Approach Shot (City Hearts #2)

Chapter 1

Walk-Up

The kid had a hundred-dollar forehand and a two-dollar heart, and Allen Cabrera knew it before the third ball crossed the net.

Sure you are, Allen thought, and kept watering.

"You Cabrera?" the guy called through the chain-link.

"Depends who's asking."

"I heard you're the best coach in the city who doesn't work at a club."

"You heard right about the second part." Allen dragged the hose down the baseline, the water hissing into the clay, the smell coming up green and mineral the way it had every day of his life since he was six.

"Clinic's full. Kids' program's got a waitlist. If you want a court, sign-up sheet's in the rec office and it's first come, and it comes real early. "

"I don't want a court." The guy hooked his fingers in the fence. "I want you to coach me."

Allen looked up.

Behind the guy, across the street, Yaz was working the walk-up window of the little cafecito stand she'd talked the owner into letting her run three afternoons a week, and she'd stopped mid-pour to watch, because Yaz missed nothing and enjoyed everything.

Two of the twelve-year-olds from the four o'clock were doing suicides along the fence line and pretending not to eavesdrop.

And this guy — twenty-seven, twenty-eight, built like someone who used to be an athlete and had spent a few soft years since — stood at the gate of Allen's whole life like it was a thing you could just walk up to and buy.

"I don't take private students," Allen said.

"Everybody says that until the right person asks."

"And you're the right person."

"I'm hoping to find out." The grin again.

It really was a good grin. Allen had spent twenty years around people who'd been taught to grin like that, and he'd learned to distrust it on reflex, the way you learn not to trust a drop shot from a guy who's down a break — too pretty, too convenient, hiding something behind it.

"Ten minutes. Hit with me for ten minutes and if you think I'm wasting your time, I'll leave and you never see me again. "

"You'll leave anyway. My time's not for sale in ten-minute pieces."

"Then how's it for sale?"

Allen shut off the hose. Straightened up, felt his left knee file its usual complaint, ignored it the way he'd been ignoring it for a decade.

He looked at the guy — really looked, the coach's look, the one that stripped the grin off and read the frame underneath.

Good shoulders. Old muscle gone a little quiet.

The specific way he was standing, weight already forward on the balls of his feet without thinking about it, ready to move.

That part wasn't fake. You couldn't fake that. That was somebody who'd been made to stand that way ten thousand times before he was fifteen.

Huh, Allen thought.

"You played," Allen said. Not a question.

Something crossed the guy's face — there and gone, the grin flickering like a bad connection — and for half a second he looked less like a man buying something and more like a kid who'd been caught. "A long time ago," he said. "Badly."

"You didn't play badly. Nobody stands like that from playing badly." Allen tossed the hose into the corner. "Grab a racket. You've got one lesson. Not because you asked nice — because I want to see what quit on you."

***

The guy — "Chris," he said, sticking a hand through the gate, and when Allen waited for the rest of it, just repeated, "Chris, that's it, that's the whole thing" — could hit.

That was the problem. That was always the problem with the ones who came from money.

Allen fed him a dozen balls from the center mark, easy pace, nothing tricky, and Chris's forehand came back clean and deep and heavy with the kind of topspin you did not develop on a public court in your spare time.

Somebody had paid for that forehand. Somebody had paid a great deal, over a great many summers, for a very good junior coach to stand exactly where Allen was standing and build that stroke one rep at a time.

It had rust on it now — the footwork was a half-step slow, the guy was arriving instead of setting up — but the bones of it were expensive and real.

"Again," Allen said, and fed him the backhand.

The backhand was two-handed and just as good and just as rusty, and Chris hit six of them in a row into the corner and then grinned at Allen like a Labrador who'd brought back the stick, and Allen felt the exact thing he always felt watching talent that had been handed everything: a low, tired irritation that had nothing to do with this guy specifically and everything to do with twenty years of watching gifts go to people who'd never had to want them.

"You're pretty," Allen said. "You've been pretty your whole life. Somebody built you a beautiful game and then you stopped using it. Why?"

"Does it matter?"

"It's the only thing that matters." Allen walked to the net, wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. The four o'clock heat sat on the court like a hand.

"I've got a hundred kids on that waitlist who'd cut off a thumb for the coaching you're wearing on your arm right now, and they'll never get within a mile of it.

So yeah. If I'm gonna spend one second of my afternoon on a rich kid who quit, I want to know why he quit, because that tells me whether you're gonna quit on me too.

Which you are. But I like to know the shape of a thing before it happens. "

He'd meant it to sting. He said things like that to sting, sometimes, to the pretty ones, to see what was under the grin — most of them got offended, went stiff, told him they didn't have to take this, and left, and that was fine, that saved everybody a summer.

Chris didn't get offended.

Chris laughed — a real one, surprised out of him, cracking right through the loaded grin, and it was a completely different sound than the one he'd walked up with, younger and louder and with no strategy in it at all.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, that's — nobody talks to me like that.

Do you know that? That's the first honest thing anybody's said to me in like a year. "

"Then you're keeping bad company."

"You have no idea." Chris walked to the net too, met him there, still grinning but the grin had changed, had opened up.

Up close his eyes were doing something the mouth wasn't — something bright and a little desperate, a guy who'd just been handed the one thing he was starving for and couldn't believe it was free. "Say another one."

"Another what?"

"Another honest thing. About my game. Come on. Nobody's coached me in eleven years, everybody just—" he waved a hand, loose, a gesture that took in some whole world Allen couldn't see "—everybody just tells me it's great. Tell me what's wrong with it."

And that — Allen would think about that later, on the drive home, turning it over — that was the first thing that didn't fit.

The shoes fit. The forehand fit. A bored rich kid slumming on the public courts for a thrill fit.

But a bored rich kid didn't stand at the net sweating through a peeled-logo shirt asking to be told what was wrong with him like it was water in the desert.

"Fine," Allen said. "You want it?"

"I want it."

"Your game's a lie." Allen leaned on the net post. "It's all top.

All the pretty stuff, the strokes, the spin — that's the part somebody bought you, and it's real, it's genuinely good, I'm not gonna insult you.

But it's got no bottom. You arrive late on everything because you've never had to fight for a ball in your life — somebody always fed you the next one.

You hit six beautiful backhands and I guarantee you'd have shanked the seventh if it took you out wide, because the second a point costs you something, the second you'd have to actually run and hurt and want it, you don't have the legs and you don't have the — " Allen tapped his own chest, once "—the thing here.

Nobody built you that part. You can't buy that part.

That's the part you quit before anybody could put in you. "

The court was quiet. Even the twelve-year-olds had stopped pretending.

Chris looked at him, and the grin was gone now, all the way gone, and what was under it was so raw and so undefended that Allen almost — almost — took it back.

"How much for you to teach me the bottom part," Chris said.

***

"No," Allen said.

He said it walking away, because it was the right answer and he knew it was the right answer and he wanted to be gone before the guy's face could change his mind.

He picked up the ball hopper, started scooping, the familiar rhythm of it, the thing he did with his hands when he needed to not look at somebody.

"Why not?" Chris trailed him down the court. "You said the game's got no bottom. I'm asking you to put the bottom in it. That's literally your whole speech, you can't give me the speech and then—"

"I don't take privates because privates are how this goes.

" Allen straightened, hopper full, and turned to face him.

"You come three times. Maybe five. It's fun, it's a novelty, the working-class coach and his tough love, real authentic experience.

And then it gets hard — because I'd make it hard, that's the only way to put a bottom in a game, it has to hurt — and one Tuesday you don't show up, and you don't text, and I'm standing on a court I could've given to a kid who'd have died for it.

I've done this. I did this for years, at clubs, for families like yours.

I'm not furniture you rent for a summer.

I've got a hundred kids and a program and a plan, and none of it has room in it for a rich guy's phase. "

Something happened in Chris's face when Allen said families like yours. A small flinch, quickly covered — but Allen caught it, and misread it, filed it as the guy not liking being called rich, which was rich-guy behavior all on its own.

"It's not a phase," Chris said.

"They're always a phase."

"There's a tournament." Chris said it fast, like he'd been holding it, like it was the real thing under all the grinning.

"In eight weeks. The Salazar Foundation pro-am.

It's — it's a charity thing, big Miami deal, pros and amateurs, and there's a bracket for — anyway.

I want to play it. Not the celebrity-photo part.

The actual bracket. I want to play one real match, in front of everybody, where nobody's letting me win and nobody's — " his jaw worked "—where I actually earned being on the court.

Once. In my life. And right now I'd get bageled off it in front of the whole city, so.

" He spread his hands. "Eight weeks. Put a bottom in the game.

I'll pay whatever. I'll pay a year up front so you know I'm not gonna ghost you, I'll pay it right now, cash, today—"

"That's not the problem."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is you just offered to buy the exact thing I told you can't be bought.

" Allen shook his head, but he was — he could feel it, the crack, the interest, the thing that always got him, which was a game with a hole in it and eight weeks to fill the hole.

That was the job. That was the whole reason he loved the job.

"You want a bottom in your game, the price isn't cash.

The price is you show up when it's raining.

You show up when it hurts. You show up the day after I make you cry — and I will make you cry, that's not a threat, that's a schedule — and you run the drill anyway.

That's the price. And guys like you have never once in your lives paid it. "

"Try me," Chris said.

And there it was — the thing that wasn't fake, the same thing Allen had seen in the guy's stance the first second, weight forward, ready to move.

He meant it. Whatever else was going on, whatever the peeled logos and the eight-hundred-dollar shoes and the one-name-only were hiding, this part was true: the guy wanted it.

Wanted it the way Allen's best kids wanted it, the ones with nothing, the ones who ran through the sprinklers to get here.

Allen had spent his whole life learning to tell the real want from the pretty want, and this was real, and it was in the last person on earth who should have it.

Don't, Allen told himself. You know how this ends. It ends with you on the curb.

"One week," Allen heard himself say.

Chris went still.

"One week. Five sessions. Six a.m., because that's when the courts are mine and because if you can't make six a.m. you can't make anything.

You pay me for the week, not the year — I'm not taking a year off a stranger, I don't care how much you've got.

And at the end of the week, I decide. Not you.

If I think you're a phase, you're gone, and no amount of cash changes it.

If I think you'll pay the real price—" Allen shrugged, like it cost him nothing, like his pulse hadn't done something stupid the second he'd said one week "—then maybe we talk about eight. "

"Six a.m." Chris was grinning again, but it was the new grin, the cracked-open one, no strategy in it. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow. Bring water and don't be late. I lock the gate at 6:01 and I don't unlock it."

"You won't have to." Chris stuck his hand through the gap in the net this time, and Allen shook it, and the guy's grip was good, callused in the old places a racket leaves, soft everywhere a hard life would've left marks.

"Thank you. Seriously. You have no idea what this—" He stopped himself.

Pulled the grin back down over it. "Six a.m. I'll be the one already crying. "

He grabbed his logo-less bag and went, and Allen watched him cross the street — watched him wave at Yaz at the cafecito window like they were old friends, watched Yaz hand him a colada and wave off his money with a look Allen would be hearing about later — and then watched him walk half a block down and around the corner, away from the lot, to wherever he'd parked the car he clearly didn't want Allen to see.

Rich kid, Allen thought, scooping the last of the balls. Bored rich kid with a good forehand and a daddy problem, gonna ghost me by Thursday.

He was right about the daddy problem.

He was wrong about everything else, and he'd find out how wrong tomorrow, when Yaz came over to the fence with two coladas and a look on her face like Christmas had come early and said, "You know who that was, right?"

And Allen, six a.m. already circled in his head, one week already turning into a hole he wanted to fill, said, "Some rich kid named Chris."

"Some rich kid named Chris," Yaz repeated, delighted, and handed him the coffee, and did not tell him — because Yaz missed nothing and enjoyed everything, and she wanted to watch his face when he figured it out himself — that the rich kid named Chris was a Salazar, and that the tournament he wanted to earn his way into was named after his own father.