Page 28 of Coach (Shady Valley Henchmen #8)

He backed me up against the wall, ran his hands down my arms, over my belly, then up… up.

My legs unfroze, and I ducked under his arm.

I ran half-naked into the hallway, banging on doors as I went, yelling for someone to help me.

It was the dropout pothead at the end of the hall who answered, letting me into his apartment while storming into the hall with a bat swinging in his hand.

By the time he checked around, though, my coach was long gone.

The cops who showed up claimed that I had no proof there had been any sort of break-in, rolled their eyes when I insisted that I was very careful about locking my door when I left.

And when I kept going with the story, they went as far as to say it sounded like I had a date over, led him on, then caused a scene when I decided not to go through with it.

As they walked off afterward, I heard them grumbling about dumb college girls.

This time, when I tried to get another restraining order, the new judge wouldn’t give it to me.

Without that barrier, Coach Dover was everywhere. I got a new phone; he figured out the new number. I changed jobs; he tracked me down. I tried to be normal and date; he told the guy horrible stories about me.

Then, worst of all, I got news that Coach Dover went to his union and forced another review of his conduct. No one spoke to me. Just the other girls who had been on the team at the time, all of whom said Coach Dover had never been inappropriate.

Horror of horrors, he was rehired.

And I just… couldn’t do it anymore.

I couldn’t go to that field every day, knowing he’d gotten away with everything, knowing he could keep touching me, watching me. Or doing worse.

There seemed to be no choice.

I had to drop out.

Quit.

Pack up.

Move.

Try to start over.

So that was what I did.

It was the first time since college started that I felt like I could breathe.

Having a history in serving and bartending allowed me to get a decent job in a big city.

The money flowed in, though flowed out almost as easily, thanks to insane rent prices.

I made new friends. I dated. I started looking into community college courses to hopefully get some sort of degree to help build a more solid foundation.

Then one night, there was a shadow under a streetlamp.

And there he was.

In my new life.

With his same old obsession.

Again, I’d tried to get protection. But the police, while not as belittling as the ones at college, informed me that Coach Dover hadn’t done anything wrong, that streets were public, and that unless he did something threatening, there was nothing they could do.

What choice did I have but to uproot and restart again? I couldn’t risk staying and waiting for my former coach to get brave and violent again.

So I moved.

And moved.

And moved.

Each time, I got smarter, more careful.

Each time, he kept tracking me down.

With each move, life got harder, money got shorter in supply. It wasn’t long before I was offsetting costs by living in my car. Which created its own new world of difficulty and terror. Strange men at my windows. Where to go when my car needed repairs. Showers in public rest stops.

Until one night, I woke up with a familiar face near my window, his hand in his pants.

I nearly backed over him in my desperation to drive off.

Many times over the years, across different cities, never able to shake that shadow, I wondered if it would have been better if I had.

Ran over him.

Backed up.

And ran over him again.

Because he only got bolder with each city he followed me to.

There was no more standing under streetlights. He simply broke into my homes. He placed cameras. He left presents. He waited for me.

Once, when I went nearly ten months without a visit from my old coach, I started to think it was finally, finally over.

Until the man I’d been dating for a few weeks had his brake lines fail and wrapped himself around a tree.

He lived, thank God.

But the cops wouldn’t believe me when I told them who cut the lines. Especially since I had yet to lay eyes on Coach Dover in the area. Within a few days, the boyfriend started telling me I was being crazy and paranoid, that sometimes brake lines failed.

He almost had me second-guessing myself as well, thinking I was truly starting to crack under the pressure.

Until finally, fresh off a breakup with that same guy, he showed his face, grabbing me as I made my way toward my apartment, pinning me to the wall, talking rapid-fire craziness at me, his spit coating my face, his fingers bruising my skin.

Luckily, a nosy neighbor was taking her big German Shepherd out for a walk. Her yelling and the dog’s snarling managed to scare off my coach.

“You need one of these,” my neighbor said, patting her dog’s head. “They keep the creeps away.”

I packed up once again.

But on my way out of town, I stopped by a shelter, lied about my living situation, and walked out with a man-hating dog who could hopefully keep one particular creep away.

I had one last run-in with Coach Dover after bringing Trix into my life.

She’d done exactly what I hoped she would.

She barked, lunged, snarled, snapped, foamed at the mouth.

Coach Dover was quick to back away, panic filling his eyes.

It was the first time I felt like I had the upper hand, that I had a little bit of power.

That lack of panic allowed me to think clearly for a change, to try to consider how the hell he’d been tracking me.

At first, I assumed it was my socials. Until I deactivated them. Then maybe my phone. So I got rid of it. After that, I imagined he had somehow hacked into some sort of database for employment records.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in a motel room with Trix as she chowed down on the steak dinner I’d bought her that I realized…

There was no way. While I had to admit (reluctantly) that he was a good coach, he wasn’t exactly a genius.

If anything, some of the girls used to comment on how uneducated he came off.

He was no hacker.

But he had proven good at things like cameras.

It didn’t feel that big of a leap to assume that he might also know a thing or two about trackers.

First thing the next morning, before I drove one more mile, I found a repair shop and spent a small chunk of precious money to have a mechanic look my car over for any kind of devices.

“Wait… what?” I asked when he dropped four little squares on the counter in front of me.

“Yep. Four.”

“Why would there need to be four?”

“My guess,” the mechanic, an older girl-dad who’d been very concerned at the idea of a single woman with a tracker on her car, said, “is he wanted to make sure that if you found one, you would likely stop looking and not find the others. Then backups in case of battery failure.”

“Wow.”

“I got a buddy heading out of town to visit his family. How about I have him take your trackers with him? Get him moving in one direction while you go the other way?”

“That would be amazing.”

And so it was.

His buddy went east.

I went west.

Then I fell in love with Shady Valley.

And a man named Saul Garza.

I should have known it could never last.