Chapter Seventeen Lily #2
He gave me a pointed look, and I felt the heat crawl up my cheeks.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“Coach, who is this lovely creature and why don’t we know her?”
Barrett’s eyes never left mine. “Go away, Justice.”
“Nope. Can’t.” He approached with a wide white-toothed smile and dimples deep in his cheeks. The guy was easily six five, muscles on muscles, his thick arms covered in ink, and so freaking gorgeous that I couldn’t help but stare. “I’m Justice Tyler. And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
Barrett sighed. He was doing that a lot today. Maybe he had breathing problems.
I raised my chin and held out my hand. “Lily Townsend.”
Justice took my hand and turned it, raising it up to his mouth to drop a kiss on my knuckles. I couldn’t help it—my cheeks were on fucking fire. Anyone’s would have been. Imagine Michael B. Jordan walks up and kisses your hand. You’d be blushing, too, okay?
Barrett cleared his throat pointedly, glaring at my hand in Justice’s until the man dropped it, giving me a tiny wink as he did. “How do you know Coach? He never brings friends, so this is a very exciting day for all of us.”
“I am going to make you run sprints across this entire field for the next hour,” Barrett snapped.
“Worth it. Now, I’d like to hear the lady answer, if that’s all right.”
The heat in my cheeks slowly started to ebb, and I arched an eyebrow slowly at the pissing match playing out in front of me. “We’re not friends; I’m his neighbor.”
“Interesting,” Justice mused.
“Go back and run the play, Tyler,” Barrett warned. “You owe me those sprints tomorrow.”
“He’s in a bad mood,” Justice explained. “I’m sure he’ll tell you why.”
“He’s very forthcoming about his feelings,” I said. “I can’t get him to shut up most of the time.”
Barrett looked up at the ceiling and sighed while Justice let out a hoot of amused laughter. “Oh, I like her, Coach. You better lock this one down.”
“Go run the play, Justice,” I said, giving him a warning look of my own.
He saluted crisply, then jogged back over to the other players.
For a few moments, we watched the players line up facing each other. I didn’t know what the fuck I was looking at, of course, but after a quick glance at Barrett’s facial expression, I knew he was dissecting something I couldn’t see.
“Watch the line, Carson,” he yelled. “See the blitz before it happens.”
Every single guy was tall and muscly and fast, a veritable ocean of testosterone as far as the eye could see, but one in particular stood off to the end of the group of players not lined up, glaring over to the man at my side.
He had a bruise on his cheekbone and jaw, muscles popping on his arms where they were crossed over his big chest.
“Oh my.”
“What?”
“That one,” I said, lifting my jaw toward Grumpy Face. “If looks could kill . . .”
“I’d have been dead a long time ago,” Barrett finished. “My quarterback is mad at me.”
I pursed my lips and studied the gentleman in question. Like Barrett, he was tall, with long legs and a sharp jaw. “Did you make him cry in practice?” I tilted my head. “Wait, there’s no crying in football, right?”
“Wrong sport. There’s no crying in baseball, and that’s a great movie.”
I lifted my brow in concession, allowing my arm to brush against his as we watched the play unfold.
The guy who yelled a bunch of random words caught the ball when some other dude snapped it from between his legs (like, what?), held the ball in his hands, and danced to the side when someone tried to tackle him, then heaved the ball down the field, where it landed perfectly into the hands of a waiting receiver.
Justice picked the receiver up and yelled, the celebration unfolding like I was watching a game and not a practice.
Grumpy Face turned and stalked away, and Barrett watched with slightly narrowed eyes.
“They always get this worked up for throwing a ball?”
Barrett shook his head. “No. I have our backup quarterback in on this play.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The edge of his lip tugged up, and my chest tightened in anticipation of a smile that never came. Damn him and his stingy, non-smiling soul. I’d perish if I ever saw one for real.
“Between my players—backups, starters, practice squad—and my staff, I’ve got a lot of personalities to balance. Big egos too.” He scraped a hand over that stubbled jaw, and my mouth went dry at the sound it made as it dragged over his skin. “I’ve been accused of being a perfectionist.”
“No.”
He gave me a long-suffering look, then turned back toward the players as they milled around the field, discussing the previous play with the other coaches. “That I care more about my reputation than anything else.”
My brows furrowed at the unexpected turn in the conversation. Did we share things now? Were we . . . friends? Maybe the broken shovel had been a bizarre friendship ritual I wasn’t aware of and now we were stuck with each other for life. “I don’t know if I believe that,” I said carefully.
“No?”
“I mean, if you only cared about your reputation and looking perfect to everyone, you’d be fake as hell. You’d try to be everything to everyone. Match their definition of perfect. And fake, Barrett King, is not a word I’d ever use to describe you.”
His eyes settled on my face again, their searing weight making me wish I hadn’t said anything.
“It’s not?”
Keeping my expression as close to unaffected as I could muster, I allowed myself one fleeting look in his direction, and when our eyes locked, I felt a powerful little shock all the way down to my fucking toes.
“No. You were too much of an asshole at the beginning. You didn’t give a shit what I thought. ”
“Quite true,” he murmured, keeping his gaze on my face even when I looked away. “I guess I could use that as my proof if he ever says it again. Go ask Lily, I’ll say. She’ll vouch for my dick-ish tendencies.”
“I can be counted on for many, many things,” I said sagely. “Who’s not listening to you? Mr. Grumpy over there?”
He hummed, and I decided to take that as a yes.
“Just tell him to fuck off if he doesn’t listen. You’re the boss.”
“Simple as that, huh?”
“Totally. But as you can imagine, I’m not a perfectionist and I don’t care what people think of me.”
The lie hung in the air, low-hanging fruit that must have been so hard for him to ignore. But he did. The man had every opportunity to call me on the second round of rampant bullshit, but instead he let it be.
How nice to be in possession of such epic restraint.
Barrett glanced over at Maggie—they were still getting her hooked up to mics and messing with lighting—then he turned contemplative eyes toward me.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m curious about something,” he said, all slow and thoughtful. It made my skin itchy.
“It better not be about me.”
At my snappish tone, his eyes softened, and I might not have noticed if we hadn’t been so close.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Oh God.”
Another almost-smile, and my lungs cinched tight around absolutely nothing. “Nothing bad. No tattoo questions.”
My shoulders relaxed an inch or two. “Okay.”
“Tell me what you’d do,” he said in a deep pitch that felt all sorts of intimate, speaking as if we were the only two people in the room. We weren’t even close to alone, but as we stood off to the side, I could almost pretend that we were. Dangerous, dangerous thing, that.
“About what?”
“You have someone who’s important to the team.
Supposed to be your leader. But he’s rash.
Reckless. Stubborn. Doesn’t like to listen.
Hates being corrected. But he’s talented.
Smart. Not performing even close to his potential.
You can see it, but he doesn’t want to dig deep enough to get there.
He thinks he’s untouchable. That there will never be consequences to his actions.
That he can keep shoving himself forward in life without ever stopping to look back at where he could’ve reacted differently.
” My brow furrowed, heart inexplicably racing as he spoke.
He tilted his head and watched my face. “What do you do to get through to him?”
I adopted an airy tone. “Buddy, if you need me to help coach your team of big man-babies, you’ve got bigger problems.”
“Tell me how you’d handle someone like that,” he said again, and his coaxing tone was my undoing. “Someone who looks at the world in a completely different way than you do.”
There was no way I could look at Barrett again, because he was dangerously close to prying back a layer of carefully constructed armor.
Something bolted down and hidden from view.
Instead, I closed my eyes and pictured a different face.
As a teenager, I assumed it was frustration, but now, as an adult, I could see the weariness.
It couldn’t have been easy, dealing with me.
Someone rash and reckless and stubborn and who looked at the world in a completely different way. The situation was vastly different, but the similarities were striking enough that I couldn’t ignore them.
If I could go back, would I tell her to do something different?
Impossible questions like that could never truly be answered, because the truth couldn’t always be distilled down into a clear yes or no.
My heart screamed yes. A million times. But I couldn’t, and entertaining a different reality was a fool’s errand.
“There are always consequences to our actions,” I said, then cursed the slight unsteadiness in my tone. “No one can protect us from those, and I don’t think they should. Even the best people in the world—patient and understanding and full of the best intentions—can’t save someone from themselves.”
I pried my eyes open and risked a look up at his face. He was watching me so intently that it took my breath away.