Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
“I meant what I said, you know.” I have the back of my head pressed against Adrian’s thigh, and when I swivel to look up at him, the San Francisco skyline fills the space beyond his shoulders. “You’re a brilliant coach.”
Adrian laughs and elbows me. “Thanks, Kath. You’re a fantastic athlete.”
“No, I mean it.” I grab his hand, forcing him to make eye contact.
I should have told him this a while ago and I don’t want what I’m saying to be lost in jokes or passion.
“I’ve never had meaningful progress this quickly before.
You’re probably one of the best coaches I’ve ever worked with.
Certainly, the best possible person for the junior national team. ”
Something unreadable passes over his face. “There’s no way that’s true.”
“That you’re not the best person for the job?”
“That—” he begins, but cuts himself off. “That I’m one of the best coaches you’ve ever had.”
He’s staring at the horizon now.
“You don’t believe me?” I know we had a rocky start. I ignored his advice and, possibly worse, actively questioned his knowledge and abilities. “I’m sorry that I haven’t said this before. I’ve known it for a while. Sometimes it takes me some time to admit when I’m wrong.”
Adrian shakes his head, eyebrows pulling together as he finally looks at me again.
“I appreciate you saying that, but no, that’s not it.
It’s okay that you took some time to warm up to me.
Besides, I made some mistakes early on, too.
It was trial and error and some of that didn’t land exactly as I’d hoped. ”
“What is it, then?” I ask.
Adrian goes back to trailing his fingers across my skin, working a thumb into the muscles at the front of my shoulder—the ones that are always tender to the touch.
“Nothing,” he says. “Everything is fine.”
But it’s not. I can tell by the flex of his jaw and the way he’s been avoiding my eye contact. I look up at his chin, mentally rehashing our conversation and trying to remember the moment where he tensed.
“You don’t believe you’re a great coach?
” I ask. It seems impossible that he wouldn’t see this for himself.
He’s always treated me with so much confidence—too much sometimes.
Even when I questioned everything about him and his strategies, he looked me dead in the eyes and told me to trust him.
Surely, he knows that he’s good. Great, even.
He wouldn’t have applied for the junior national team otherwise.
“I do well for myself,” he says. “Certainly, with my team. With you, too, apparently.”
“And you’ll do remarkable things with the juniors. We’ve got some serious contenders to medal at Junior Worlds next year. I know you’ll be the right person to help them get there. They’ll be lucky to have you—if you decide you want it.”
Adrian’s expression flickers again. He pats my shoulder. “We should head back before your muscles get too cold.”
Then, without waiting for me to move, he slides my head off his lap and stands, brushing sand off his legs as he forges toward the waterline.
“What is happening?” I ask as Adrian pushes his scull into the water, waves gently lapping against his shins. “Are you mad?”
“No. I can’t get mad about a job I’m not going to get.”
Before I can respond, he’s squatting into his seat and paddling away.
I hurry after him, wet-launching my own boat and trailing after his strokes.
I’m not letting this go. Not only because of my own curiosity, but more importantly because I need an answer to the evaluation question about Adrian’s interest in the job.
Shouting at him about this across the water is probably not my best move, though.
So, I wait until we’ve traversed back across the bay and our oars are resting on the docks.
Then I say, “I’m sure you’re going to get the job, Adrian. I mean, I probably shouldn’t tell you what I’ve written in your evaluation so far, but it’s very positive. One could say it’s glowing.”
“Thank you.” He yanks his boat out of the water and hoists it onto a shoulder, effortlessly carrying it uphill toward the boathouse.
I can’t carry my boat quite as fast, so I have to wait until we’ve both released our sculls into their berths before I can add, “I think you’d enjoy it, too.
You’d love the challenge. You’d get to work with athletes who are more serious and committed.
Best of all, you’d be working alongside a team.
You’d have people to bounce ideas off of, people to make decisions with you. ”
It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Adrian could have handled Peter’s injury and Rohan nearly quitting without me. Still, I could tell he enjoyed having someone on his team. I’d like him to have support like that permanently. Even after we part ways.
He frowns down at the hull of his boat, then smooths a thumb across the surface. “I must have dinged this on the beach,” he says.
It’s the tiniest scratch—one that would sit above the waterline. Still, Adrian doesn’t say anything else, just trudges off toward the locker where he keeps the boat repair materials and returns with a tub of epoxy, sandpaper, and patches.
He’s avoiding me. Obviously. Maybe I should stop pushing because it’s not my place.
We’re not really together. We don’t have a future.
It’s not like him taking the job would give us one, either.
My training center is about two thousand miles away from the junior development center.
If anything, Adrian taking this job would solidify what I already know—we have no real future.
Rather, I want to push because I think this job would make him happy. And because I believe in him.
“What do you think, though?” I ask. “About having a team?”
Tongue clenched between his teeth, Adrian finishes using his sandpaper to buff out a small area around the scratch. “I don’t see the point in thinking about it if I’m not going to get it.”
“Why are you so convinced of that?”
He doesn’t answer, just tucks his sandpaper away and pulls out a popsicle stick, which he uses to brush on a thin coat of epoxy.
I let out an impatient sigh. This might be the most infuriating conversation I’ve ever had with the man, and I have no idea why. “If you’re so set against it, why not withdraw?”
“I’m not set against it,” Adrian protests. “I just—I don’t want to withdraw. It would crush my mom. Staying in the running is my way of doing this one thing for my dad.”
I tilt my head, still not understanding.
“For the last few years before he died,” he explains quietly, “I stopped trying to make him proud. I shut down the conversation every time he brought up anything to do with rowing or my career. I disappointed him. And now he’s gone and I need to at least put in the effort to do things that would have made him proud.
Even if I ultimately fail, I’ll have done what I should have been doing all along. ”
“I see,” I say.
“Do you?” he asks, sounding genuinely curious. “You seem so…blissfully unconcerned by your dad’s feelings. I mean that in a good way.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But it wasn’t always like that.”
It took me years to get over the crush of disappointment every time I was supposed to see my dad, but something came up and he said he couldn’t.
Eventually, I started fighting back against the idea of visiting with him at all, but only because I wanted to stop feeling that way, not because I didn’t care.
As a junior, every time I finished a race or stood on a podium, for just a moment, I’d wonder what he’d say if he were there.
Even after all the times he wasn’t. I’ve had about two decades to learn to separate my emotions from my dad’s choices. Adrian has had only a couple of years.
Adrian nods, but he’s still frowning. Maybe I’ve taken all of this too far. The whole reason he never dated a rower before was because he didn’t want to be pressured by someone he cared about.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know you don’t want me to push you. I’ll drop it.”
Adrian stares at the popsicle stick clenched in his fist. “But you wish—You would rather that I had a better job.”
“No,” I say, angry with myself for eliciting this reaction.
I grab Adrian’s hand, popsicle stick and all, pinning it in mine so he can’t escape the sincerity of what I have to say.
“Absolutely not. I don’t care about your job description or your team’s medal count or whatever the hell else.
I like you because you are an enthusiastic, caring, and supportive man and that will be true no matter what title you have. ”
He smiles and looks up at me and my heart flutters with it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I let go. “Sorry I took your high-tech tool hostage there.”
“I kind of liked it,” he says with a wink, before hunching back over.
Even though he’s focusing on his patch and this conversation absolutely could have gone better than it did, my chest feels reassuringly light.
Not only because of the way Adrian looked at me, but also because we had a disagreement that didn’t leave me feeling like I want to flop on a couch and sob into a balled-up napkin.
Behind me, I hear a shuffle of footsteps. I glance around to find Rohan peeking at us from behind an open bay, concern apparent in his brown eyes.
My eyes cut to Adrian’s hunched shoulders, but thankfully he’s still absorbed in his task.
Trying to keep it that way, I murmur something about needing a calorie deficit and forge toward Rohan’s concerned face.
When I reach him, I tap his elbow and angle him wordlessly toward the stairs at the side of the boathouse, out of sight and earshot from his coach.
“How much did you hear?” I ask when I’ve planted myself in a seat a few steps above his eyeline.
Rohan remains standing, arms crossed, head tilted. Unnecessarily defiant. “He’s leaving?”
Well, I guess that answers that. “Probably not. But if he were, would it be so bad?”
“I just moved up boats.” Rohan’s voice is barely more substantial than a whine. “It’s hard enough with him around. I can’t do it without him.”
“I realize this isn’t ideal but—”
My words snag as Rohan’s eyes stab me accusingly.
“I wouldn’t have even agreed to move up if I’d known I had to do it without my coach,” he says.
My jaw clenches as I appraise him, realization setting in. If there’s something holding Adrian back, maybe it’s this. Maybe he knows how his kids would react and, even if it’s completely unfair, he’s willing to sacrifice his own future to avoid temporary pain for them.
“What grade are you in?” I ask.
Rohan’s forehead crinkles. When I don’t elaborate, he says, almost hesitantly, “I’ll be a senior in the fall.”
“A senior. So, you graduate next summer. And then what’ll happen in September?”
“I’m hoping to get into UC San Diego with early admissions, but I’ll have to see.”
“And are you trying to make the varsity team at UCSD?”
Rohan lifts a shoulder. “I haven’t decided yet.”
I let out a long breath. “Right. So, let’s say Adrian doesn’t take this job. And, for a while, everyone is happy and together. Then, in less than a year from now, you’ll leave for college, right? But Adrian will stay.”
Rohan’s eyes slip to his shoes.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sure you already know this, but your coach cares about your feelings a lot. Maybe even more than he cares about his own.”
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“That’s okay,” I say, tamping down my frustration until it dissolves.
“You get to feel your feelings, too. They are just as important as anyone else’s.
But I also hope you’ll think about his. Because there might come a day that Adrian needs your support.
When that day comes, I hope you and the other guys will rise to the occasion. ”
Rohan swallows, scuffs a toe against the ground. “I’ll think about it.”
My phone vibrates in my fanny pack. I stand and fish it out. “That’s all I can ask.”
We head back toward the bays and I click open the screen. Then nearly plow face-first into the bow of a boat.
Maxwell.
I press hard on the message, and hit the delete button. But not before I see the first few words.
Can we talk?
The words set off a montage in my mind with scenes from that day in Varese. Sitting on the dock and blinking at my freshly minted ex-boyfriend. The race. The finish—a tornado of despair and pain and ache.
“Kath?” Adrian, outside the bays, holds his hand like a visor and squints against the sun.
I shove the phone away. “Hey.”
He smiles as I reconnect with him, our eyes snapping together in easy contact. “Your hull has a scratch, too. Want me to start on it while I wait for my epoxy to dry?”
“That would be really nice,” I say, following him back into the quiet darkness of the boathouse, trying to ignore the tendril of anxiety that’s coiling around my stomach.