Hunter didn’t know how to handle this moment, stripped bare and so unvarnished. He nodded once, harsh and abrupt, and told himself that was enough.
“I’ll say your goodbyes for you,” Jack said gently, swallowing hard as he turned for his classroom door. “Take care of yourself, Hunter.”
Which was when Hunter finally understood what was happening.
“Jack,” he said, before the other man could open that door, before he could think too much about what he could or couldn’t say. “Why do you think I’m here?”
Jack turned back to face him. “Uh. You’re leaving? I’m touched you came in person, really—”
“I’m not leaving,” Hunter barked out, unduly aggressive, because he was afraid that anything else would turn unacceptably soft in a hurry. “I want your job.”
It was Jack’s turn to stare.
“My...?” He half turned toward the classroom, but then stopped and shook his head. Then smiled, wide. “You don’t mean my math classes.”
“No,” Hunter said quietly. And his own smile felt different then, as if it was new. As if it belonged to that man Jack had described, who Hunter didn’t recognize as himself. But he wanted to be that man, after all these years. At long last. He wanted it badly, more badly than he wanted to admit. For these kids. For Zoe, if she ever found her way back to him. Maybe even for himself. “I don’t mean math.”
* * *
He was headed toward the school exit some time later when he heard the sound of running feet behind him, hard against the old linoleum flooring. He turned, and realized as he did, as he identified the figure hurtling toward him at breakneck speed, that he probably should have expected this.
“Listen, kid—” he started, but Aaron was vibrating and out of control. Pissed, Hunter saw, and utterly reckless with it.
“I don’t give a shit what you do,” the kid threw at Hunter, getting in his face, his own twisted with wild emotion. Loss, Hunter thought, and disappointment. He’d seen them often enough when people looked at him. He knew them well. “It’s not like I was a fan of yours before you showed up, and now? It turns out you’re even more of a loser than I thought you were.”
“Aaron.” He told himself to be gentle. Kind.
Both things he wasn’t any good at, of course, or he’d have been someone else.
“The truth is, you suck,” the kid gritted out, and Hunter recognized that, too. The howl of pain beneath the angry words. The hurt that spoke of other, harder abandonments. Of much deeper losses, the kind that never quite went away. “We didn’t need you showing up here, trying to make yourself feel better about your own shitty life, driving your slick car around and acting like you’re better than everyone else—”
“Are you talking about football? Because I actually am better than everyone else. In Edgarton anyway. That’s not my ego, kid. That’s fact.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’ve been there,” Hunter said, studying Aaron’s flushed face, his bunched-up hands at his sides, that shattered look in his dark eyes. It was like looking in some kind of twisted mirror, and it confirmed that he’d made the right decision here. That no matter what happened with all the rest of the things he had in motion, this was the right thing. This kid, so desperate to be a man and so uncertain how to go about it, was why. He mattered. This mattered. “I can’t recommend it.”
Aaron said something even more foul, and Hunter laughed. Gentle and kind wouldn’t have worked on him at any point during his downward spiral, and he’d been raised on a steady diet of privilege and financial support. Why try them on a kid like Aaron, who’d probably assume they were a trick?
Besides, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know how.
“Aaron,” he said sharply then. “Shut up.” Aaron glared at him, fury and attitude sparking from his skin, clouding up the air around them like a testosterone mushroom cloud, but Hunter saw beneath it. “I’m your new coach. Officially.”
The principal had practically wet himself at the notion, assuring Hunter that they could expedite his hiring through the Edgarton School Board, such as it was, especially as Hunter was perfectly happy not only to take the lowest salary they could offer him by law, but to donate three times that amount back into the school system—to the brand-new athletic budget.
Because it had occurred to him after Zoe left that he could actually do what he’d told Jason he was going to do only to mess with the other man’s head, to push him where they’d needed him to go. It had occurred to him that more than that, he wanted to do it. That he might even be good at it.