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“Yeah.” I nodded.

Except my stomach twisted uncomfortably. Every time we called Rhodes her, it felt worse. I hated calling him a woman. It felt wrong. It was wrong. Rhodes wasn’t something I wanted to disguise. I wanted to say his name when I talked about the person who made me feel safe. I wanted to tell my best friends that he was brilliant and caring and bossy as hell. I wanted to complain about him and gush about him and admit I was falling for him without having to edit every sentence before it left my mouth.

CHAPTER 12

Rhodes

WOLF: I know the guys are going to give you shit and have a ton of comments about how yesterday went, but you did good. We’ve never had a coach so hands-on before.

WOLF: Coach Mason always just brought in trainers and didn’t get involved.

WOLF: It’s nice to have you doing everything too.

WOLF: Don’t doubt yourself, Rhodes.

Of all the things Theo had sent me, the messages I woke up to were the most confusing. Maybe because they were full of the kind of reassurances I didn’t want to admit I needed. Theo shouldn’t have been reassuring me. And yet, there they were. I reread them more times than I would ever admit out loud before showing up at the field early.

I expected backlash when the team started arriving. Honestly, I’d earned some. I’d pushed them hard the day before—hard enough that I’d gone home wondering if I’d overestimated what their previous conditioning had prepared them for. I expected dragging feet, bad attitudes, maybe a few players suddenly developing mysterious illnesses overnight.

Instead, they showed up. They were tired, sore, and bitching, but they were ready. Something warm and satisfying settled in my chest at the sight of them gathering on the field.

That told me more than their stats ever could.

I pushed them through another five miles, adjusting my pace a bit to compensate for sore muscles. During it all, Theo didn’t understand the concept of conserving energy. Just like the day before, he finished ahead of most of the team and immediately turned around to run back toward the stragglers. I watched him fall into step beside one of the slower players, talking to him as they ran. Then another. And another.

There was no way Theo was doing less than seven miles by the time everyone finished.

From there, I moved them into body conditioning on the field. By that point, even I was beginning to regret some of my life choices. I worked out regularly, but this was significantly more than my normal routine. My legs burned, my shoulders started protesting, and every time I dropped into another squat, some increasingly loud part of my body reminded me that coaching didn’t technically require me to suffer alongside them.

“How do aliens breathe in space?” someone huffed out—pretty sure it was Forrest. I faltered mid-squat. Of every possible sentence I expected to hear during conditioning drills, that had not made the list.

“What?” I demanded.

“Well,” he stopped doing his exercises to face me, “how do they breathe in space? Do they have lungs?”

I stared at him and then around at the rest of the team, trying to determine whether there was some joke I had missed. There was no obvious answer.

“What does this have to do with doing exercises?” I countered, unsure of how the hell we got here.

“Well, like.” We were going to have to work on the well and like situation coming out of his mouth at some point. “Me and the guys were talking last night.”

“About aliens?”

“Yeah.” Forrest nodded. “And well, like… we don’t know how they breathe? What’d you say, Ter?”

“There’s no oxygen in space, so how do aliens breathe?” Terry said. The rumble of laughter spreading through the group didn’t help me determine whether this was a legitimate question or an organized attempt to derail practice by distracting everyone.

“Is this seriously what you were talking about?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded. “Five of us were trying to figure it out.”

“What five?” Five hands flew up—Forrest, Terry, Sam, Cody, and Jaime. “Are you fucking with me to get out of exercising?”

The problem was that I genuinely couldn’t tell. And worse, if they were fucking with me, they’d chosen one of the few topics capable of making the strategy wildly successful. I could talk about this shit all day. Space. Extraterrestrial life. Planetary evolution. The statistical likelihood of life developing under conditions completely different from Earth. Give me enough encouragement, and I would absolutely become the guy with a whiteboard and several hours of unsolicited information.

I wasn’t quite the crazy aliens guy from television, but the margin was thinner than I liked to admit.

“No!” Sam exclaimed. “It’s a real question, Coach.”