Page 5 of Sexting the Coach
If I could snap my fingers and secure us a spot to fight for the Stanley Cup, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Shaking the thoughts away, I strip the grass-stained shirt over my head and pull down the waistband of my shorts, twisting to the side to get a good look at the bruise already forming over my hip.
It’s like just looking at it makes it hurt worse, my brain catching up to how bad that impact rocketed through me. How quickly it turned from a dull, constant ache into something more like a ripping sensation.
OfcourseI had to land on this fucking hip. Apparently, I don’t have a single shred of self-preservation in my entire fucking body. Why didn’t I twist to the other side? Land on my back?
Why didn’t I just crush her?
Stupid, pointless question.
I would have killed that girl if I had landed on her.
Tall, but relatively skinny—at least, compared to me—she would have snapped like a toothpick under my weight. Even though she was fucking fast, and strangely mesmerizing to watch as running back.
If the other guys on the team hadn’t been quite so hypnotized watching her, or too busy staring at her ass, they might have been able to get to her before I did, before she got up to terminal velocity.
Elsie Montgomery.
Only been a part of the team’s staff for a few weeks, and I already can’t wait for her to move on to something different.
Maybe she’ll go work for the Bruins, follow in her father’s footsteps. Would be nice to have her somewhere across the country, where I can’t hear her laughing, don’t have to see her ponytail bouncing around the arena every day.
I hit a particularly tender spot on my hip and suck in a quick breath through my teeth at the sensation. I pause for a second before tracing my fingertips over the path of the bruise, trying not to wince at the exquisite, searing pain. After a second, it dies down, settling into a consistent, body-rocking throb.
It’s not that Elsie is a bad person—it’s something of the opposite. Always bright and shiny, bouncing into the weight room and calling players in to work with her. Laughing and twisting the end of her braid around her finger while she talks.
Fucking distracting.
And frustrating.
Nobodyis that happy.
Which means she’s a liar.
“Hear me out,” Bernie, one of my assistant coaches, had said, when I muttered a complaint about her whole bright-eyed, bushy-tailed thing the other day. “Maybe she’s just in her twenties.”
Right. Except it’s not like I was that happy in my twenties. And back then, I was married to a fucking movie star. Ishouldhave been that happy.
While looking at myself in the mirror, I try to calculate how long it would take me to come back here and go to the bathroom. Have I already taken long enough that they’re going to worry about me? Send someone in here after me?
I need to get myself together, get back out to the field before they start to suspect something is wrong.
As I was walking off the field, desperately trying to keep my limp from showing, I heard Fincher mutter, “Guess I can take over as coach, then.”
Fincher getting to big for his britches is the last thing I need. Theonlything he’ll be head coach of is touch football, no matter how much he throws a fit about the fact that the Squids picked me over him for the head coach position.
“Weston, I—oh?—”
There’s commotion in the mirror's reflection, coming from right behind me, and I freeze.
The smart thing to do would be to grab my shirt, cover the bruise, but I don’t want to look like I’m hiding something. If it’s anyone but Fincher, I’ll swear them to secrecy.
I raise my eyes.
It’s not Fincher.
It'sElsie Montgomery,bursting through the door to my room—which I realize I didn’t get fully shut—her eyes widening as her gaze wanders down my body, then back up, lingering on the exposed skin above my waist band.
