Page 18 of Coach (Heartstrings of Honor #4)

Mateo

T he gym echoed with the sounds of teenage misery. Sneakers squealed against the waxed hardwood. Scrawny bodies hit the floor in a cacophony of grunts and slap-thuds. Somewhere, someone was dry heaving into a trash can—again.

“Coach, you’re a monster!” came a wheezy voice from the court.

I blew my whistle with the cheerful malice of a man who’d heard it all before. “You’re not dying, Ortega. You’re just finding out your body hates you. Now hustle! That little outburst just cost the whole team five more suicides. Come in last and you earn another five.”

There was a collective groan, as though the souls of fifteen adolescent boys had left their bodies in synchronized protest.

“Move!” I barked, putting on my best “pissed off coach” scowl while smiling inside. “Connor, keep your knees under you or I’ll duct tape them in place!”

A heartbeat later, I shouted, “Dillon, this isn’t a scenic jog through the Alps. Sprint!”

I checked my stopwatch and made a note on my clipboard. I didn’t even flinch when Jameson slipped in his own sweat and went down hard.

The first week after tryouts was always like this.

Misery mingled with regret laced with . .

. vomit. There were occasionally tears, though I ignored those when they happened.

It was a time when boys, flabby or sloppy—or both—from a summer away from the team, realized how much easier it was to stay in shape than to get back into shape after slacking for months.

The few kids of mine who played summer ball took to the drills easily.

The others, well, we had buckets and mops for their personal issues.

I looked up from my notes, and my brows pinched together. “Get to the sideline, Jameson! If you’re gonna die, do it on the bench, not in my drill. You’re blocking guys who want to work.”

A few minutes later, I blew the whistle again. Loud. Sharp. And vaguely triumphant.

The boys hated me then, but they’d thank me later.

Or they wouldn’t .

I didn’t care.

They’d be faster, stronger, sharper, and maybe—just maybe—not useless in a full-court press by the time December rolled around.

“Coach, you need therapy,” someone muttered from the middle of the pack, crowded enough together that I couldn’t identify the guilty party. Sneaky little bugger.

“I’m Italian. My whole personality is therapy,” I shot back, flipping to the next page on my clipboard.

I paced the sidelines while the boys dragged themselves up and back across the court like dying ants, sneakers squeaking rhythmically. I didn’t yell again, not yet, just let the silence do my work. It was amazing what a few seconds without encouragement could do to the adolescent male’s brain.

“Marcus, I said touch the line! Your legs are lying to you. Give me three more!”

They started to move faster after that, with a little more urgency, and maybe a little more hatred. That was fine. Hate was just motivation in disguise.

While they ran, my mind wandered.

Well, not wandered. It bolted. The sulky boys with their sullen faces and perpetual scowls sent my thoughts to places it didn’t belong, to a man I probably shouldn’t bother with.

Right to Shane Douglas .

Like my kids, he was broody.

And broad-shouldered.

He was “Silent-type Shane,” who texted like a man preparing for the end times.

From the couple of times we were close enough for our elbows to brush, I knew he smelled like cedar and sawdust. I wondered if he might taste like all of my teenage dreams rolled into one grumpy package.

Ricci, focus. They’re doing suicides, not interpretive dance. Call the next drill.

I blew the whistle. “Get water. You have two minutes, then I want jog laps around the entire court. Don’t let me catch your shoes touching the line, either. Make a full circuit.”

“How many laps, Coach?” one of the barely winded seniors asked.

“Until I blow my whistle, which might be sometime next season if you don’t move better than during those suicides. I know an old Scottish woman who runs faster than you lot.”

The boys groaned and turned.

My mind flicked back to Shane in that tank top.

NO. Drills. Conditioning. Bleeding youth.

“That’s not a jog, Beasley; that’s a slow-motion existential crisis. Pick it up!”

I scribbled a note—probably illegible—and caught myself smiling. Why had I just written, “ sideboard”?

Dio, aiutami! God, help me!

I was torturing teenagers. This was serious. I had to focus, to drive myself as hard as I drove my team. If we wanted to make it back to State, there was no room for laziness or . . . damn it . . . beefy, ab-covered distractions.

But the way Shane looked at me? Like I was a riddle he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to solve but couldn’t stop trying? That did things to my stomach. Inconvenient things. Floaty things. Things that made me drop my guard and almost trip over a bench last night just thinking about texting him again.

“Coach!”

I blinked. One of the boys had stopped running and was now doubled over, panting like a ninety-year-old with asthma.

“Cramps,” the kid wheezed.

“Walk it off. Stretch. Hydrate. Consider your life choices.”

“I am, Coach. I’m regretting all of them.”

“Perfect. That’s growth.”

I paced the sideline, a panther prowling the edge of a clearing, waiting for prey to rustle so I could pounce. I whistled, then barked another drill, then jotted another note I’d forget to read later .

Behind me, someone hit the floor with a muffled thud.

Another one down.

I didn’t look back.

“Team bonding,” I muttered to myself. “Mutual suffering. It builds character . . . and stamina.”

We’d need plenty of both when there were refs and fans and a live scoreboard.

And as much as I didn’t want to admit having a fixation, torturing cocky, if talented, teens was a pretty effective distraction from tall, scruffy, emotionally repressed lumberjacks who somehow made eye contact feel like a religious experience.

Fucking focus, Ricci! You have kids dry heaving and swearing at your ancestors. Do NOT daydream about tank tops and wood shavings.

I rubbed the back of my neck and scowled at my clipboard like it owed me money.

I was fine.

I was totally fine.

There’s no way I was fawning over a man who used five-word sentences like they were high-risk investments.

I glanced up at the team. Most of them were upright. A few were still alive.

I blew the whistle again just to assert dominance.

“Five-minute break. Get water and sit. ”

The instant my stopwatch clicked, I said, “That’s time, gentlemen. Let’s go! Baseline to baseline! You stop when I say stop—or when you collapse. Whichever comes first!”

Thirty minutes later, the last of the kids, a freshman, braced himself on the shoulder of one of the juniors as the pair vanished through the door that led to our locker room.

There wasn’t enough money in all the world to entice me to go back there then.

There were a dozen angry, exhausted, malodorous boys stripping down and likely tossing their soiled, sweaty clothes at one another.

The entire world was safer on the gym side of that door.

I certainly was.

I leaned back against the wall, letting the whistle fall from my mouth. I wasn’t thinking about drills anymore. Or court spacing. Or footwork.

I was thinking about Shane.

And not in the casual, fleeting, oh-he’s-hot way.

No, I’d sprinted past that intersection and was now firmly in dangerous emotional territory.

It was the kind of headspace where I started wondering how his laugh would sound if he ever let go, what he’d look like first thing in the morning, whether he built furniture to keep people out or to say things he didn’t know how to say.

Which was insane .

We’d had one date.

One.

And yet there I was—sweaty, clipboard in hand, abandoned by vomiting teens—trying to remember the exact curve of his lips when he said my name.

I was certain this wasn’t just attraction. It wasn’t just lust, though, lord help me, that tank top was a war crime unto itself. No, these thoughts, these feelings, were something quieter, something steadier—which was funny because everything about them made me feel about as unsteady as I ever had.

Why did life have to be so confusing?

These feelings, these flashes of memories and hopes of more . . . they felt like something that settled behind my ribs and refused to leave, like a favorite song stuck on repeat.

It was the last thing I wanted to admit, but if I was honest with myself, I liked him.

More than I should.

More than made sense.

And for the first time in a long time, that didn’t scare me as much as it should’ve.

Okay, it didn’t scare me like it should actually scare me, more than if I’d been scared in the first place.

Shit.

I was babbling in my own head.

This was bad .

This was so incredibly, painfully, horribly—wonderfully—bad.

And yet . . .

The part that gnawed at me more than anything—the part I didn’t want to say out loud because that might give it more power—wasn’t just admitting that I liked him.

It wasn’t even the teenage angst of wondering if he liked me back.

It was wondering whether or not he could like me back.

And I wasn’t thinking about the surface-level kind of liking, either—not attraction or flirting or appreciating a decent set of forearms, though he seemed to do that just fine. No, I meant the real stuff, the messy, warm, terrifying parts of someone that got under your skin and refused to leave.

I didn’t know . . . I wasn’t sure . . . if Shane could go there.

Not because he didn’t want to.

But because I wasn’t sure he knew how.

The way he held himself, the way he measured every word like it might cost him something, the way his eye contact would be so steady and sure before flitting away like a rodent who’d just heard a cat hiss—it all screamed that someone taught him to be careful .

And careful people didn’t always know what to do with someone like me: someone who talked too much, who felt everything too loudly, who led with his heart even when it was bruised.

So yeah, there was a part of me—small but persistent—that whispered I was setting myself up for something I couldn’t finish. That maybe I’d fall and he’d watch, unable to catch me, not because he didn’t want to, but . . . because he didn’t know how.

I tossed my clipboard onto the bottom bleacher and slumped down beside it, pressing my palms into my eyes.

Thinking about Shane made me feel a happiness, almost a giddiness, that I hadn’t felt in years.

It was stupid. I barely knew the guy, and, shit, he’d barely said a few dozen words in the time we had spent together.

Feeling anything for him was ridiculous.

I was being ridiculous.

But then I thought about the way he’d looked at me when I told him about coaching, the way his eyes softened, that he’d shown up at all.

That he’d texted back.

That he’d smiled, if only once.

That maybe—just maybe—he was trying . . . that he would try.

I let out a slow breath, glanced at the rack filled with basketballs my boys had yet to touch, and made a decision.

Whatever this was, I was giving it a shot.

Because I’d rather stumble trying with someone real than stand while waiting for someone perfect.

And Shane Douglas, broody tank-top-wearing furniture wizard that he was, felt a hell of a lot like someone real.