Page 20 of Mile High Coach

Last night was the Blue Crabs’ first pre-season game, and based on the data I collected, I’m pretty sure all my adjustments have been making some tangible changes to performance. The pre-season is always harder to judge, as play time is different than in regular games.

“Lovelace Waters?”

My name rings out through the waiting room, and it draws me out of my thoughts, reminding me where I am. Waiting to talk to these people about picking a sperm donor.

A woman stands in the doorway wearing a nice gray suit, a clipboard in her arms, “Would you like to come with me?”

I follow her back, and hear all about the sperm donation process. How they screen for all major issues—starting with STDs and ending with minor genetic details like the potential for balding or wrinkles.

At the end of the walk down the hallway, she brings me into a room and shows me how to read through their donor profile cards, what the different symbols mean, and how to know which donor is best for me.

“Based on the preferences you listed in your initial paperwork, we’ve narrowed a selection down for you. Of course, you’re always welcome to change your preferences and selection at any point—but these are the matches we feel best represent your wishes at this moment.”

The binder she sets in front of me is thick, layered, with crinkling plastic pages. She goes through the standard spiel—all donors are anonymous, and have signed away any rights to paternity.

By the time I leave the meeting, I feel a rising, dizzying sense of dread pressing at the bottom of my throat.

“How did it go?” Chrys answers the second I call while I’m walking through the parking lot outside the donation center. “Was it weird?”

Around me, birds chirp and flutter from tree to tree. People sit at a boba shop across the street, and the smell of garlic drifts out from an Italian place next door. None of the people around me know that I’m doing something so serious. That right now, I am carrying a binder full of potential biological fathers for my future baby.

“It was definitely weird,” I say, trying to tuck the binder into my bag while walking to my car. “I feel like…like I’m trying to design a child. Isn’t that weird?”

“Well, that’s what people do anyway, right? Like, you pick the person you want to be with because they’re cute, then your babies are cute. This isn’t that much different.”

“I guess.”

“You’re always so chipper, Lov.”

That makes me laugh, and feel marginally better, and Chrys and I chat during my drive to the complex. I tell her about the fact that all the donors in the binder have baby pictures, so I can choose what my future baby will look like. She tells me about how Dad made it across the living room today without a single noise of pain, but then got sick right after lunch and had to lie down.

By the time I pull in outside the Blue Crabs Arena, I’m feeling marginally better. But I still end the call without telling Chrys the thing that’s really on my mind—a consuming worry that I’m going to pick wrong.

That even with all this data and information on each guy, I’ll miss something vital. Spend all this time and money using science to make a baby and not even end up choosing the best donor.

I’m so busy thinking about it, my mind flashing with the baby pictures from the binder that I don’t realize someone else is here until I hear the telltale crack of a hockey stick connecting with a puck.

Pausing, I play a little game with myself, trying to figure out which player it might be, down on the ice, way after practice, when everyone else has gone home. Colby Holder has his eye on moving up a line, and Justin Smith seems like he never wants to leave.

But when I walk up to the edge of the rink and look in, it’s not a player at all.

It’s Harrison Clark.

Of course it is. I seem to have the terrible luck of running into him everywhere. At lunch, between meetings, and any time I’m trying to install new equipment or gather more data on the players.

In that supply closet last week.

A flush moves over my body when I think about what it was like, the way he so easily picked me up and set me on that counter. How his thumb dragged up my thigh, somehow both patient and hurried.

How my nipples went tight at the slightest movement of his hips, my breath escaping me.

It turned out that I was completely right about Harrison Clark—he is dangerous to me. He scrambles my brain, gets me to consider doing things I never would have before. Sleeping together on the plane. Damn near hooking up in that supply closet.

Now, down on the ice, Harrison skates hard toward the goal, juggling the puck easily with his stick. He’s a picture of perfect concentration and athleticism, and if I didn’t know better, I might think he was a player, not a coach.

He moves with the grace of a much younger man, and when he hits the puck, it rockets straight into the goal.

It’s frustrating that he’s so competent. That all the players admire him. If only he was bad at his job, it would be much easier to keep my distance from him.

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