Chapter 10 #2
Heat floods my face so fast I almost feel dizzy. “No.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You are literally hiding behind the bleachers in sunglasses.”
“I’m sitting,” I say. “In public. On public bleachers. That’s not spying.”
He starts walking toward me, unhurried, knowing exactly how much that makes my pulse go stupid.
“Sure. I just so happen to volunteer here every second Saturday, and you just happened to wander by on a random weekend?”
I open my mouth, then close it again, because there is no non-embarrassing answer. He stops one step down from me, close enough that I can smell sun-warmed cotton and traces of his cologne under the sweat. Close enough that I want to lean both away and toward him at the same time.
“You’re fantastic with kids,” I blurt, because apparently public humiliation is the hobby I’ve chosen.
His grin widens. “Yeah?”
“I hate it,” I say immediately.
That gets an actual laugh out of him. He leans down a little, bringing us closer to eye level. “Why do you hate it?”
“Because,” I say, gesturing vaguely at the field, where one of the boys is trying to carry three cones at once and failing spectacularly. “That. This. People seeing this and thinking you’re a good person.”
Some of the humor slips off his face, replaced by something more careful.
“And what do you think?” he asks quietly.
I should lie; it’d be easy. I should say I think it’s a performance, or a weird personality fracture, or some kind of narcissistic side quest. Instead, because it’s him, because he keeps pulling honesty out of me like it belongs to him, I say the worst possible thing:
“I think you are a good person in ways that make no sense with the rest of you.”
Dominic just looks at me, and there’s no joke in his face now; no easy comeback. He huffs a breath and glances away toward the field. “Kids don’t make demands I can’t meet. They want attention, patience, someone to throw the ball back and tell them they’re not useless. That I can do.”
The honesty in that catches me off guard. “Why this place?”
His eyes flick back to mine. “You asking as my TA, or as the guy hiding behind the bleachers to watch me work?”
I roll my eyes. “Shut up.”
His smile turns softer. “My dad used to bring me around places like this. Said if I was going to be good at something, I had a responsibility not to keep it to myself.” His mouth twists. “He always said kids know when you’re bullshitting them. They keep you honest.”
“So this is you being honest?” I ask.
He leans in a fraction. “Sometimes.”
My pulse jumps when a shrill little voice from the field interrupts us. “Coach Dom!”
We both look. Mateo is waving wildly with both arms like he’s trying to direct air traffic.
“You coming or what?” the kid yells. “Jenna says I cheated, but I didn’t!”
Dominic sighs, all put-upon drama. “See what I mean?” he says. “Demanding.”
I snort before I can stop myself.
He straightens and points the football at me. “You stay.”
“I’m not a dog.”
“No,” he says. “You’re nosy. Stay anyway.”
I glare up at him. “Go coach your tiny demons, Volkov.”
He laughs, then turns and jogs back toward the field. I watch him go before I can stop myself.
The next hour is worse, because now he knows I’m here and still somehow manages not to perform for me. He doesn’t glance over constantly or showboat. Doesn’t suddenly act sweeter or harder because I’m watching. He just… goes back to what he was doing.
At one point, one of the little girls trips during a drill and bursts into tears, not from pain but from frustration. Dominic goes straight to her, takes a knee on the grass, and says something I can’t hear.
Whatever it is makes her scrub her face angrily and stand back up. He hands her the ball again and waits. She throws badly, but he catches it anyway and cheers like she just won a championship. The smile that breaks across her face is so quick and bright it hurts.
I have to look down at my own hands, because if I keep watching his face, I’m going to have a problem bigger than the one I already have.
Practice wraps up with a chaos drill that looks suspiciously designed to tire them all out before they’re handed back to the staff, and it works. By the end, the kids are all sweaty and loud, collapsing on the grass in heaps.
Dominic passes out popsicles from a cooler and gets mobbed so completely I lose sight of him behind tiny bodies and waving hands.
I stand, gathering my bag, but only make it halfway down the bleachers before his voice catches me.
“You leaving without saying hi properly?”
I turn despite myself. He’s free of children now, though one little boy is still hanging off his arm like a barnacle. Dominic has an orange popsicle in one hand and a look on his face that says he knows exactly what kind of internal war I’m currently losing.
“I said hi,” I point out. “By being publicly humiliated.”
He walks over, barnacle child in tow, and stops close enough that I can see the grass stains on his knees. “Mason, go ask Jenna if she wants the last blue popsicle.”
Mason eyes me suspiciously, then nods and tears off.
The second he’s gone, Dominic lifts the orange popsicle and taps it against my wrist. “Truce offering.”
I stare at it. “You’re bribing me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Take the popsicle.”
I do, mostly because I don’t know what else to do with my hands. It’s melting already, sticky at the edges.
He watches me, expression unreadable now that the joke’s mostly gone.
“You came to watch me,” he says. Not teasing. Just… noting it.
I look away, annoyed by how much that matters to him. “I was curious.”
“About whether I eat children in my spare time?”
“That was one theory.”
He hums. “And the verdict?”
I peel the wrapper back a little more, buying time. “I think that you’re very inconvenient.”
A slow smile spreads across his mouth, the kind that makes my stomach drop and my temper spark at the same time. “Inconvenient,” he repeats.
“You’re impossible to categorize,” I say, more sharply now that he’s looking at me like that. “It would be a lot easier if you were just one thing.”
His gaze changes. Deepens. “Yeah?” he says quietly. “Would it?”
I grip the popsicle stick tighter. “Don’t do that thing where you act like you can hear what I’m not saying.”
He steps a fraction closer. “I usually can.”
The answer should make me back up. Instead, I stay where I am, because apparently I’m incapable of preserving my own peace around him.
For one stretched second, it feels like the whole field has gone quiet, even though kids are still yelling behind us and someone’s blowing another whistle. It’s just me and him and the orange popsicle sweating in my hand.
Then one of the staff women calls his name from across the grass, asking if he can help stack equipment in the shed.
The moment breaks, Dominic glancing over his shoulder, then back at me.
“See you later, Little Sin,” he says, and walks off.
I stand there in the late afternoon sun, with a melting popsicle in my hand, and watch him jog back toward the kids, back toward the shed, back toward the version of himself I wish I hadn’t seen because now I can’t unsee it.
I wanted proof that everyone else was stupid—that they were all falling for a performance—and that the sweet, generous, patient Dominic Volkov was just a public skin pulled over something rotten.
Instead, I got a far more dangerous truth: the rotten parts are real, but so are the good ones.
Now I have to live with both, because I can see what everyone else sees.
And worse, I think I’m starting to understand why they miss the rest.