AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Bingo. And like, don’t get me wrong—I don’t have a problem with coaches who are hardasses. If I fuck up…” I shrugged. “Then I fuck up. But if you’re just going to scream at me the same whether I overskated a pass or showed up late to a team meeting, then go fuck yourself.”
“Ugh, I’ve known some teachers like that.” Isaiah huffed sharply. “They wonder why their students either walk on eggshells or just give up.”
“Right? Exactly!” I thumped the wheel with the heel of my hand. “I’ll bend over backwards for a coach and a team, but once he starts acting like that…” I shook my head.
“I don’t blame you.”
“Fortunately, I spent most of my first season in Seattle in the minors, so I didn’t have to deal with him much. The second season, I only played like twenty games before they traded me to Pittsburgh.” I half-shrugged. “So it could’ve been a lot worse.”
“Sounds like it,” Isaiah said. “What about the GM?”
“Ugh.Thatguy. He was—” I paused as traffic suddenly slowed down. “Oh, come on. It’s just a fucking tunnel!”
“Hey, now.” Chuckling, Isaiah gestured ahead. “The tunnel monsters are scary.”
I grumbled a few choice words. As much as I loved living in Pittsburgh, the collective fear of tunnels and bridges made me want to scream sometimes. Especially since you couldn’t spit without hitting a tunnel or a bridge.
Ah, well. It was what it was.
“Anyway,” I went on as we crawled toward the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. “So Rick was also in Seattle before he got the job in Nashville. I was so not surprised when he poached Haskins the minute he landed there.”
“So they’re tight?”
“Very. Rick loves Haskins’s”—I made air quotes with my free hand—“‘coaching style.’ The minute he hired that fucker as Nashville’s head coach, I asked my agent to put Nashville on my no-trade list.”
Isaiah whistled. “That bad?”
“Yep. I won’t play for Haskins, but Rick is a giant bag of dicks, too. He fucking loves the power of being a GM.”
“Oh, man. I know that type. Like the school bully who grows up to be a principal and thinks it makes him the right hand of God.”
“Yes! Exactly!” I shook my head. “Helovedthreatening guys with trades. Or even waivers. Heaven help you if you were in a rut or having a slump.”
“Seriously?”
“Mmhmm.” Up ahead, traffic was starting to mercifully break up. We were, after all, nearly to the tunnel, at which point most people figured out the tunnel monsters wouldn’t actually eat them, and they found their accelerators again. For fuck’s sake. Picking up a little speed, I said, “We all have slumps, you know? Like last season, I was snakebitten for a good dozen games. Not a single fucking point. It sucks, but it happens.”
“What causes it?”
“Injuries? Bad luck?” I shrugged. “Most of us have our superstitious beliefs about it. It’s just one of those things that happens. And it’s a huge relief when you finally find the back of a net and break the streak, let me tell you.”
“I bet. And I don’t imagine it helps having a GM threatening to send you packing over it.”
“No, it does not.” I settled back a little in the seat, both because my irritation over traffic was abating and because I told myself I needed to not get worked up over this conversation. Rick Allenson and Coach Haskins weren’t my problem anymore, and I needed to stop letting them under my skin when I thought about them.
Isaiah might’ve sensed that, too, because he gently steered the subject away. “So you have a no-trade list?”
I nodded, my hands almost involuntarily loosening their death grip on the wheel. “A lot of us do. I don’t really have the clout for a no-move clause, but there are a handful of teams I don’t want to play on for various reasons.”
“Yeah?” The curiosity was unmistakable: who didn’t I want to play for and why? That wasn’t something I discussed publicly—it could start rumors that could turn whole fanbases on a player, like when it had slipped out that Garrett Anderson had been traded to Montreal at the trade deadline, but his GM had somehow forgotten that team was on his no-trade list. The GM had wound up with egg on his face for dropping the ball on what would’ve been an amazing trade for his team, but it was Garrett who still got booed whenever he played in Montreal.
But, I reminded myself as we drove into the darkness of the tunnel, Isaiah wasn’t “public.” He was my boyfriend. We talked about anything and everything, and it was incredibly freeing to be open and honest about things without being afraid they’d end up under a headline.
“There are four teams on my no-trade list,” I said quietly. “Nashville, because of Coach Dicks-a-Lot and their asshat GM.”
Isaiah snorted. “I’m going to remember that nickname.”
“I can’t take credit for it.” I chuckled. “One of my teammates in Seattle came up with it.”
