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He let it sit there a moment, the realization that he’d take either one.
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” he said gruffly to Austin. “Unless you want to lecture me more about my telephone habits? Compare me to an ostrich again? I’m sure you can insult me much better than this, Austin. It’s like you’re not even trying.”
“Hunter.”
He waited, and it was as if history and memory compressed, somehow. As if it snapped tight in both of them at that same moment, reminding him of a thousand other phone conversations, as many long, late nights, all those hours upon hours they’d spent in each other’s company learning their own private language, making themselves their own form of family.
Reminding him again how much they’d lost.
“Listen,” he began, inadequately, because he was pretty sure this was all his fault. He was the one who’d left. The one who’d never looked back. The one who’d been so determined to pretend nothing was happening, then or now.
But Austin was talking again. Heading him off as if he already knew where this was going.
“It better not be a fucking florist,” he said, and Hunter couldn’t help but grin. “I’m not kidding.”
* * *
The Edgarton High football field lay under two feet of fresh snow and likely would for weeks, which meant these practices took place indoors in the old, drafty gym.
Hunter hated the gym.
The scratched-up floors bent and squeaked beneath the pummeling of so many adolescent shoes, the smell of damp surrounded them like a humid choke hold, and the small, high windows were much too far from the ground to let in what little winter light was available.
The whole depressing place was a fire hazard.
Didn’t they fire your ass? Aaron, the punk wannabe quarterback, had demanded that first day. The kid had been puffed up and scowling as if he thought he was a much bigger man. But that hadn’t concealed the dazed longing in his dark eyes, letting Hunter know how badly he’d wanted to be convinced Hunter was the real deal. That something—anything—was. Why should I listen to anything you say?
Because I’m a goddamned legend, Hunter had retorted. And you suck.
And yet, defying all reason and his own uncertain temper, his small, sad group of kids not only kept coming to his increasingly difficult weight sessions and his killer drills—all better suited to teams that were already at the championship level than one with their decided lack of skills, because Hunter thought they might as well start hard—but they seemed to bring more new players with them each time they came. Until it looked less like an afterthought in that weight room, that sad old gym, and more like an actual team.
Today the sight of them made him harsher. More demanding. Because he refused to fail anyone else.
He refused.
“You, uh, doing okay?” Jack, the actual football coach, not that anyone had been observing that title in weeks, dared to ask him. Hunter had the team running speed drills. Again and again and again, up and down the length of the old gym floor, pretending he couldn’t hear the mutinous grumbling as they went.
“They have to be able to do this perfectly when they’re exhausted,” Hunter said shortly. “It’s about mental toughness.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, in one of those too-agreeable voices that meant he didn’t want to argue, not that he actually agreed. “Sure. But, um. Are you...?”
“I’m fine,” Hunter bit out, short and rough.
Jack flinched, but Hunter couldn’t seem to modify his tone. Not when he was angrier than he’d ever been, and he couldn’t do a single thing about it. He couldn’t fix Zoe. He couldn’t save her. He couldn’t change a single thing that had happened to her, just as he hadn’t been able to save anyone else. Sarah. Even himself.
He couldn’t even touch her the way he wanted, because that wasn’t what she needed. She’d said he’d made it about him and he, by God, refused to let that happen. He’d take Jason Treffen apart with his own hands if that was what it took—
He realized he was scowling, and that Jack was staring at him.
“Why?” he asked. It came out in a growl. “Do I not seem fine?”
Jack raised his hands in surrender and didn’t ask again.
“You can decide what kind of losers you want to be,” he told the pack of kids later that same bitterly cold evening. They were panting on the floor at his feet, stretched out across the scratched gym floors with the drafty walls letting too much winter in. Looking as if they thought they might die—or had already died. Which meant that he must have been doing something right. “The kind who gives the better team a fight or the kind who wastes everyone’s time. Entirely up to you, gentlemen.”
