7. Eli
ELI
Her scent is all over the gym this morning; sweet citrus from her shampoo probably. I caught it the second she walked in, and I’ve been trying not to notice ever since. You’d think after six weeks I would be less affected by her.
Brady’s twenty minutes late. I check my phone again.
Stomach’s fucked, Coach. Sorry.
Convenient.
“He’s not coming.” Dakota’s voice cuts through my staring contest with the heavy bag. She’s already wrapped, already loose, already watching me with those stunning hazel eyes that make my throat go dry. “Is he?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“So.” She rolls her shoulders, blonde hair caught up in a knot at the back of her head, loose strands sticking to her neck. “What are we doing?”
What are we doing? Christ.
“Clinch work. Pummeling drills, dirty boxing from the over-under.”
She nods, all business, and walks past me toward the center of the mats. I make myself look at the clock. The bag. The ceiling. Anything but the line of her spine under the thin black sports bra, the dip at her lower back where her shorts ride low.
I’m forty years old. I’ve coached world champions. I’ve coached women who looked like her, fought like her. I have never once in fifteen years had to talk myself out of a hard-on before warm-ups.
Today’s the fourth time this week.
“Coach?”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
I step onto the mats and the room shrinks. That’s what she does to a space, makes it smaller. Makes everything else dim down until she’s the only thing the light’s hitting.
“Hands here.” I show her the position, my own hands rising. “Over-under. You’re going to drill the swim, then we’ll add the bump and the pummel. Slow first. Build to fast.”
“Got it.”
She moves in.
I forget how to breathe properly the second her chest presses against mine.
It’s nothing. It’s a clinch. I’ve been in ten thousand of these. The smell of her hair is right under my chin, and her bare shoulder is sliding up my arm, and her hip is bumping mine, and I am going to die on this mat.
“Like this?” Her voice is right against my collarbone.
“Lower.” I bring her elbow down, my hand wrapping her wrist. I keep my touch light. “Don’t let me get under you. There. Now swim.”
She swims her hand through and our chests slide. Her breath ghosts up my throat.
I am so fucking screwed.
“Again.”
We drill it. Twenty reps. Thirty. The first ten I can hold the line because I’m focused on the mechanics, on her elbow angle, on her hip placement, on the technical things my brain has done a million times.
By rep fifteen she’s sweating, and the sweat is making her skin tacky against mine, until all I can feel is the heat coming off her like a furnace.
“Bump now,” I tell her, and my voice has gone gravelly. “Drive your hip into mine. Use it to break the tie.”
She bumps me.
Her hipbone catches mine, and the friction drags her against me, and I’m already half-hard and now she’s pressing into me at exactly the wrong angle, and there’s nothing I can do about it except stand there and try to keep my face neutral.
“Was that right?” she asks.
“Yeah.” It comes out wrong. I clear my throat. “Yeah, that was good. Again.”
She does it again. Slower this time. Her brow pulls together a little, like she didn’t notice. And maybe she didn’t. Maybe I’m getting away with it. Maybe…
“Now resist,” I say, because I’m a goddamn masochist. “I’m going to try to break your grip. Don’t let me. Stay heavy.”
I shove into her. She holds. She’s strong as hell, and she’s planting her feet and dropping her weight, and her thigh slides between mine to anchor herself, and fuck.
Her thigh is between my legs.
She freezes.
It’s barely a hitch, half a second, the smallest catch in her breathing, but I feel it. She feels how hard I am. There’s no universe in which she doesn’t feel it, not pressed against me like this, not with how hard I’ve gone in the last sixty seconds.
I want to step back. I want to step back so badly my muscles are already twitching toward it.
I don’t. Because stepping back is admitting it. Stepping back is saying yes, that’s what you felt, and yes, it’s because of you.
So I stay. I keep my face stone. I keep my voice flat.
“Reset. Other side.”
Her chin tips up, hazel eyes finding mine, and her cheeks have gone a pretty pink color. Her tongue darts out to wet her bottom lip and I want to suck it into my mouth.
“Coach—”
“Reset, Fisher.”
She blinks. The crack in her composure seals over. She steps off me, switches her grip, comes back in on the other side, like nothing happened.
I’m grateful. I’m dying. I’m both. And both feel like hell.
We drill the other side. My heart is hammering against my ribs hard enough that I’m worried she can hear it. The grip work is rougher now, and she’s coming in harder, fighting it more, like she’s trying to outrun what just happened by exhausting it.
I let her. I match her. Because the alternative is thinking about it, and if I think about it I’ll do something I can’t take back.
“Pummel through,” I tell her. “Don’t stop. Keep flowing. The point is you never stop swimming.”
She nods, all that blonde fly-away hair sticking to her temples, and we start the continuous pummel. Hand over, hand under. Hand over, hand under. Our forearms slide. Our chests stay locked. The rhythm is hypnotic.
She gets sloppy on the seventh cycle. Her hand goes too high, and I catch her elbow to correct it, and as I’m pulling her arm back down she steps in to recover her base, too far in, and her thigh slots back between mine.
She gasps.
It’s small. Soft. The tiniest sound. But it’s a gasp, and her hand fists in the back of my T-shirt, and her forehead drops against my chest for one suspended second.
“Sorry. Sorry, Daddy, I—”
The word lands like a punch.
I go absolutely still.
She goes absolutely still.
Her fingers are still curled in my shirt. Her breath is hot against my sternum. The word is just hanging there in the air between us, and I can feel the exact second it registers for her, the way she locks up, the way her head jerks back from my chest like I’ve burned her.
“Coach. Coach. Sorry. I. Shit, I don’t know why I… That came out wrong, I…”
“Reset.”
My voice sounds foreign to my own ears.
She stares at me, lips parted, eyes wide. There’s panic behind them. What she just called me, she didn’t mean to, and now she’s looking at me like she’s waiting for me to tell her to get her stuff and get out.
I should. I should send her to a different coach. I should walk away from her right now and never put my hands on her again.
Instead I roll my shoulders, set my jaw, and say it again. Steady. Calm. Coach voice. The voice I’ve used for fifteen years.
“Reset, Fisher. Same drill. Let’s go.”
“I—”
“It’s a slip of the tongue. People get tired. Move on.”
She watches me for another long second. I keep my face carved out of granite.
I keep my hands loose at my sides. I keep my breathing even, even though my chest is doing something complicated and my cock is throbbing against the seam of my shorts and that word, Daddy, is on a loop in the back of my skull, playing over and over in her breathy, broken voice.
She nods. Slow.
“Yes, Coach.”
The correction is deliberate. She wants me to hear it.
Christ.
We finish the drill. Then we move to the cage and I have her work the fence, and I keep three feet between us at all times, and I run her until she’s gasping. Not because she needs the conditioning. Because I need her to be too tired to talk about it.
She is. By the time I call it, she’s bent at the waist, hands on her knees, sweat pooling at the hollow of her throat. She straightens up, drags her forearm across her brow, and the the way her breasts are barely contained in her sports bra nearly kills me.
“Good work,” I say.
“Yeah?” she asks.
“You held up well. The pummel transitions need polish but the fundamentals are clean.”
She nods. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the cage floor.
“Coach—”
“Don’t.”
She lifts her head. Her eyes find mine through the wet strands of hair plastered to her temples.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t apologize again. It’s done.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize.”
That stops me. My hand pauses on the strap of the medicine ball I was about to put away.
“No?”
“No.” She straightens up properly, rolls her shoulders back. There’s something different in the set of her mouth now. The panic from earlier is gone, replaced with something far more brazen. “I was going to ask if you wanted me to stay back and clean up the mats with you.”
“Brady’s on cleanup this week.”
“Brady’s not here.”
“That’s my problem.”
“Mm.” She walks past me toward the water fountain, and the way her hips sway is sinful. “Suit yourself, Coach.”
I should let her go. I should turn around, walk to my office, lock the door, and not come out until she’s left the building.
Instead I follow her.
She hears me. She doesn’t turn around. She bends at the water fountain purposefully and I have to drag my eyes off the curve of her ass and force them to the far wall.
She straightens. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Turns.
The wall is at her back. I’m closer than I should be. I don’t remember covering the distance.
“You’re staring, Coach.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.” Her chin lifts. There’s a flush high on her cheekbones that isn’t from the workout. “You’ve been staring at me since I got here.”
“Fisher.”
“Dakota.”
“Fisher.” I take half a step back. It’s not enough. I can still smell the scent of her, citrus and sweat and something underneath that’s just her. “We’re not doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Whatever this is.”
“I haven’t done anything.” Her tongue runs along her bottom lip. “I called you the wrong name. You made me run sprints. That’s all that happened.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
“Mm-hm.” She tilts her head, and the smile that ghosts across her mouth is going to ruin me. “Whatever you say, Daddy.”
My hand is on the wall above her shoulder before my brain catches up to what my body’s doing.
She gasps. Soft, that same broken little sound from the mats. My other hand comes up beside her head. Caged. Both of us are breathing too hard.
I do not touch her. My hands stay on the wall. My chest hovers an inch from hers. My mouth is right there, close enough to feel her exhale on my lips, and I don’t close the gap.
“Say that again.”
It’s a warning. It’s supposed to be a warning. It comes out like a dare.
Her eyes widen, pupils swallowing the hazel. Her tongue darts out again and this time it almost touches my chin.
“Daddy.”
I press forward. Not my mouth. My hips. Just enough that she feels the hard, unmistakable line of me against the soft give of her belly through her shorts. Her whole body shudders.
“Oh.” Her head tips back against the wall. Her throat is right there. Pulse hammering. “Oh, fuck, Coach…”
“This is what you wanted?”
“I—”
“To have me acknowledge that you can make me lose my mind?”
“I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did.” I press a fraction harder. Her fingers fly up and fist in the front of my shirt and she does not pull me closer and she does not push me away. She just holds on. “Look at you. You’re shaking.”
“You’re shaking too.”
I am. I can feel it in my forearms, the fine tremor running through me from holding myself off her. Every inch of my body is screaming at me to drop my mouth to hers, to slide my palm between her legs, to find out if she’s as wet as I think she is.
I don’t.
“This isn’t happening, Fisher.”
“It’s happening right now.”
“This.” I drag my eyes down from her parted lips, to her flushed throat, to her chest heaving against the inch of air I’m keeping between us and back up again. “Goes no further. Are we clear?”
She makes a small sound. Almost a whimper. Her hips give the tiniest roll forward, seeking pressure I’m not giving her.
“Are we clear, Dakota?”
“Yes, Coach.”
“Good girl.”
The words slip before I can catch them and her eyes flutter shut and her grip on my shirt goes white-knuckled. I have to step back right now or I am going to do something that ends my career and her trust in the same breath.
I step back.
The air between us rushes in cold. She stays against the wall, chest rising and falling, mouth open, looking thoroughly undone. Her thighs are pressed together and there’s a visible damp patch over her cunt.
Fuck.
“Hit the shower.” My voice has gravel in it. “A cold one.”
“Coach—”
“Go, Fisher. Now.”
She pushes off the wall. Walks past me on legs that don’t quite seem to be holding her up properly. At the edge of the mats, she pauses and looks back over her shoulder, hair half-fallen out of its knot, mouth swollen from where she kept biting her lip.
“Yes, Daddy.”
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone in the empty gym with a hard-on that won’t quit and the dawning, horrifying certainty that I am going to lose this fight.
I just don’t know how badly, yet.