Page 23 of First Time Coach

I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. I want to spill the beans, but at the same time, I’m afraid of what will happen. Maybe the reality of the situation hasn’t set in yet, but I know that if I tell them the truth—the whole truth—Coach will be in deep trouble.

My dad will kill him, that much is for sure. My mom will report him to the school and then all of this will get out. Everyone will know me as the girl who fucked the soccer coach and blew up his marriage. No. I can’t tell them.

“I—I didn’t go to Brenda’s tonight,” I say. It’s part of the truth. I can at least tell them that. “I went to…see a boy.”

I hear my dad take a deep breath; he wants to reprimand me, and he will, but for now, he stays quiet. My mom, on the other hand, is just going to be my friend now.

“And he didn’t hurt you?”

“No,” I shake my head. “I just…I guess I thought it was something that it wasn’t. I thought we were going to be exclusive, but…”

“Son of a bitch,” my dad growls. “Who is he? I’ll kill him.”

“No!” I say quickly. “No, daddy. It’s—it’s my fault. I made a mistake. I trusted him when there was really no reason to.”

“It’s not your fault,” my mom tells me, hugging me again. “Boys do things like this. You can’t blame yourself.”

I wish it was that easy. I do blame myself; I blame myself for thinking that a man like Coach, a man who was loved by all the women he meets, would settle down and be exclusive to me. I never even bothered asking him about his past before I just went ahead and let him take my virginity—

Oh, God…I think, as the realization hits me. I let Coach, a man cheating on his wife, take my virginity. Now I’ll have that to remember as my first time.

“What can I do, honey?” my mom asks, fixing my hair. “Tell me?”

“I think I just need to be alone for a while,” I tell her. I pull away and walk slowly down the hall toward the back yard.

“I’ll make you some herbal tea,” she says. “Or I can go get some of that chocolate you love?”

“It’s okay, mom,” I reply as I push open the back door. I love both of those things, but the truth is that now there’s really nothing that can fix the pain inside me.

I slump down in a patio chair and look up at the stars, wishing I could just fly up there and be alone with them. It would be better than this.

What was I thinking? Relationships like this never work out. Sure, an older guy might find a younger girl like me attractive, but why would he ever settle down with me? Especially when he’s already married! But Coach came into my life like a meteor; I was helpless from the moment I saw him.

I feel the cracks in my heart starting to spread. I know that if I move just one inch it will break. The tears continue to run down my cheeks and I just let them. I thought Coach was the answer to the things I wanted in life: a man, marriage, kids, a family. I wouldn’t be like the rest of the girls out there who didn’t know what they wanted, because I’d have him. Now I just feel like an idiot.

And I fell in love with him! He brought out things inside me that I never even knew were there and he embraced them—I embraced them. Life felt brighter when I was with him; more exciting, thrilling even. But now, when I think about him, all I can see is the picture of his wife’s face, standing there in the doorway, looking down at me with contempt.

I get up and do a lap around the yard, feeling the cool grass against my feet. It’s a chilly night, but I don’t even notice. I know I won’t be able to sleep. Maybe I’ll just do laps around the yard until my legs collapse out from under me. I look up at the sky again. A shooting star blazes briefly across the sky then winks out. Under any other circumstances I’d be smiling and running back inside to tell my dad what I just saw, but right now it just makes my heart hurt even more—a brief moment of beauty on such a terrible night.

But just as I feel like I’m about to break, shatter into countless pieces to never be put back together again, I hear the sound of someone pounding on the front door. I whirl around and look through the screen door as my dad pulls it open.

&n

bsp; Standing there panting, looking like a mess, is Coach.

14

Coach

“Whoa, wait a second, big guy,” Pete says as I try to push past him into the house. He puts a firm hand on my chest and steps outside, closing the door behind him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Pete,” I say, my heart pounding in my chest. “I’ve got to tell you something. I—”

“Am in love with my daughter?”

His words rock me, almost shake me up completely. He—he knows? But how?

“Yeah. I know,” he says with a forced smile, but the rest of his face is angry. “I know you both tried to hide it from me, but I know. And under normal circumstances, I’d be completely fine with it.”

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