8. Seth
The match against G.L. takes everything I’ve got and then some.
“I’d like to have a word with you, Seth,” Coach says quietly, grabbing the arm of my t-shirt as I walk past him.
“Yes, Coach,” I say. Every part of my body hurts right now, but when Coach wants a word, Coach gets a word.
“What’s going on with you and Gabby?” he asks, motioning for me to take a seat on the bottom bleacher.
I sink down gingerly.
“We’re friends, Coach.” Or at least I think we are.
“Is that all it is?” he asks. He looks at me like I’m one of his kids. I’ve seen him with them. He adores them.
“That’s all it is, Coach.”
He shakes his head. “No one goes after another man like that if that’s all it is.”
“Coach, I’d have gone after him if he’d said something like he said to my sisters, too. It’s not romance-related. It’s just common decency.”
“You’re sure it’s not going to be a problem?”
“No, Coach, it won’t be a problem.”
“Look, Seth,” he says, “I know about your family situation.”
“What family situation?” I don’t like talking about my family.
“Your mom… Your dad…” He arches his brow at me.
“My mom died, and my dad has never been around.”
“Exactly.”
“What about it?”
“If you ever need to talk, Seth, I’m here.” He holds up his hands. “That’s all. I wanted to open that door, okay?”
“Thanks, Coach. I’m fine.”
I hear a click and a whoosh of a door opening behind me, and I blink twice as my aunt Sky and her husband, Matt Reed, walk into the wrestling room. I get to my feet.
“Hey, sweetie,” Sky says. She glances down at her watch. “What are you doing here at this hour?”
I look from her to Matt. “What are you doing here?” I ask. Surely, Coach didn’t call them because of something as stupid as a fight.
Coach quickly answers. “I invited Matt to come by so we could discuss him and his brothers coming to a few matches to help draw a crowd. Maybe a few practices.”
“So this has nothing to do with what happened today?” I look from Sky to Matt to Coach. They all look confused.
“What happened today?” Sky asks. Her brow furrows. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“No, no,” Coach rushes to say. “This was pre-planned, Seth. A little community outreach. It worked last year. The fans love to see the Reeds engage with the team. It’s good for the school. We sell five times the concessions when they’re here. That’s all.” He squeezes my shoulder. “I promise.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Come back to my office, Matt. We can pick a date or two. Can you and your brothers talk about it a little on social media?” he asks as Matt follows him toward the offices.
I look over and find Sky standing with her arms crossed over her chest. “What happened today?”
“Nothing,” I start, even though I know I’m not going to get out of this discussion.
She motions toward the door. “Come on. You can buy me a hot chocolate.”
I follow her out, even though I haven’t showered yet, and I still smell like G.L. Stanton’s sweat.
We stop at a small indoor cafe, and Sky gets two hot chocolates. “Did you want something?” she finally asks. She grins over the top of one cup.
I laugh. “Is one of those for me?”
Her smile is almost infectious. “If you insist.” She hands me one of the cups. I cup my hands around it and let the steam waft into my face.
“What happened today?” she asks as she leads me to a small table. We take a seat.
“It was a disagreement,” I say. “Nothing more.”
“A disagreement is different from a fight,” she explains.
True. “G.L. said something I didn’t like, and I let him know, and Coach caught us arguing and made us take it to the mat.” I shrug. “That’s all.”
“That’s all,” she chirps back at me. She grins again. “Who won?”
I blow out a breath through my lips. “I did. Of course.”
“Of course,” she says. “This didn’t happen to be over a certain woman, did it?”
I scratch my nose. “No, it was over G.L. being an ass.”
“But G.L. has always been an ass.”
Also true.
“So, was he an ass to a certain woman?”
I scratch my nose. “Maybe.”
She chuckles. “I knew it!” she whisper-hisses at me. “I imagined Gabby as someone who can take care of herself,” she muses.
“She can. She kneed him in the nuts, gave him a nosebleed, and dropped him to the floor like a stone.”
Sky’s eyes narrow. “If she did all that, why did you have to get involved?”
This is why I both hate and love talking to Sky. She understands every situation immediately. I just wish she would be on my side even when I’m wrong. But then she wouldn’t be Sky.
“I didn’t like seeing her cry,” I admit, my voice small.
“He made her cry.”
“Yes.”
“It’s pretty normal for a woman who’s feeling overwhelmed—and I imagine she was after what you say happened—to cry.”
“I didn’t like it.”
She leans forward and stares at me like she’s mapping my expression. “You like her.”
I give her a quick dip of my chin.
“Like like her like her.” She sits back and pretends to be astounded. “Holy crap, Seth,” she says as she sits back and blows out a breath. “This is big.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.”
“It’s really not.” I shake my head.
“Okay, it’s not.” She waves a breezy hand in the air. “Are you doing the friendship thing first before you tell her how you feel?” She blows across her hot chocolate again.
I shrug. “I don’t know how I feel.”
She covers my hand with hers and pats it. “Take it slow. Get to know her. She might hate your guts. Or you might dislike the way she chews. Or she might be disgusted by how much your feet stink.”
I cross my ankles. “My feet don’t stink.”
She snorts. “Yeah, right.”
“When you see yourself in five, ten, or twenty years, what are you doing?”
“Traveling. Seeing the world. Experiencing new cultures.”
“Babies? A wife?”
I shake my head. “Doubt it.”
She smiles like she has the secrets of the universe in her head. “Do you think Gabby will be mad that you put yourself in the middle of a situation she was handling?”
I hadn’t even thought about it. “It was a gut reaction,” I explain.
“You didn’t answer my question.” She crosses her legs and looks at me the way she looks at my sisters when one of them ate the last cookie, and she wants them to confess.
“Probably,” I say with a heavy sigh. “One more reason to dislike me.”
She smiles softly. Then I see her look over her shoulder. “All done?” she asks as Matt and Coach walk up.
“We set a date,” Matt announces. He takes Sky’s hot chocolate and sips from it.
“Excellent. We need to get home,” Sky announces. “I didn’t expect to see you, Seth,” she says, as she wraps her arms around me, “but I’m glad I did.” She lingers with her lips on my forehead and presses a kiss there. I can feel the cold imprint of her damp lips. “I love you, Seth,” she says as Matt bumps my fist with his.
“Love you too,” I say.
I watch them as they walk away. From the moment they met, I knew they’d last.
“I take back what I said, Seth,” Coach says softly.
“What?” I ask, genuinely confused.
“About you not having parents to talk to. You most definitely have parents.”
I laugh past the sudden lump in my throat. “I guess you could say so.”
He starts to walk away and calls over his shoulder, “But that door is still open, Seth! Anytime!”
“Thanks, Coach,” I call back. Then I go and grab my gear bag, and I walk to my apartment. I stop short, though, when I get to my door.
Sitting in front of my door is a brunette with a textbook open in her lap. Her back is pressed against the door as she reads. She looks up when she hears my keys jingle. She closes her book and stuffs it into her bag.
“Seth,” she says with a smile so pretty that my heart wants to stop.
I look up and down the hallway. “How long have you been here?”
“About twenty minutes,” she says. “Coach wouldn’t let me watch the match. He made me leave.”
“Hm,” I hum as I reach over and open the door. “Coming in?” I ask.
“Do you want me to come in?” she tosses back.
“Well, I don’t want you to sit in the hallway. People might talk.” I grin at her.
She grins back and wrinkles her nose.
I drop my bag near the door and wince as my shoulder twinges.
“What happened to your shoulder?”
“Match,” I explain, with just that one word.
“G.L. is forty pounds heavier than you,” she reminds me.
“Forty-three,” I correct. Wrestlers know their weights.
“Too big of a spread to be competitive.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I pretend to look offended.
“It means you never should have been wrestling G.L. in the first place. He’s too heavy for you to be able to compete.”
I shrug out of my jacket, and she reaches for my arm.
“How badly did he beat you?” she asks quietly as she puts my arm through a range-of-motion test.
“What makes you think he beat me?”
“Forty-three pounds, Seth,” she reminds me.
“It was a tough match,” I admit. One of the hardest ones I’ve ever fought.
I wince as she hits a tender spot while rotating my shoulder. “Ice and rest,” she says. She goes to my fridge and takes an ice pack from the freezer. “I knew this would be in there,” she says with a grin. She lays it on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry I involved myself in your fight when you already had it handled,” I say quietly, as she’s standing no more than an inch from me.
“I don’t need a knight in shining armor, Seth. I had it handled.”
“I know that now, and I’m sorry.”
She nods. It’s just a quick drop of her chin. “Did you really beat him?” Her eyes light up at the thought.
“Of course I did.” I blow another raspberry.
She pumps a fist in the air. “Yes!” she exclaims. But then she sobers. “Don’t do it again.”
I snicker just because I can’t help it. “Okay.”
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
“Starving.”
“Go shower, and I’ll come up with something to eat.” She pulls out her phone and starts to thumb through it.
“I have noodles in the cabinet.”
She suddenly looks overjoyed as she runs to the cabinet and pulls it open.
“Sky sends them,” I admit.
“Go shower!” she says again. “You smell like stress sweat!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I shower, making sure to wash my stinky feet, and walk back out to find her on the couch with a hot bowl of noodles on her lap. “I made myself at home,” she says with a grin. She wiggles her toes under the lap blanket she has tugged off the back of the couch.
On TV is a program I’ve seen in its entirety too many times. “What are you watching?”
“Only the best reality TV show ever invented.”
She has queued up the Reed Brothers series, and she’s got it on season two.
I laugh as I pick up the bowl of noodles she left for me on the end table and sit down next to her. She tosses the edge of her lap blanket across my legs, and I settle in. She flops the ice pack onto my shoulder. I see that she has a second one across her knuckles.
The Reed Brothers series is the best reality TV ever. It’s good people doing good things all the time, and there’s nothing better than that. Add in a little family drama, fights between Friday and all the brothers, and good deeds, and you instantly have my attention.
“Turn it up,” I say.
She grins as she turns it up, settles down again, and starts to laugh about the day Friday got a run in her fishnet stockings and how it took three Reed brothers to go out and get her a new pair.
The noodles are seriously the best noodles I’ve ever had.
An hour later, she clicks off the TV. “Time for me to go home,” she announces.
“Do you have to go?” I ask. I pick at a string on the blanket rather than look at her.
“I’m afraid I do. I have to run in the morning.” She shoves my leg. “And you have early morning workouts.”
She gets up and shrugs into her coat, and I put mine on, too. “What are you doing?”
“I”m walking home with you.”
“I don’t need anyone to walk home with me, Seth,” she says.
“It’s dark, and there are stupid people everywhere, Gabby.”
“I am neither afraid of the dark nor stupid people, Seth.”
“You can either let me walk with you or I can follow you like a creepy stalker. Which would you prefer?” I heave out a frustrated breath. Then I blurt out the real reason I want to walk her home. I can”t even stop myself. “My mom would kill me if I didn’t stop you from walking home alone in the dark.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “She raised a gentleman.”
“She tried.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” I grin.
I open the door, and she goes through it.
When we get to her door, she unlocks it and steps inside. She turns back quickly and faces me, her arms holding either side of the doorway. “Thanks for dinner,” she says with a grin.
I nod my head. “You’re welcome.”
“Ice and rest,” she chirps, and then she closes the door.
I didn’t expect her to invite me in, but I also don’t like being left in the hallway. I stand there a minute, contemplating what she’d do if I knocked again and tried to kiss her.
Then I remember what Sky said. Take it slow. I’ll take it slow if it kills me.