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Fucking hell. Was I the alien coach now? Was this what my legacy with Harbor Tech would be? Was this what I got for entertaining alien football? Would all my practices involve alien conversation?

“Okay, look,” I began. I braced my hands on my hips as I took a deep breath. This was about to become significantly longer than it needed to be, and from across the way, I caught Theo grinning. I immediately looked somewhere else. I didn’t want to know what he thought. This was exactly the kind of shit I usually avoided talking about around him. While I was completely fine with my nerdy side, I was also very aware of how I came across, and I didn’t want him thinking less of me because of it. “Yes, there’s no oxygen in space. Now, that being said, there’s no way to tell if that affects aliens or not. What if they breathe hydrogen? What if they don’t breathe at all?

“Also, it’s not like aliens are likely to be just floating around in space. They’re likely inhabiting other planets—ones like Earth or ones that are completely different. Where they live will drastically affect how they breathe. Think about fish. We live on the same planet as fish, but they have gills that extract oxygen from water. It’s evolutionary.”

By the time I finished, several guys had stopped exercising entirely. Fucking hell. I’d successfully turned conditioning into an impromptu astrobiology lecture.

“Oh, my God!” Jude exclaimed loudly, practically wheezing as he laughed. “Were you always this much of a nerd?”

“Bite me, douchebag.” Not coach-appropriate, but he was my little brother, which I decided gave me at least a little immunity. I caught how Theo’s grin widened a little too suggestively, but I put all my focus on the five to avoid him. “But does that make sense?”

“So, what you’re saying is you don’t know for sure…” Cody replied slowly.

Fucking hell.

“No, I don’t know for sure,” I said. “The documentation on alien life—and I mean scientifically backed, not conspiracy theory—is non-existent. Right now. If I’m being really honest, I think it exists, but there’s a security clearance involved. That’s neither here nor there.”

The second the words left my mouth, I knew I’d gone too far—not because I didn’t believe them. But because now they knew I believed them.

“Man, you’re sounding a little crazy, Coach K.” Rodney laughed. Okay, maybe I did sound a little crazy to people who didn’t get it. That was the reason I typically kept this shit to myself.

“Again, we go back to my Star Wars commentary from two days ago,” I reminded them.

I drew in a slow breath and looked over the group. The strange thing was that, underneath all the jokes and laughter, they were listening. Every face was turned toward me. It was oddly unnerving. And maybe a little sad, if I was being honest, because the longer I looked at them, the more I wondered how rarely their previous coaches had simply talked to them.

Theo’s messages from earlier landed a little differently as that thought settled in. Maybe attention mattered more than I realized. Maybe they’d spent years being treated like bodies on a field and had gotten so little interest from the adults responsible for them that even a ridiculous conversation about alien lungs felt notable.

“All right, enough of this. We’ve got work to do,” I continued.

The collective groan started almost immediately as everyone reluctantly returned to their exercises. But I made a mental note to find other ways to engage them on a more casual level. If I was going to coach them, I wanted to know the guys underneath the helmets, even if it was just conversations about how extraterrestrials breathed.

Despite a full day of exercising, training, and going through files, I was restless. I’d already showered, answered emails, gone through tomorrow’s training plan twice, and adjusted a schedule that hadn’t needed adjusting the first time, but none of it helped. The goddamn safari theme wasn’t helping either. Everywhere I looked, there was another zebra stripe or fake palm leaf reminding me that I was trapped in this ridiculous rental with entirely too much time to think. There wasn’t a damn thing soothing about the place, and after twenty minutes of pacing, I finally gave up trying to relax.

The engine roared to life beneath me, and some of the tension in my shoulders immediately loosened. Usually, riding gave me something simple to focus on—things that made sense. The road, the weather, the movements of my body. They were tangible things I could use to distract myself, but tonight, none of it worked.

If anything, the empty stretch of road gave my thoughts more room to get louder.

The last time I’d ridden like this, Theo had been behind me. Even now, I could damn near feel the weight of his arms around my waist as I drove mindlessly through the woods. There had been a comfort in his weight. One I craved now that it wasn’t there.

Fuck.

When the hell had that happened? When had Theo gone from someone I hooked up with because the sex was incredible and the arrangement was uncomplicated to someone whose absence I could physically feel?

There hadn’t been one obvious moment where everything shifted. No conversation where we agreed to become something more. No decision I could isolate and examine until I understood where I’d screwed up.

It had happened gradually.

Theo had worked his way into my life one insignificant moment at a time, and now I was trying to cut him out all at once. No wonder it fucking hurt.

I tightened my grip on the handlebars. I was in over my head, and for once, it had absolutely nothing to do with the coaching job. The coaching job I could handle. There were rules and expectations, problems I could identify and solve. Even the disaster the previous staff left behind was manageable once I knew what I was dealing with.

Theo wasn’t.

Especially because he was always right fucking there. That smile. That laugh. That goddamn voice. Even when I deliberately tuned him out, some part of me remained aware of exactly where he was.

I didn’t like what that did to me. I liked control—I thrived in it. My entire life worked better with clean lines and predictable outcomes. Theo had apparently taken one look at every carefully constructed boundary I had and wandered straight through them without either of us noticing.

That was the problem. I felt like I was losing sight of myself.