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The tone was undeniably flirtatious, and it was my turn to crank things up to eleven.
What are you doing right now?I asked.
I sat there, wondering if I was making the right move, but there was no way to know. I was just tired of her having the upper hand all the time. I wanted to be on top. I wanted to be winning.
Wouldn’t you like to know . . .
That was the exact response I’d been hoping for. I closed the message and set the phone down. Obviously I wasn’t a total dick, I wasn’t going to take this too far, but silence would give her something to think about.
Meatball yelled for attention and I rubbed his head.
“We’re just doing a little sabotage, right? Nothing serious.”
I could handle this. I could put our past aside for the good of fucking with a rival coach and come out on the other side absolutely fine. I could do this.
Echo hadn’t texted me again, and that was starting to stress me out. When I woke up on Monday, I checked to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Nope.
I sighed and flung off the comforter, angering all of the cats, who jumped to the floor and started screaming about it.
“Yes, I know, I know.” First thing was bathroom and then the kitchen to feed the beasts and make breakfast for myself. I scrambled some eggs and plopped yogurt with fruit and granola in a bowl to go with the side of a massive cup of coffee drowning in vanilla creamer. The breakfast of champions, I hoped.
Once I had the caffeine flowing through my veins, it was time to go to the nook that served as my office. I think it was supposed to be a formal dining room, but I didn’t live the kind of lifestyle that required a formal dining room, so I’d filled it with books and an absolutely obnoxious mahogany desk with one of those lamps with a green shade you’d see in a gentleman’s library. It was home to my two massive desktop monitors and my rainbow light-up keyboard. Everything about my office made me happy.
I kept my phone by me and turned on some music to start the daily task of seeing what emails I had, what I needed to respond to, and what I could put off until later. There were always too many emails and not enough time for them, but I’d been freelancing long enough to have an intense flagging system to put them in different categories.
I got into my groove, but every now and then a notification would come through my phone and I’d jump as if I’d been pinched on the ass. The cats came and went and played on the floor as I tried to keep my focus while I edited one article, did a proposal for another, and then scheduled some social media posts for a client.
By lunch I still didn’t have a message from Echo, but I’d gotten through the work I’d needed to get through before the afternoon. I ate a salad standing up at the kitchen counter and then headed outside for a brisk walk. I tried to work out so my body didn’t fuse in a hunched position at my desk, but during competition season that didn’t happen as often as I wanted it to.
Still nothing from Echo. She’d fallen off the face of the planet, or at least from my phone. Fine, whatever.
I burned through work in the afternoon and then it was time to get ready to head to the gym. Unfortunately, that also meant I was going to have to see Echo.
What would she say to me in person? Would she pretend our little convo last night hadn’t happened? Would she be overly flirtatious? Echo was a puzzle I couldn’t solve. I had no idea what she was capable of.
“I did something last night,” I told Dom, when I walked into his office with a smoothie. I almost always brought him a little something when I needed advice as payment.
He looked at the smoothie and then at my face. “Oh god, am I going to need to sit down for this? Wait, I’m already sitting down.” He winked as I handed him the smoothie. Banana strawberry, his favorite.
I dropped into the chair across from his desk. “So, after you left, Echo was messing with me and gave me her number. I may have used it to text her in a flirtatious manner, but my plan kind of backfired, and now I’m stressing out.”
I sipped loudly through the straw of my smoothie.
“K, why?” Dom was used to my shenanigans, but usually I asked for his input before I ignored whatever advice he gave me and forged ahead anyway.
“Because I was tired of her always having the high ground, I don’t know!” I sat back in the creaky chair and regretted my life choices again. The fact that I was supposed to be a role model for teenagers was a joke that I never stopped laughing about. I faked it as well as I could.
“Just focus on Nationals. Eyes on the prize. Shoot for the hoop. Go for the goal. Sink the putt.”
I gave him a look.
“You know I always reach for sports metaphors in times of crisis.”
“Am I in crisis? I don’t feel like I’m in crisis.” This was a lie. I always felt like I was in crisis when Echo was anywhere in my vicinity.
“No, you’re fine. Just don’t do it again. All we have to do is get to Orlando and make it through and hope for the best. Don’t get distracted.”
He had a good point. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I had to be the rock for my team. I had to be the adult in the room, the one in charge. I wouldn’t let Echo mess with that, even if it meant I didn’t get to mess with her. The high road, I was taking it.
