Chapter 5
Zoe
“I swear to you, if I don’t start touching a ball, I’m going to lose my mind!” I yell at Tessa in our last session.
And now here we are with Hades, who refuses to miss my first touches, alone on one of the practice fields. One of those we barely use, the kind they rent out in the afternoons to local youth soccer clubs.
The sprinklers have just run. The grass smells sharp and green, and the white lines shine like someone drew them with a brand-new marker. God, I miss this.
Four weeks of modified planks and glute bridges.
Four weeks of pelvic floor work so humiliating I want to cry every session.
Four weeks rebuilding my body muscle by muscle.
Four weeks watching my teammates train through the rehab room window like I’m on the wrong side of a life I’m supposed to be living.
And finally, Tessa clears me for light work with the ball.
My first touch is trash: too hard, zero control, the ball rockets off with no real direction. Hades lets out this huff that tells me she’s disappointed.
The second touch is better. The third almost feels normal.
By the fourth, I’m smiling.
“That smile,” Tessa says from the sideline when I pass her. Her voice drops like she doesn’t want the field to hear it. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve touched a ball on a soccer field,” I shoot back, stopping the ball under my cleat right in front of her and my coach. “God, this is… I can’t even find the words.”
“Let’s try something a little more complicated and see how you feel,” Hades says, already walking toward the middle with a stack of cones.
She sets them out every few yards in a straight line. It’s basic. The kind of drill she’d run with twelve-year-olds in any local club: weave through the cones, turn, come back the other way.
“Trust your body,” Tessa whispers, gripping my elbow before my first run.
When I start, the ball moves between my feet with that tap-tap-tap rhythm that lives in my bones. Pure muscle memory. My eyes burn and I hate how close I am to crying.
This.
This is who I am.
Not the woman who couldn't hold a plank for a full minute a month ago. Not the exhausted mom who sometimes forgets to eat because Wesley needs every ounce of me. Not the woman who has to defend herself from a toxic ex-husband who uses her kid like a weapon.
Zoe Méndez. Midfielder. The one who used to see the field as geometry. As endless options. As art.
I complete the drill again and again, and on the last run I add a feint my body remembers even if my brain blinks, shocked I can still do it that fast. I finish with a nutmeg between my coach’s legs—thank God Hades takes it as a joke.
And I laugh too.
A real laugh. No filter. The kind of joy I only feel with my son Wes. Something I haven’t felt inside a stadium in so long I'd forgotten how good it feels. Like air after being underwater.
When I stop, I’m breathing hard, but I’m happy.
“Please tell me I can do preseason with the team,” I beg, and my face does the thing on its own—those abandoned puppy eyes Tessa used to love years ago.
Next to us, Hades waits like she’s ready to stamp a form.
“You can do preseason with the team,” Tessa confirms. “But I need you to tell me about any pain, and we keep the strength work going.”
“You’re coming to Florida too?” I ask, surprised.
Tessa only nods slow. Hades flashes a thumbs-up and winks at me before she heads off.
When we’re alone, I move toward Tessa before I think, before I remember professional lines, before I remember I still hate her a little for what she did seven years ago. Before I list every reason why keeping distance from Tessa is the safest thing I can do for my emotional stability.
I hug her.
It’s fast. It’s impulsive. I’m so happy I don’t even stop to ask what I’m doing.
She wraps her arms around me and it feels exactly like it used to. I feel her heart thudding against my chest. I smell her perfume. Clean and familiar. I hear her breathing. I feel it on the skin of my neck.
The hug should last two or three seconds. Five, max.
It lasts ten. Maybe more.
When I start to pull away, her hands pause on my hips, and my fingers still clutch the lapels of the white coat she wears.
And something shifts.
It’s in the silence. In the way our breaths line up, like my body goes on high alert for every single point where we touch.
I should step back.
I don’t move.
“Zoe…” she whispers my name, and I don’t know if it’s a warning, a plea, or a question. I only know I close my eyes and part my lips.
And then she kisses me.
It’s soft, like she’s asking permission to keep going, but my body decides before my brain can argue. If my brain gets a vote, I stop her. Instead, I wrap my arms around her neck and deepen the kiss, shaking every time I hear the small sounds she smothers against my mouth.
Seven years since the last time we kissed, and my body knows her anyway. Her taste. The shape of her mouth. The way her tongue finds mine like it never forgot.
There’s no caution left. There’s hunger. Seven years of distance collapses in one breath. It’s everything we don’t say during four weeks of too-professional sessions where every brush of skin is a torture dressed up as medical care.
I push her back against the stadium’s concrete wall. Her hands find skin under my sports bra. My fingers find the zipper on her pants. And the second I feel the heat between her legs, she lets out a sound that makes my whole body stutter.
“Shit,” I whisper against her lips. “Tessa… no. Stop. Please.”
I pull myself together, and to say reality hits me like a bucket of ice water doesn’t even cover it. It’s like someone dumps the whole Arctic on me, ice chunks included.
“Goddamn it,” I grind out.
I jerk away, take two steps back, put space between us. My chest rises and falls too fast. My breathing goes wild and it has nothing to do with the drill.
“No. I can’t… I can’t do this with you again,” I say, hands up like I need the air to keep us apart.
Tessa looks wrecked. Her hair is messy where my fingers tangled in it. Her eyes—God, her eyes—are so full of want I could tear her clothes off with my teeth if I didn't remember what happened between us seven years ago.
“Zoe…”
“You broke my heart and threw it on the floor once.” My voice comes out rough. “You left me. You chose Munich. You chose your career. You chose everything but me. And it took me years to recover. I can’t, Tessa. It’s not happening again.”
“I know…”
“You know?” I bark a laugh that tastes like metal.
“You know how much it hurts to realize you left convinced it was the right call?
You know what a stupid, massive mistake it was to marry Nate just because he was there at the right time and I thought at least he wouldn't wreck me the way you did? And look how that ended.”
“Zoe, please… just listen, okay?”
“Has anything changed? What makes you think this time would be different?”
She goes quiet.
The silence stretches too long.
Too sharp.
I can almost see the fight in her head: she wants to lie, she wants to give me something soft to hold onto, she wants to promise things she isn’t sure she can deliver.
But Tessa doesn’t lie. It’s one of the only solid points in this whole mess. She tells painful truths instead of comfortable lies.
And right now, her silence is the most painful truth of all.
“Yeah,” I murmur, turning on my heel and walking away so she doesn’t see me cry.