Page 43 of Her Coach

I laughed despite myself. “That’s it? That’s your advice?”

“Also find the green dress.”

“You’ve mentioned the green dress twice.”

“Because it’s important.” I heard her coffee mug hit a counter. “Call me the second you get home. I want everything. The food he orders, the way he looks at you, all of it.”

“It’s just lunch, Dani.”

“Brynn Caldwell, nothing about this man is just anything and you know it.” A beat. “Go find the top.”

I hung up.

The city slid past the window the way it always did at this hour, lit up and indifferent and not interested in what was happening to any one person driving through it. He was right there, somewhere across town in that penthouse with all those lights. And I had just agreed to have lunch with him tomorrow and let Dani lose her mind about it and now I had to go home and find a shirt in a storage box and figure out how to act normal for the rest of the evening.

The thing was, I already knew what I was doing. I’d known since about the third time I caught myself thinking about the way he looked at me across the bar. I was attracted to him. Fine. He was older and steady and had this way of paying attention that made you feel like the only person in the room, and I was apparently not immune to that, which was inconvenient, because I had a plan.

The part that sat wrong was Mom. Not the plan, not the matchmaking. That ship had sailed and I knew it. Just Mom. The fact that I’d spent the last few days telling myself I was doing this for her, and somewhere along the way I’d stopped thinking about her entirely the second he walked into a room. That felt like something worth sitting with.

I thought about the book I’d been meaning to write for three years. The one about a girl who came home to take care of her mother and stayed so long she forgot what she’d been going back to. I hadn’t written a word of it because every time I sat down to start I couldn’t figure out how it ended. Whether the girl got out. Whether she stayed. Whether staying was a choice she made or just a thing that happened to her while she was looking somewhere else.

I didn’t have an answer for any of it. I just had a green dress somewhere in a storage box and a lunch date tomorrow and a best friend who was probably already texting me from across the country.

Information gathering, I reminded myself as the lights of the Strip faded in the rearview. That’s all tomorrow is.

I didn’t fully believe that anymore. But it was still a good thing to tell myself.

18

COLTON

“Come on, Moose! You can do better than that!” Rhett exclaimed as I made my way toward the weight room.

I was already six minutes late to my own fucking practice, but that didn’t mean each late minute was worth it.

I still felt the softness of her forehead etched against my mouth as I silently inched into the weight room.

Rhett, our center and defunct team captain, clapped his hands as the goalie, Moose, tried to shove a ridiculous amount of weight up from a squat.

“The hell them legs for, Moose!?” Jett, our chirper and sniper, exclaimed as he clapped his hands. “Let’s get them thighs used to something other than clinging onto your next target!”

Moose shoved the impossible weight into the air and it reminded me of the hundreds of pounds I used to squat and deadlift back during my heydays. So many people thought that being on the ice meant speed and agility. But musculature and having strength was just as important, if not more important, than having that speed and agility. Anyone could learn how to skate on the ice and stick a puck in a net.

Not a lot of people could learn how to take fully grown men out of the way in the process.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Jett said as he clocked me at the door. “Look who finally decided to show up for practice!”

Rhett grinned. “Late night, Coach?”

I pinned them with a look as I strode into the gym. “Win a game, and then we can talk.”

The team erupted into laughter, but I quickly settled them down with a high-pitched whistle. “Listen up!” I yelled over their heads as my voice echoed across the gym. “Today is for max-outs!”

“Hell yeah!”

“Fuck, yes!”

“Show-off day!”