Chapter 3
Caleb
Coach's office smells like Slim Jims and big dick energy.
There's a mini fridge humming in the corner, a wall of framed teams going yellow at the edges, and a man behind the desk who decided exactly who I am before I said a word.
He doesn't tell me to sit. So I don't. I've learned the chair is a trap.
You sit, you settle, you start talking, and talking is how guys like me end up backed in a corner.
"You know why I did it that way, right?” he asks me.
"Public? Yeah. So the team polices it for you. Cheaper than a babysitter."
His eyes flick up from the folder. Coaches hate it when you turn out smarter than the report says you are. It wrecks the story they've already written in their heads, the one where I'm muscle with a temper and nothing else underneath.
"Three transfers in four years, Adams. Everybody keeps handing you a fresh start, and you keep burning them to the ground." He says it tired, not mad. Mad, I can work with. Tired is harder.
I shrug, because I don't have anything for him.
I can barely explain myself to myself, let alone to a stranger with a whistle.
The truth, for whatever it's worth, is that I don't decide to burn anything down.
It just goes up, and I'm always the one standing closest to the match. Guess I was just born that way.
"No answers, huh." He nods like that proves a point.
"Good news is, I'm not giving you a fresh start.
Fresh starts are for guys who've earned the benefit of the doubt.
I'm giving you a last chance." He shoves a folder across the desk.
"You want on my ice, you give me weekly conduct reviews, academic checks, and anger management on Tuesdays and Fridays.
This is a non-negotiable. You miss one, my daughter writes it down, and what she records is the paper trail that follows you the rest of your career. However long that ends up being."
I pick up the folder. It’s a cheap manila thing, couldn't weigh any more than two ounces, yet somehow it sits in my hand like a brick. I've held my whole future in one of these before. Different state, different desk, same weight. It never gets lighter, no matter how many times you carry it.
Here's the part nobody in that office gets to know.
I want it. The league, the contract, the one thing my old man swore up and down I'd never have the discipline to earn.
This dump of a program in the armpit of Nevada is the last open door I've got left, and we both know it.
That's the real leash. Coach Dixon's just the guy holding the end.
"One more thing." He waits until my hand's on the doorknob.
They always save the real message for the door.
"There's a reason my team doesn't know Jasmine, and it's that she and I both like it that way.
She handles your paperwork, and you keep it professional.
" He lets it sit there a beat. "That is not a suggestion. Do we understand each other?”
I look him dead in the eye, because a man holding my whole life in a folder needs to believe me. "Understood."
I'm pretty sure it's the first lie I've told since I landed in Nevada.
Conference Room B has one table, six chairs, and a poster about academic integrity with a faded eagle peeling off the wall. It's seven forty-five on a Tuesday, and I'm reporting in like a good little felon, which is fine. I've been worse things than punctual.
She's already set up. Spine straight, sleeves shoved up to her elbows, papers laid out in columns so square they look machine-cut. Conduct agreement. Class schedule. Counseling schedule. A pen sitting perpendicular at the top of the stack like a blade at a fancy place setting.
"You don't believe in saving trees?" I chuckle. “Isn’t this a digital world now?”
My snarky charm usually gets me something from the ladies, but not from this one. Nothing. Not even a look.
Half the lights are off in the room. The back half.
That's the bank with the tick in it, the one that's been buzzing since I sat down, the kind of small noise that makes me want to climb up and rip it out of the ceiling with my bare hands.
She's sitting under the quiet half. I'd bet my last dollar she has never once sat under the loud half.
Nobody else in this building would catch that. I do.
"Sign where the tabs are," she says. No hello or anything, but that’s cool. Hellos are overrated.
I read it first. Every page. You read what you sign, that's rule one, learned the hard way. And I can tell the slower I go, the more it gets under her skin. She cracks when I linger on page four.
"It says what my father said it says."
"Your father says a lot of things."
“It’s clear.”
“Are you in a rush? Somewhere to be?” I smirk, but she doesn’t take my jest well. In fact, I think I’ve just royally pissed her off.
“One more incident and you're done. No appeal." She presses the page flat with two fingers, like it might get up and walk off. "He won't give you another chance, and I want you to understand that I won't either."
"Noted, Dixon."
"It's in section three. And don't call me Dixon."
"It's your name."
"It's his name." Her response comes out fast. Unplanned. I watch her hear it about a half second after I do, and watch some door behind her eyes start to swing open, then lock again. "Initial the bottom of five and six."
Now I’m curious. So there's a spunky person in that beautiful shell. Locked up tight, but in there.
I reach for the pen. So does she.
My fingers come down on hers. Cold metal underneath, warm hand in the middle, one full second.
A second is longer than people give it credit for.
Her hand goes dead still under mine. Not even a flinch.
It’s like I’m the hunter and she’s the prey.
Her whole body is holding its breath at once, trying its best not to be caught.
What’s interesting is I understand that one.
It's what your nervous system does when the only safe move left on the board is to disappear while standing completely still.
I learned it under a different roof a long time ago, and I have never once seen it on another living person.
Until right now. The coach's daughter is using the exact survival trick I thought belonged to me alone. I pray it’s not for the same reasons.
I pull back first.
"Sorry."
"It's fine."
But her tone is a good two octaves flat of fine.
She clicks the ballpoint pen and hands it to me grip-first, careful, like a scalpel she'd rather I not cut myself on.
And while I sign my name eleven separate times, she lifts a paper clip off the corner of the stack and works it under the table, down where she's decided I can't see.
Bending it out of shape and back. Out and back. Slow.
She has a lot of interesting tics.
So I watch.
Catching what nobody else catches is the only thing I've ever been good at that isn't hockey.
My whole life, it's been a survival skill.
Where are the hands, where are the exits, who in this room is about to turn into a problem?
This is the first time it has ever felt like a gift instead of a sentence.
"We're done." She squares the stack perfectly. “Next Tuesday. Seven forty-five."
"You said that already."
"I repeat things for people with documented judgment issues."
The laugh's out before I can kill it. It’s loud and ugly, but I can’t take it back. She doesn’t immediately respond until I see her chin lift. And for about a quarter of a second, right before she locks it down, the corner of her mouth moves.
That's all.
But hell, that’s all I needed.
She leaves first. The paper clip stays behind on the table, bent into nothing, finished. There is no good reason on God's earth for what I do next.
It goes in my pocket.
It’s a hot Nevada night, and I’m chilling in my new apartment, if you want to be generous about the word. New guys and freshmen don’t get to live in the Ice House with the other players, so this is where I will continue to lay my head.
I’m sitting among three boxes that I have no intention of unpacking, a mattress on the floor, and a phone charging next to it. Home is a place you decorate. This is a place where I wait.
I lie there and run back through the day, same as every night. The hit after the whistle has cost me currency with my new coach, my captain, my new teammates…but particularly with Jasmine. Is this even worth trying to make work?
Then I remember the pen.
Her hand still under mine.
And my dick remembers too.
At 11:58 pm, my cell phone lights up the ceiling. There’s a calendar invite.
WEEKLY CONDUCT REVIEW.
Recurring. Tuesdays, 7:45 a.m.
Conference Room B
Organizer: Dixon, J.
I hit accept before the screen even thinks about going dark. It’s the fastest I've agreed to anything in my whole life, and I once agreed to a fight before the other guy finished the sentence.
The phone buzzes again. She's edited the invite. One line added to the notes field, and I swear I can hear it in her voice, flat, two octaves under fine.
Bring your own pen.
I smile and lie back on my shitty mattress with a bent paper clip on the nightstand and exactly one strike left in my entire career. Yet the only thing on my mind now is anticipation for Tuesday.
When the phone buzzes one more time, I’m still grinning when I grab it, because some idiot part of me wants it to be her again.
But it isn't.
It’s a text from Coach Dixon.
Coach: Remember what I said.
Yo, is there a freaking camera in here? Does he know I’m in here smiling like an idiot over his damn daughter?
I mean, the text could mean nothing. Coaches are always trying to be intimidating, but I’m not stupid. His warning could very well mean he was standing close enough this morning to clock the exact half second my hand stayed on his daughter's and didn't move when it should have.
I look at the paper clip on the nightstand. Bent into nothing. Sitting there like a damning piece of evidence.
One strike left in my whole career, and I just spent my first quiet night in Nevada lying awake over the one girl on this entire planet I’m not allowed to want.
Oh boy…I’m fucked.