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Fucking Walker. But as much as I tried to be pissed at him about it, I knew what it was like to get stuck in a spot you couldn’t get out of, where you kept fucking up shit that you didn’t even usually think about. He was a hot mess right now and it was screwing him all the way up his arm. We both had some massive shit to work out before Friday.
When a ball thunked down in the grass next to me I opened my eyes expecting to see Ellis and saw Caleb walking towards me instead.
I was so surprised to see him I couldn’t even pretend I wasn’t glad about it, and I grinned. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“Thought I’d come catch the end of practice, but I guess I’m too late.” His eyes lingered everywhere, practically licking me up while I sat there all sweaty and gross, and yeah, that gave me some of my energy back.
“Should have come earlier, you missed Coach yelling at me to get my head out of my ass like thirty times.”
“Troublemaker. You sitting over here in time out?”
I snorted and lifted my arm up to rap my knuckles on the side of the shed. “He put me on clean up. That means put things away. Equipment,” I elaborated, remembering he didn’t know anything about anything.
“Yeah, I could have pieced that one together.”
“Where’d you get this?” I asked him, picking up the ball and rolling it off my fingers, popping it in the air and balancing it on my palm while he watched. It wasn’t card tricks, but he still seemed impressed, and god I was such a slut for his attention.
“Over by the fence.”
“Fucking Ellis, I bet,” I muttered. “He’s always punting shit off to the west coast. Thanks. Here, catch,” I tossed it toward him as I shoved myself up with a groan to open the shed again and put it away.
He stepped back, surprised, and reached out like someone who’d never caught a football, and it bounced back my direction. I chased after it and got ready to throw it to him again, but he put his arms up, blocking himself.
“I can’t catch that.”
“Why not?” I asked him and then felt like a jackass when I realized he meant he didn’t know how. I felt my agro tendencies puffing up in my chest, wanting to share and show off and tell him fifty things at once, but I squashed it. “Can you throw it?” I asked him instead.
He shrugged. “I mean… technically. I took gym. For a while. I never really could figure out the spiral part, but my arm’s okay I guess.”
“Nobody learns anything in gym class. It’s just extra practice time for jocks to show off and everybody else to suffer.”
He lifted his eyebrows up and I felt a little sick, calling myself out like that without even meaning to.
“I can show you,” I said, hesitating, and then ripping up the hesitation and turning it into a way to make something right. “I’m a better coach than Coach T. Or Mr. Gregory from middle school, he fucking sucked at everything.”
Caleb laughed. “Yeah, okay. You can try, I guess.”
I didn’t really expect him to say yes, and I had to think it through a minute after my big claim of being a great coach when I actually had zero coaching experience to back me up. But I did have a little Beast experience now, knew he was a curious motherfucker who liked in-depth explanations, so why couldn’t I be a good coach.
I went over and handed him the ball, hesitating a second before I reached over and around him, twisting it in his palm and then spreading his giant fingers out across the laces. I’d been thinking about pressing up against him all afternoon, and this wasn’t what I’d been thinking about at all, but somehow it was just as good.
“Here, like this.” It was almost like holding hands when I layered mine on top of his, slipping my fingers in between his to adjust his grip. “Fingertips on the laces and hold your hand like a V so the laces are on the outside. That’s how you control the spin. You have really big hands, so you’ll have a lot of control.”
“Is that right,” he said, his voice all low and smooth and teasing, and my dick filled out a little in my jock.
“Mmm.” I slid my other hand across his back, grabbing him by the hip and jerking his stance around until he laughed. “So when you pull back and let go, you kind of want to punch your fingers up at the same time so the ball tips off and starts spinning.” I held his hand up and moved the ball around, trying to show him what I meant. “It’s kind of hard to explain, but once you get it you won’t unget it. It’s like skipping rocks.”
“I can’t skip rocks.”
“You probably can. You just need alternative education.”
He laughed. “Is that what this is?”
“Definitely.”
“Yeah, if you’d acted like this in gym class I would have liked it a lot better.”
“I was a dick. Give me a chance to treat you like you deserve.”
