Chapter 19
19
At Friday-morning practice, she sat in the cab of her truck in the parking lot, watching as the last few stragglers showed up not quite late to the session. The Jade she’d been a week ago would have been on the field for an hour already. Helping to set out the water and snacks, looking over her playbook, greeting the kids as they trickled in. The Jade she was today was terrified to show her face.
Jade was a lot of things. Like everybody else in the world, she was a culmination of good stuff and bad stuff. Fucked-up thoughts and generous actions. Most of the time, she made peace with it all. Largely because one thing she’d always prided herself on was not being a coward. She’d never shied away from confrontation or from the truth, and she’d certainly never been too scared to face the facts of life. But here she was, staring down the barrel of losing everything she’d worked hard as hell to get, and the only thing she wanted to do was tuck tail and run so she could avoid the inevitable.
She could imagine holding her head high, striding across the green, only to be met by stares from her colleagues who knew exactly what she’d done and were judging her for it. And Landry… God, she could see his face now. Reddened from the sun, with his Oakley sunglasses perched on the bill of his cap, looking at her the same way he had in his office. Frustrated, disappointed, tired.
Her stomach revolted just thinking about it, and she had to clench her eyes shut to get the image behind her lids to fade away. Maybe it would be better for her to just drive off and send some bullshit text to Landry about how she was going to miss practice because she wasn’t feeling well.
It wouldn’t be a lie, at least. She felt awful.
“Coach Dunn!”
She cursed inside as soon as she heard the voice. Through the glass of her driver’s-side window, she watched as David Kelly came sprinting toward her car. Slowly, she used the hand crank to lower the window.
“Hey, David.”
“What are you doing out here?” His little blond eyebrows furrowed.
“I, uh…” It was shameful, the way she couldn’t come up with a single adequate answer for him.
“We need to get inside—” His voice broke in the middle of his sentence. “These last few summer practices are important, remember? You told us that.”
She nodded, swallowing even though her mouth had suddenly gone dry. She had told them that. She’d stressed it to the kids, to the parents, and to the other coaches. Over and over, she’d drilled it into their heads. Being a coward was one thing; being a hypocrite was another.
“Move back, David,” she said, opening the door and hopping out, then grabbing her water bottle and canvas bag before slamming the car door shut. “I was just running a little behind.”
The duo started to walk toward the field together, and Jade wasn’t sure which one was keeping with the stride of the other. David had boundless energy, and he was a little on the small side, which made him one of their better running backs.
He took off like a rocket the second he touched the edge of the field, and Jade’s heart started pounding just as fast. Everything looked completely normal. The boys sitting around, talking on the field. Coaches on the sidelines doing the same. Landry was in a small huddle with a group of parents. Immediately, Jade feared that he was telling them what she had done—letting them know that their kids had been coached by a goddamn fool.
She shook her head. That was ridiculous. As much as she feared him right now, Landry would never do something like that.
Her steps toward the sideline weren’t as sure as they normally were, but the greetings everyone—or almost everyone—gave her seemed to be.
Lim was there too, hip cocked against the giant orange Gatorade cooler as she downed a cup. Jade drifted toward the other woman as if she were a buoy adrift at sea.
“Hi,” she choked out.
Lim made something of a grimace, all clenched teeth and pitiful eyes. “You look…”
“Yeah,” Jade groaned, pulling the bill of her visor farther down over her face. “Sleep is for people who aren’t about to get fired.”
“He wouldn’t let you come just to fire you, Jade.”
“You don’t know what he’d do.”
Lim sighed and pulled away from the cooler. “Look,” she said as she tossed a casual arm around Jade’s shoulders, doing nothing to ease her pounding heart, and spun her in the direction of the field. “It’s a beautiful day, the kids are happy, and you have not lost your job.” She leaned in closer until Jade could feel her warm breath against her ear. “But if you hang around here like some kind of specter of sadness, you might. The only thing you can do now is make him remember how indispensable you are. So you might as well do just that. Don’t accept your fears as truths.”
Jade couldn’t help but look at the woman. Her full, peachy lips and the little Cindy Crawford mole just above them. The way her dark eyes never seemed to display anything other than playfulness. She was too beautiful to look at for too long, but fuck if Jade didn’t want to test the boundaries of those limits.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked once she finally dragged her gaze back to the field. “You should be over there trying to wiggle your way in.”
“One-sided competition, remember?” Lim shrugged. “Maybe I’m just playing the role of kingmaker. They’re the ones who actually have all the power anyway.”
“Ugh.” Jade shoved the other woman away, ignoring her laughs as she found a spot to put her things down and steeling herself for the coming hours.
Lim was right, damn her. The only thing she could do now was show Landry—remind him—that she was his first choice for a reason. Mistakes be damned. She was it. She had to be.
She just had to remind herself too.
Landry managed to go the entire practice without speaking to her. He’d even only looked her way a handful of times, and Jade wasn’t positive those hadn’t been accidents.
The silence felt like a snub. Even when she’d been a child, her parents had never punished her by ignoring her. It felt impossible not to let such a thing cloud her mind and shake her already fragile confidence.
Thankfully, Landry had the boys running laps for a good portion of practice. Hot as it was, they’d also taken a lot of water breaks. So she’d been given only about thirty minutes to run D-line drills before they’d called it a day. Seconds after he’d blown the whistle signaling the end of practice, Landry had disappeared inside the school—presumably to his office. Jade had watched him walk, tall but with his shoulders drawn, and fought back every instinct inside herself that told her to follow him. Instead, she’d gathered her things and made her way back to her truck—the only thing on her mind being whether she should go cry in her mother’s lap again or go home and cry into a pint of pistachio ice cream.
But the truck wouldn’t start.
“This is not happening.” She turned her key and listened as the ignition made a pitiful sound for the third time in a row. “There is no way this is actually happening to me right now.”
She paused and took a deep breath, rolling her shoulders and giving her lips a once-over with her tongue. Then she tried again. “Gladys, baby, please. Just… please…”
Once again, that pitiful sound.
Gladys was a 1984 Chevy Silverado. At one point, she’d been a glossy cobalt blue; now she was much duller, with more parts of her replaced than Jade could count. It had been her father’s truck, and for the first few years of her life, it had been her favorite place to be. Riding down country dirt roads in the bed with her cousins or strapped into the cab with wind whipping through the windows and Curtis Mayfield on the radio. Her father had given it to her when she’d turned seventeen, and Gladys had been with her ever since.
Jade had sunk more money into the old girl than she cared to admit, but she’d never been strong enough to let her go, not even when Gladys had more than three hundred thousand miles on her and an affinity for being finicky as all hell.
She didn’t know shit about cars, so there was no fixing Gladys on her own. Instead, she’d have to do what she always did and call one of her friends to pick her up. Which always included listening to them lecture her about how dangerous it was for her to still be driving “that raggedy-ass truck.” She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear anything but that engine finally turning over.
And it wouldn’t, no matter how much begging she did as she turned the key.
Jade pressed her head against the steering wheel, teeth gritted, jaw hurting from the way she clenched it. She was so caught up in her own mess that the tap on her window didn’t even faze her.
“Please go away.” She spoke the words into the horn.
“Can’t. I have a responsibility to make sure you’re good right now.” Lim’s husky voice was immediately recognizable, even muffled through glass.
Jade fought the urge to scream and yell and kick. She picked her head up quickly, not even bothering to pull the window down. “Can you give me a ride home?”
Lim just nodded, and within the span of two minutes, they were buckled into the front of the other woman’s Subaru hatchback with the air blowing in their faces and Syd playing through the speakers.
“I still can’t believe you drive a Subaru,” Jade grumbled.
“You can’t?” Lim laughed. “Lesbians and their Subarus, country gays and their trucks. There’s no denying it, honestly.”
“Fair enough,” Jade said. “Everybody hates on my truck.”
“I don’t know why. It’s very you .”
“Is it?”
Lim kept her eyes on the road but nodded. “Oh yeah, it’s sturdy and solid, obviously breaks down every now and then, but it gets back up.”
“Gladys breaks down way more than I do,” she said.
“Is that her name? Gladys?”
“It was my daddy’s truck, and he loves Gladys Knight.”
They stopped at a light, and Franny turned to look at her. “You know what? My dad loves Gladys Knight too, actually.”
“Really?”
“‘Neither One of Us’ is his favorite song,” she said, smiling. “My parents went to Dallas to see her perform at some festival a few years ago.”
“My daddy always says he hates that he was born too late to have been a Pip.”
“Can he sing?”
“Not a damn lick.”
They shared a quiet laugh as the car pulled forward again. “The Subaru very much does not have a name.”
Jade gasped. “That’s sacrilege. Every good car needs a good name.”
“I don’t know… Nothing ever felt right, honestly.”
Jade ran her hand along the dashboard, then the headrest of Lim’s seat. She even tickled her fingers along the buttons on the radio. “Feels like kind of a Georgia to me.”
Lim pulled a face. “Absolutely not. I dated a Georgia, and she used to pick her foot skin in bed.”
“Eww…”
Suddenly, they were jolting forward and back fast, and Lim’s hand shot out across Jade’s chest in some kind of attempt to keep her from shooting forward. The car in front of them had slammed on its brakes for a turn it hadn’t signaled. Lim cursed, then pressed down on her horn for a few long, long seconds while the car ahead made its turn. Then they were on their way again.
“What about Nelly?” Lim said suddenly. “Like ‘Whooooa, Nelly.’”
“That’ll work,” Jade said, laughing, as they pulled up in front of her little house. “This is me.”
She pointed at the little two-story cottage home with its white brick exterior and dark shingled roof.
“It’s really cute.” Lim leaned over, her face closer to Jade’s as she checked it out through the passenger window.
“I bought it last year. It’s pretty damn cute inside too.”
Jade turned her head a fraction so that she was looking at the other woman. Their faces were inches apart, and Jade could smell Lim’s shampoo and the minty ChapStick on her lips. Her thighs flexed in her shorts as her mind flooded with images of their mouths pressed together, their bodies pressing into each other. Then a flash of remembering the feeling of Lim’s hot, wet pussy contracting around her fingers.
“Do you want to see?” The words where whisper quiet, like she couldn’t believe she was saying them.
Without so much as a word, Lim put the car in park and turned it off. As Jade led them up the small path toward her front door, her tummy started to burn. After she closed the door behind them, she froze, unsure what to do.
“Can I get you a water or…” Jade was suddenly skittish, shy. Why, she didn’t know. She was no stranger to this—to sex—not even with Lim. She already knew exactly how the other woman tasted, and here she was acting like it was the first time she’d ever been alone with a girl.
“Did you invite me in here for water, Jade?”
Jade shook her head.
Lim took a few steps until she was right up on her, breasts touching. “Why did you invite me in, then?”
All Jade could do was swallow. Her eyes went to Lim’s lips, peachy and plush, and her skin tingled as she recalled how they felt making their way across her neck and chest.
Lim took Jade’s chin between her thumb and her index finger, tilting her head back a bit. Jade’s eyes instantly fluttered closed—like it hurt too much to look at the woman in front of her.
“Tell me.”
“You already know why.” It sounded more like a whine, needy and desperate.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“So you can torture me?”
“No, I just want to hear it and keep it with me.” Lim’s voice was breathy, and it sent a shudder through Jade.
Fuck. What a thing that was to hear. Jade wound her arms around Lim’s waist, resting her palms against her lower back, just under her T-shirt. She was warm there, heated and a little slick. The fine hairs at the base of her spine felt like silk that Jade was helpless to do anything but stroke with her thumbs.
“I want you,” she said, opening her eyes. The words felt ragged and not enough. “I always want you. Here in my house and at the club and in the car. Even in my fucking tree house, I want you.”
“To fuck me?”
“Yes, but also…” Jade’s mouth hung open, and she hesitated. “I don’t know why this is so hard.”
Lim stroked a finger across Jade’s forehead, down the middle between her eyes, and over her lids, before swirling around the apples of her cheeks. “You don’t trust yourself,” she said. “Not right now and not with this.”
The words hit Jade like a Mack truck. Head-on, knocking the wind out of her sails and leaving a dagger lodged in the middle of her throat.
“I still don’t,” she admitted. “I’m still scared.”
“You’re scared of me?”
Jade nodded wordlessly. Maybe Lim was right. Maybe she’d hit the nail right on the head. Jade felt like she were living on a wire, where every decision she made had the power to knock her off and kill her.
“Francesca…”
Lim stroked her finger over Jade’s cheek once more. Then she pulled away. “I genuinely cannot believe I’m the one saying this, but we’re not doing this, not until you’re sure. Because I’m not sleeping with you again just to have you run out like your head is on fire and pretend like I don’t exist.”
Guilt punched Jade in the chest so hard that she took a step back too. “Yeah. I get it.”
“I want you, Jade Dunn. So much. And not just for sex. Like, I want you for real. I want the kisses and the crying and you sitting in my car. Fucking Sundays at the farmers market and us trying not to get caught flirting at work. I want you , all of you. But I’m not willing to fall for another girl who isn’t all in for me too. You understand that, right?”
Jade’s eyes started to water, salty liquid pooling at the edges. The tears were on her cheeks before she could take a breath in. “I understand.”
The look on Lim’s face made Jade’s entire body ache, and the sound of the front door closing behind her almost brought Jade to her knees. Keeping shit steady had been the only way to move forward for her. No surprises, no fuckups. Clearly, that had not been sustainable. For all her caution, for every bit of her carelessness, Jade was in the exact position she’d feared most. Adrift, unsure, completely up shit creek without a paddle. She felt just as terrified as she had when she thought about Landry’s final decision. Hating Lim—or pretending to anyway—had always felt much safer than leaning into whatever feelings she knew she had.
But even still, in this moment, finally understanding the truth, she didn’t know how to make things right. She didn’t know how to make herself feel better.