Chapter 19 #2
Falling in love. Lex Landry, who had arrived in Phoenix Ridge with a reputation for short-lived flings and tabloid appearances and a rotating cast of beautiful women, was falling in love with her forty-eight-year-old coach in a town that smelled like salt water and construction dust.
The words she wanted to say pressed against the back of her teeth.
Three words. Simple and true and terrifying and she swallowed them whole because saying them out loud would make this real, irreversibly real.
She had built her life on control. On the careful management of risk and exposure and vulnerability.
Saying I love you would be handing Lex a weapon that could destroy everything Mara had spent years rebuilding, and the fact that she trusted Lex not to use it made the terror worse, not better, because trusting someone that completely meant the loss would be total if it went wrong.
"Lex." Her voice cracked. "We can't go public.
You know what would happen. The media would eviscerate us.
The league would investigate. Astoria might support it or she might not, and if she doesn't, I lose my job.
Not just this job. Every job. No one hires the coach who took advantage of her player. "
"So we hide forever?"
"We hide for now. Until the season ends. Until we figure out what this is and how to protect it."
Lex's jaw tightened. The disappointment in her eyes was raw and unconcealed and Mara hated putting it there. Hated being the one who drew the lines, who built the walls, who couldn't say the three words pressing against her ribs because she was too afraid of what would happen when they escaped.
"I know this isn't what you want to hear," Mara said.
She reached out and touched Lex's face, her thumb following the hard line of her jaw.
Lex's skin was warm under her fingers. The morning stubble along her jawline was soft.
"But I need you to trust me. I'm not saying never.
I'm saying not yet. When the season ends, when the power dynamic changes, we'll figure it out.
Together. But right now, going public could destroy both of us, and I refuse to let what happened with Sara happen again. "
The mention of Sara hit home. Mara watched the frustration in Lex's eyes shift, soften, as it always did when Mara's history surfaced.
Lex knew enough. She knew about the firing, the four years of rebuilding, the cost. She didn't push when Sara's name came up.
It was one of the things Mara loved about her, the ability to be fierce and stubborn and demanding and then, in the space of a breath, gentle.
Patient. Willing to wait because she understood what the waiting was protecting.
"And if I'm tired of hiding?"
"Then let me make it worth the wait."
Mara shifted down the bed. She positioned herself between Lex's thighs and looked up at the woman who had just told her she was falling in love, and the expression on Lex's face, frustrated and wanting and softening despite itself, made Mara's chest ache with a fierceness that stole her breath.
She lowered her mouth and tasted Lex, slick and warm, the flavor she had come to crave with a hunger that surprised her.
Lex's hand found her hair and gripped, and the sound Lex made was raw and needing and beautiful.
The dominance that Lex carried so naturally in their encounters gave way to something Mara had never seen from her: vulnerability.
Her body softened under Mara's mouth, her thighs falling wider, her breathing losing its controlled rhythm and becoming ragged and desperate.
The woman who controlled every room she walked into was trembling, her jaw slack, her eyes wet, the cocky armor stripped away until what remained was just Lex, open and needing and trusting Mara to hold her there.
Mara used her tongue with a confidence that grew every time she did this.
She was learning the map of Lex's pleasure, learning which pressures made her gasp and which made her moan and which made her hips lift off the bed in helpless arcs.
She brought one hand up and slid two fingers inside and felt Lex tighten around her.
Then Lex's grip in her hair went loose. Her hands opened and dropped to the sheets, and she lay still — not passive, but chosen.
Deliberate. The restraint of someone who could pin Mara to any surface in this house choosing not to.
The intimacy of that trust made Mara's chest ache.
She worked with mouth and fingers together, tongue circling while her fingers curled and pressed, finding the spot that made Lex's abs contract and her breath catch.
Lex's hips lifted off the bed and her hand tightened in Mara's hair and the sounds she was making filled the bedroom, rough and broken and escalating, and Mara didn't stop, didn't slow, drove her higher with each stroke until Lex came with a shattered cry that echoed off the bedroom walls and her body arched like a bow drawn to breaking.
Mara kissed the inside of Lex's thigh and crawled up the bed and gathered Lex against her chest. For a moment they just breathed, tangled in sheets warm with sex and salt air, the morning light growing brighter through the curtains.
"Worth the wait?" Mara murmured against Lex's temple.
Lex laughed. Low and warm and reluctant. "Don't think that gets you out of the conversation."
"I know it doesn't." Mara pressed her lips against Lex's shoulder, tasting salt.
"But yes. Worth the wait."
Lex rolled out of bed first. She pulled on boxers and one of Mara's old tournament t-shirts, the fabric tight across her shoulders, the hem barely reaching her hips.
Mara watched from the bed and felt something shift in her chest that had nothing to do with desire.
Lex looked like she belonged here. In Mara's house.
In Mara's shirt. Padding barefoot into Mara's kitchen with the dog at her heels.
Mara pulled on a robe and followed. She found Lex standing at the stove, scrambling eggs with one hand and feeding Goldie a piece of cheese with the other.
The coffee maker was already running. Lex had figured out the settings on the second morning she'd stayed over, and the fact that she remembered Mara took it strong with no sugar made Mara's throat go tight for reasons she refused to analyze.
"You're burning those," Mara said, leaning against the counter.
"I'm not burning them. I'm giving them character." Lex prodded the eggs with a spatula. They were definitely burning.
"Character is what you call it when you can't cook."
"I'm an elite athlete. I don't need to cook.
I need someone to cook for me." Lex turned and grinned at her, and the grin was so open, so unguarded, so entirely unlike the cocky performer who strutted through practice, that Mara laughed.
A real laugh. The kind that came from the belly and surprised her because she'd forgotten what it felt like to laugh in her own kitchen with another person at seven in the morning.
Lex's face changed when Mara laughed. Softened into something raw and wondering. "You should do that more."
"Critique your cooking?"
"Laugh."
The word landed soft between them. Mara looked away, busying herself with coffee mugs.
Lex scraped the eggs onto plates and they sat at the small kitchen table with Goldie positioned equidistant between them, tail sweeping the floor, head rotating between plates with an optimism that bordered on delusional.
Lex ate in the fast, efficient way of someone who'd spent years in team dining halls. Between bites, she pulled out her phone, glanced at it, and set it face-down on the table.
"My mother called again yesterday."
Mara set her fork down. "Did you answer?"
"No." Lex pushed a piece of egg around her plate.
"She left a voicemail. Said she watched the Boston game.
Said my defensive reads have improved." A pause.
The cockiness was gone. What remained was the twenty-eight-year-old who'd spent her whole life trying to earn approval from someone who rationed it like wartime supplies.
"She can't just say she's proud. She has to make it a coaching note. "
Mara reached across the table and covered Lex's hand with hers. "You don't have to call her back."
"I know." Lex turned her hand over and laced their fingers together.
Her grip was warm and solid. "But I think I might.
Eventually. Not because she's earned it.
Because I don't want to be the person who can't forgive.
" She looked up, and her eyes were wet. "She'd like you, by the way.
You're exactly her type. Intense, terrifying, obsessed with systems."
Mara squeezed her hand. "I'm nothing like your mother."
"No." Lex's thumb traced Mara's knuckle. "You're not. That's the whole point."
They held each other while the bedroom filled with light and Goldie finally stirred on her bed, stretching and yawning and padding over to press her cold nose against Mara's hand.
Mara scratched behind the dog's ears and felt Lex's breath warm against her neck and thought about love.
About the shape of it. About how she had lived without it for so long that she'd convinced herself she didn't need it, didn't want it, was better off without the vulnerability and the risk. About how wrong she had been.
She didn't recognize herself anymore.
The woman who showered and dressed for the rink an hour later, moving through her morning routine with Lex's marks on her neck concealed beneath a turtleneck and Lex's taste still on her lips, was not the same woman who had arrived in Phoenix Ridge six months ago.
That woman had been controlled and guarded and certain of her boundaries.
That woman had not allowed anyone past the perimeter she'd built after Sara, had not let anyone close enough to leave marks, had not lain naked in the grey morning light and told someone she was trying to protect what they had.
This woman hummed while she made coffee.
This woman smiled at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and noticed, with a flush of warmth, the faint redness on her chin from going down on Lex so much.
This woman crouched to scratch Goldie behind the ears and said, "Your other mom just left.
Don't tell anyone," and then covered her mouth at the word mom as if the word were obscene.
She drove to the arena with the radio on low, not listening, the salt air warm through a cracked window, and a lightness in her chest that bordered on reckless.
The ocean was flat and silver to her left, the new arena rising white and gleaming to her right, and somewhere behind her Lex was driving the same road with her sunglasses on and her window down and the same secret burning in her chest.
She felt like a teenager. Distracted and giddy and consumed by the constant, low-grade fever of wanting someone who wanted her back.
She pulled into the coaching lot and killed the engine and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, breathing, composing, assembling the professional mask she would wear for the next twelve hours.
Coach Ellison. Head coach of the Phoenix Ridge Valkyries, disciplined and composed and above reproach.
The mask slid into place. The teenager retreated.
The coach walked into the building and no one, not a single person in the hallways or the offices or the locker room, suspected the woman underneath, the one who was terrified and elated and falling in love and had no idea how much longer she could keep the two halves of herself from colliding.