Coach Me

by Lulu Pratt

  I tried to behave normally through the rest of the practice. Er, sort of. Between us, I’ll admit that I was showing off for Simon. During my squat set I went lower for longer, facing my ass in his direction so that he could take it all in. I did more pull ups than I even knew was possible. I held my wall sits for maybe ten minutes.

  The other girls took notice, but thankfully, missed the implication.

  “Teacher’s pet,” Nora snickered.

  Max added, “Somebody’s trying to impress the new coach.”

  “Hey, somebody’s gotta represent for the team,” I shot back.

  Nora laughed, and replied, “Mm-hmm,” then moved on.

  Clearly, they all thought I was just being my normal self — that was, a kiss ass, a try-hard, a type-A perfectionist. They were so used to me going the extra mile they didn’t even question my motives. Good. I wasn’t prepared to face their loud scrutiny.

  Although they weren’t holding up a magnifying glass to my actions, they were examining Simon every which way. In between sets, they whispered to one another how cute he was. Well, more than whispered. These girls weren’t exactly discreet — I wouldn’t be surprised if he caught most of the conversations. How mortifying.

  Finally, practice came to a close.

  “Good job, ladies,” Simon announced. “Well done, you lot, very well done. I’m impressed. You’re wrapped for the day, go home and get some rest.”

  The girls nodded, too out of breath to even respond.

  “I’ll see you on the field tomorrow,” he finished.

  Without any further ado, the team turned around, began grabbing their stuff and moving to the door.

  “Catya,” Simon said, just loud enough for me to hear. The rest of the team was already near the doors and ignored his voice. “Can you stick around for a minute?”

  Even if they had heard, they would’ve let this pass. I used to talk with Alan after nearly every practice.

  So why did this request feel so different?

  The girls had all left, headed off to the locker rooms or straight home. I moved up to Simon, his body drawing me in like a powerful magnet.

  “Yes, Coach?” I asked, an innocent lilt in my tone.

  We were alone and I was hyper-aware of that fact. I wondered if he was, too.

  “You did excellently,” he said. “Seriously, you’re a stellar player.”

  “Just doing my job. As Captain.”

  He nodded. “Job or not, you’ve got big talent and the work ethic to match it.”

  Widely speaking, I could take a compliment. To me, responding to compliments with a wide, earnest ‘thank you’ and a polite smile told people they were right to acknowledge your achievements. Plus, I was confident in my athletic abilities. They were, in my estimation, well worth complimenting.

  But somehow, coming from him, the praise was heightened, amplified, painted in brighter colors. It was like the photo, I suppose — as though he’d seen a side of me I didn’t always see in myself. And the words felt like they weren’t coming from an adult, or someone who saw himself as superior to me, but from an equal. ‘Game sees game,’ as the kids say.

  “Thanks,” I said at last. “I want to make this the team’s best season yet.”

  “Winning championships?” he inquired.

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s make that happen then. I promise I’ll give you my bloody all.”

  “Same.”

  Simon held out a long hand. I noticed his fingernails were clean, the nail beds pink in an almost childlike way.

  “Let’s shake on it,” he said.

  I extended my hand to meet his, and grasped it. His palms were rough and warm, the hands of an athlete. My grip was strong — Dad had raised me to have a firm handshake — but his was light, unexpectedly gentle. As if he were being careful to not assert his physical dominance. Was I imagining it, or was he too walking the line between professionalism and attraction? If so, which side of the line was he leaning on? Mental calculations tallied in my brain.

  He ended the handshake first, and I felt a pang of disappointment. It’s just a handshake, Catya, I scolded myself. Shit. I rarely got crushes, but when they hit, they hit hard. And I could feel one coming on.

  Simon went on, “Well, that’s all settled. I can’t wait to spend more time together.”

  Oh, I was good and screwed now.

  He cleared his throat. “As your coach, obviously.”

  “Right. Obviously.”

  Did he just move closer? No, no of course not. I was hallucinating. My throat seemed to be tightening, the vocal cords straining.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Looking forward to it.” The stark light of the gym reflected off the hollows of his cheeks.

  With zero cool, I nearly ran out of the gym. Frankly, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I didn’t stop running until the building was behind me in the rearview. My heart was strangled by how badly it yearned for Simon, a deep, primal hunger, while my brain attempted to reason that there was no way in hell I could even entertain the thought. I was in the No Man’s Land of my mind and soul. The strain between them bordered on the painful.

  Had he felt the electricity? Did it matter, since there was nothing either of us could do about it?

  Simon was my coach. I was the team captain. In no universe could we be something more than those two roles.

  Or… could we?

  Chapter 6

  Simon

  The only thing I knew for a certainty about my living situation was that my bed was abhorrent.

  ULA had posted me up in a slightly off-campus housing facility that was comped for single faculty and staff, of which I was the latter. Saying it was ‘off-campus’ was a bit of a misnomer. The town was so built around the college, and the college so very much in the middle of nowhere, that everything was, relatively speaking, on-campus. I digress.

  Was I grateful that they’d put me up, free of charge? Sure. The apartment was crap, about the size of a grownup dorm room, but I’d lived my whole life in crappy apartments. The familiarity was, in fact, comforting. But the bed — God.

  It was simultaneously too hard, too soft, too lumpy and too gelatinous. I rolled about for hours, trying to settle into a comfortable position, and found none. Sleep eventually came, but not before the wee hours.

  Or… um… at least I choose to blame the bed. For the sleeping, that is.

  Because I guess, if we’re being honest, I could’ve just as easily blamed Catya.

  My head swam with her, and only her, and nothing but her. She was in both my waking and sleeping consciousness, and the strange lucid state in between.

  What a horrible sign.

  Despite my complete lack of sleep, I bounded out of bed that morning at six. There had to be, somewhere in this tiny town, refuge from the endless thoughts of her my brain kept supplying even though I begged it to stop. What might keep me preoccupied?

  A run, I thought. Perfect, yes! A run! That would do the trick. A run would prevent me from going to that dark place the dreams went last night, the place where I took off her neon sports bra and—

  “A run,” I said aloud with forced cheer. “That’s what you’re doing. Not thinking about anything you ought not to be thinking about.”

  With speed fostered by years of practice, I strapped on my running shoes, threw on a pair of sweats and grabbed my headphones. Glancing at the weather app on my phone, I momentarily debated the decision to go shirtless, then shrugged. Better cold nipples than chafed ones.

  I was out the door in less than five, bounding down the stairs of my building — I lived on the fifth floor, and though there was an elevator, it felt like admitting to defeat to take it — and emerging onto a cobblestone path. The thing about ULA was that everything seemed to be cobblestone. It was like the designers weren’t sure if any other substance properly constituted a road.

  From the few walks I’d taken around the genera
l area, a number of which were at night without any streetlights for guidance, I surmised that the whole town was built roughly on concentric circles, with the main campus quadrangle in the middle. But how could one go off this beaten, circular path? The cobblestones were tricky to run on, and my toes kept getting caught in the cracks.

  Another feature of the collegiate town was that there were security guards next to emergency lights posts stationed every block or so. Frankly, even based on what little I knew about the area, I couldn’t possibly surmise what would constitute a necessity for these guards. It wasn’t like ULA was awash with high-level criminal activity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m from London, and have first-hand acquaintance with the military-industrial police state — thanks, CCTV! — but this seemed excessive. At least in London we had real terrorist threats. The biggest threat to ULA was a frat bro getting too drunk and passing out on a front lawn.

  All that being said, I was momentarily grateful for the police officer. I veered to the nearest post and pulled to a stop.

  “Hello, ma’am,” I said. “I was wondering if there were any nearby forest trails I might run on?”

  I gestured at my running kit, and hoped she wouldn’t take it the wrong way that I was, essentially, treating her like a tour guide.

  She replied, “No problem,” and began to indicate areas with two pointer fingers, like a flight attendant. “You’re gonna wanna go three blocks that way, turn right, keep going for a block. Then you’ll come upon a kind of leafy, like, entrance? You’ll see, there are usually other joggers out there ‘bout this time.”

  I thanked her, and went on my merry way.

  Soon enough, I found myself in front of the previously described ‘entrance.’ She was right, kind of, there were some trees arching to one another that seemed to suggest a gateway, though it was unclear if that was a conscious design. The foot falls of other runners had also left distinctive smooth patterns along the stones that led up to the theoretical arch, patterns like what you might see leading up to the Parthenon. It was obvious that, as opposed to the rest of the campus, which had undergone some heavy revamping, this section had remained untouched.

  No one was around, at least not in my line of sight. Weird — hadn’t she said it was quite popular at this time? No matter. I tinkered with my phone, opening the workout playlist in my music app, which contained an eclectic — or unappealing — mixture of ‘90s hip hop, early 2000s R&B, and early ‘80s disco. Was that what they called it, disco? No, more like ballads. My taste — well, it wasn’t for everyone. It was barely even for me.

  With the music blasting in my earbuds, I began to jog through the forest. Leaves were strewn across the ground, making the surface softer than the damned cobblestones, and the trees overhead grew so tightly together that they nearly formed a canopy, blotting out the early morning sunlight. The last green of the season was getting booted out by various shades of ocher. I wasn’t sure I could ever live somewhere truly devoid of seasons. The interim colors were too beautiful to miss. And the nippy air invigorated my lungs like pure oxygen, making me dizzy in all the right ways.

  The path, like the entrance, seemed to be deserted. Maybe other people just weren’t such early risers? It would figure, after all, with a town of college kids, that the whole place only came awake after eleven in the morning or so. During my time at college, I refused to take classes before ten, as there was no chance I’d be up by then.

  “C.R.E.A.M.” by the Wu-Tang Clan had just started to play, and with no one in sight, I launched into the lyrics, my eyes focused on the ground, watching my feet fall onto one pile of leaves after another.

  “Dollar bills yo—” I muttered.

  Smash!

  I was on my back, on the ground, and the world felt heavy on top of me, like physically heavy, as if the atmosphere was pushing me down and, and there was something hot against my bare skin—

  Oh God. It wasn’t the atmosphere.

  It was Catya.

  My eyes refocused in a fraction of a second, and I realized they were a hair’s width away from her own. She was on top of me. Catya was on top of me. And I was half naked.

  Frantic and confused, we stayed in the position a beat too long, both trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened.

  After what felt like an interminable pause, over the blaring chords of “C.R.E.A.M.,” I shouted, “What are you doing here?”

  Running, my brain immediately answered. She’s running, you moron.

  Catya snapped back into it, as if she had returned to her body after a brief intermission. She rolled off me with the grace only an athlete can muster, the slickness of someone who had been knocked down nine times and gotten up ten. She seemed to, in the same second, realize that I was bare-chested, and looked away at a tree. Well, it certainly wasn’t top-level acting, but I couldn’t fault her. I too had felt the discomfort or rather, frightening lack thereof.

  “What are you doing here,” she shot back as soon as she was in a standing position, her eyes firmly unfocused on my pecs.

  “I’m running. Obviously.”

  “So am I.”

  Why was I being so inexplicably huffy? Maybe because I’d come out here to get some peace of mind and sure enough, the very thing that was causing the stress had run right into me. Or, to be specific, had run right into me and then fallen on top of me.

  “Why are you running?” I asked, still embarrassingly enough on the defensive. “You have practice today.”

  She shrugged and looked askance. “To clear my mind.”

  For a split second, I wondered what at that phrasing. To clear her mind… of what? Could it be the exact same thing I’d come out here to be clear of? No, no it couldn’t be.

  I searched desperately for common ground, for something innocuous to say that wouldn’t suggest the inappropriateness of my thoughts.

  “Don’t overwork yourself, okay?” I said in a tone between an assertion and a plea. “You know the team needs you, and blowing a knee or pulling something before championships — well, it would put the Stallions in a tricky spot.”

  Catya nodded. Seemed like she’d heard this same request before.

  “I know,” she replied, her head low. Though she’d rolled away, we were still less than half a foot from one another. “It’s just that, between the team, and my sorority, and being pre-med… I don’t have a lot of time for myself, y’know?”

  She paused, collecting her thoughts. Something about the way we were talking now, this kind of intimacy, felt right. Catya had a beautiful — and unusual — gravity in her style of speech, which drew me in deeper and deeper.

  “All my activities, or commitments, whatever you wanna call them, they’re all group-oriented stuff. I can never just get a second to be by myself. Like, I’m twenty-one and still living in a double room.”

  Off my perplexed glance, she clarified, “It means there are two of you in one room.”

  “Uh, wow,” I said, grimacing. “Yikes.”

  “Yeah. I don’t even spend that much time with just one person. It feels like there’s always this mob of people around me, and they always want something from me. I guess that’s what it means to be a leader.”

  She halted abruptly, and lifted her gaze to look upon me. My chest shuddered, the stare was too piercing, as if she saw right through every façade I’d ever thrown up. I felt defenseless beneath her beautiful eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “That was too much to… to say. I hardly even know you.”

  “That’s okay, Catya. I’m always happy to talk.”

  She tilted her head up to the canopy. “Actually, for that matter, this is like the most I’ve opened up to somebody in a while.”

  The shudder of confrontation morphed into a shiver of delight. Her confidence meant the world. My next words came before I could put a stop to them.

  “So you don’t have someone you talk to about this? Like, I don’t know, a best friend, or a boyfriend or something?”

&n
bsp; There it was. I’d asked the question. Why?! What was I thinking? If she did have a boyfriend, I’d be jealous, and then I would be angry at myself for being jealous. If she didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d have to live with that knowledge, and fight to keep my mind — and my hands — off her.

  Catya seemed to know what I was getting at. She sat up straighter, and with a slight tremble in her voice, replied:

  “No, I don’t have a best friend… or a boyfriend…”

  She’d said them, the magic words. My heart skipped once, twice, and I hung suspended in the folds of the universe. Her lips parted expectantly, but I couldn’t answer that expectation. Just as quickly as my heart had thumped, so too did it slow with remorse. This wasn’t a thing that could happen. The age gap, the power dynamics — none of it would fly. Didn’t make me want it any less.

  How she read me so quickly, I don’t know, but shortly thereafter she added, “But yeah, so anyways, that aside, just not a lot of alone time.”

  My sick head wondered what she did with the little time she had to herself. I could almost see her, under the sheets, writhing around—

  I cleared my throat, and cleared the thought away along with it.

  “I’m sorry you’re so busy,” I sympathized. “Being a college athlete’s hard. Everybody seems to think that it’s an easy gig, that there’s some nerd assigned to do homework for you, but at most, that happens for a couple select football players. The rest of us — you, rather — the rest are just expected to do the same amount of homework with half the time.”

  She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, exactly. And pre-med in itself is more work than any other major.”

  I wanted to ask her about why she’d chosen pre-med, what she planned to do with it, if she saw herself still playing soccer after college, maybe going professional, what her sorority was like, how she felt about the state of the team, on and on and on. I kept my lips shut. We couldn’t sit on this forest floor forever, no matter how good the damp wind smelled or how much I liked our bodies being this close. Even in her sweatpants and ratty old shirt, she outshone nature itself with her beauty.