Chapter 20 #2
"Lex, I can't." Her voice was almost inaudible.
"I have never done anything like this. I have never been with a woman publicly.
I have spent my entire adult life hiding who I am, and the one time I didn't, the one time I let someone in, it cost me everything.
My job. My reputation. Four years of my career. I can't go through that again."
"This isn't the same situation. Sara was a mistake who wasn’t there for you in the end when you needed her most. We are not a mistake." Lex's voice was fierce, steady.
"It doesn't matter what we are to us. It matters what we look like to everyone else.
A forty-eight-year-old coach sleeping with her twenty-eight-year-old player.
The headlines write themselves. The league will investigate.
The media will tear us apart. And even if none of that happens, even if Astoria supports us and the team doesn't care and the league looks the other way, I will always be the coach who slept with her player.
That will follow me for the rest of my career. "
"And I will always be the player you were afraid to love publicly."
Lex watched her flinch, watched the tears she'd been fighting break through, watched one track down her cheek and then another.
Mara didn't wipe them away. She sat behind her desk with her hands clasped and her tears falling and her expression shattered and she was the most beautiful and the most heartbreaking thing Lex had ever seen.
Lex wanted to stand up and walk around the desk and take Mara's face in her hands and kiss the tears off her cheeks.
She wanted to gather her up and hold her and tell her everything would be okay.
The impulse was physical, a pull in her chest, a gravitational force that had been dragging her toward this woman since the day she'd walked into this office and Goldie had greeted her with a wagging tail.
She didn't move. She couldn't. Because holding Mara right now would be accepting the terms, agreeing to the secret, consenting to a life lived in the shadows, and Lex had spent too many years in the shadows already.
Too many years not being as open as she wished in field hockey's politely homophobic corridors.
She had been keeping a private tally of what the secret cost her.
The practice mornings when she had to look at Mara the same way she looked at the goal crease — strategically, functionally, without hunger.
The team dinner where Mara had cracked a joke and Lex had laughed and then immediately cut herself off, scanning faces, recalibrating.
The morning Elise had clocked the mark on her collarbone and Lex had said gym equipment and hated herself for it.
Small prices, each one. But they added up. Every day they added up.
And then yesterday. The sponsor event in the lobby after the game.
A woman from the sportswear company, tall and striking and openly flirtatious, had put her hand on Lex's arm and leaned in close and said, "We should get dinner while I'm in town.
Just the two of us." And Lex had glanced across the room at Mara, who was watching from beside the trophy case with a glass of sparkling water and an expression that was perfectly, devastatingly neutral.
Mara couldn't walk over. Couldn't claim her.
Couldn't do anything but stand there and watch a stranger touch the woman she loved, because doing otherwise would have been far too open.
Lex had smiled at the woman and said, "I appreciate the offer, but I'm seeing someone," and the woman had said, "Lucky person.
They should bring you to nicer events," and walked away.
Mara had turned back to her conversation with the assistant coaches without acknowledging a single thing that had just happened.
They hadn't discussed it. They would never discuss it. That was the deal.
That was the deal, and Lex was done with it.
She had come to Phoenix Ridge to stop hiding, and she could not, would not, go backward. Not even for the woman she loved.
"I can't do this in secret anymore," Lex said. Her own voice was breaking now, cracking along the same fault line that ran through the center of her chest. "I love you, Mara. But I won't be your secret. I won't be a secret you're ashamed of."
"I'm not ashamed of you." The words were fierce, desperate, torn from Mara's throat. "I have never been ashamed of you."
"Then stand next to me. In the light. Where everyone can see."
Mara's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No words came out. Her face was a ruin: tears, anguish, the desperate, silent plea of a woman who wanted to give Lex what she was asking for and could not move past the wall of fear that stood between wanting and doing.
The silence stretched. Five seconds. Ten. An eternity compressed into the quiet space between Mara's desk and the chair where Lex sat with her heart breaking.
Lex stood up. Her legs felt hollow. Her chest was a cavity filled with broken glass.
She looked at Mara, at the tears on her face, at the anguish in her expression begging Lex not to go, and she loved her so fiercely that the love itself was a wound, deep and bleeding and impossible to stitch closed.
"When you're ready to stop hiding," Lex said, "you know where to find me."
She turned and walked out of the office.
Her hand found the door handle and she pulled it open and stepped into the corridor and the door closed behind her with a soft click that sounded like a gunshot.
She walked. Down the corridor. Past the locker room where her gear bag sat in her stall.
Past the gym where she'd told her friends about the woman she loved.
Past the banner that read PHOENIX RIDGE VALKYRIES — INAUGURAL SEASON in gold letters on a purple background.
Through the lobby with its trophy cases and its posters and the front desk where the receptionist said "Have a good evening, Lex" and Lex said "Thanks" in a voice that sounded like someone else's.
Out the front doors into the Phoenix Ridge afternoon. The salt air hit her face. The sun was blinding. Her vision blurred with the tears she hadn't let fall in Mara's office.
She made it to her truck in the parking lot before she broke.
She sat behind the wheel with her forehead pressed against the steering wheel and her hands gripping the leather and she cried.
Not the quiet, controlled crying of someone managing their grief.
The ugly, body-shaking sobs of someone whose heart had just been ripped out by the roots, and the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that Mara hadn't done it.
Lex had done it to herself. She had walked away from the woman she loved because the woman she loved was too afraid to love her back in the open, and the righteousness of the decision did nothing, absolutely nothing, to ease the devastation of it.
She sat in the truck and cried until the tears ran dry and the afternoon light shifted from gold to amber and the parking lot emptied around her.
Through the windshield the ocean stretched, grey-blue and indifferent, the waves breaking against the shore in the same rhythm they always did, as if nothing had changed.
As if the world hadn't just cracked down the middle.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at it through swollen eyes. A text from Elise: How did it go?
She couldn't answer. She set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and pressed her forehead back against the steering wheel and closed her eyes and thought about Mara.
About the tears on Mara's face. About the way Mara's mouth had opened and closed without producing the words that would have changed everything.
About the way Mara had looked at her while her mouth stayed silent.
She had done the right thing. She believed that with a certainty that lived in her bones. She had asked for what she deserved and refused to accept less. That was strength. That was self-respect.
It was also the loneliest feeling she had ever known.