Page 24

Worse, I wanted to tell him he was right—that I’d liked being with him far more than I’d ever intended. That somewhere along the way, liking him had become wanting him around, even when sex wasn’t involved.

That scared the shit out of me.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Theo said as he started for the door. “See you around, Coach.”

And fuck, I hated how that sounded coming from him.

I sat in Mason’s office for hours trying to figure things out. At some point, daylight disappeared from the windows and the overhead lights became the only indication that time was still moving, but I barely noticed. There was too much shit to do. I had a playbook to learn well enough to dismantle and rebuild if necessary, player files to review, and practice schedules to overhaul. There were academic reports to sort through that became increasingly depressing the deeper I got into them, and notes from conversations earlier that afternoon I needed to organize. The list of questions I needed answered before training started tomorrow kept growing.

I struggled to focus on the tasks at hand. Normally, this was exactly the kind of situation my brain thrived in. Give me a complicated system, too many variables, and a limited amount of time, and I could disappear into it for hours. I read the same page of Mason’s playbook three times before realizing I hadn’t absorbed a word. My coffee had gone cold, and I considered replacing it with liquor.

Theo’s face kept stealing my focus—more specifically, the way he’d looked at me before leaving. See you around, Coach.

Fuck. I leaned back and scrubbed both hands over my face. I couldn’t get his tantrum out of my head. Tantrum was unfair. That was me trying to diminish what had happened because admitting he had every right to be pissed at me meant admitting I’d handled the situation like shit.

And admitting how I’d hurt him in the process.

That part killed a part of me.

When my phone vibrated on my desk, my heart did something stupid in my chest as if it wanted Theo to call. Instead, it was Sariah’s name that popped up, and I welcomed the reprieve anyway.

“My koala senses are tingling,” Sariah announced when I answered the phone. “What happened?”

Despite everything, I smiled. Sariah had been my best friend since the military, which meant she’d known me through most seasons of my life. What most people would’ve called best-friend intuition, she called her koala senses because I’d once told her she hugged like a clingy koala and she’d turned the insult into a personality trait. Not that I’d complained when she did it.

“My day was… eventful,” I began slowly, reclining back in my seat. If Mason had possessed one redeeming quality, it was an appreciation for expensive office furniture. The chair was comfortable as hell. On the other end, Sariah let out a sound indicating I should keep talking. “It started with a job offer to replace the head football coach at Harbor Tech.”

“Oh,” she replied. “Well, that’s not what I thought you were going to say.”

“What the hell did you think I was going to say?”

“Something Theo-related.” Yeah, her intuition was spot on. “Is this a good job opportunity?”

“Yeah. It pays well—better than I expected for a football coach,” I admitted. “It means I won’t have to float bills up here and down there on one job.”

“But?” She drew out the word. “I can smell your but all the way from here, Rho.”

“Gross.”

“What’s the but, Rhodes?”

“Theo is one of the players on the team,” I said. I braced for the backlash as a moment of silence stretched between us.

“Don’t you dare tell me that you took the job!”

“I took the job.”

“Rhodes fucking Kennedy!” she swore. “That’s it. Your middle name is fucking from this point on. I know you’re a sadist, but are you a masochist too?”

“Hey, now!” I cut her off. “Too much.”

“Is it?” Sariah demanded. “Because only you would be emotionally invested in a guy and then take a job that all but requires you to break up with your secret boyfriend.”

The word boyfriend immediately irritated me.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I snapped. “And I’m not emotionally invested.”

“Please,” she scoffed. “You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me.”