Possessive Coach

* * *She leans against the passenger side door and rolls the window down halfway. The breeze is light and comfortable, and her dark hair flies around her round, pale face in fits and starts. She pulls her hair back in a messy bun and turns her eyes over to me. “Do you always wear that?” she asks.

“Yep,” I say. “Some variation, anyway.” I look down at myself. I’m in my usual khaki slacks, running shoes, and polo shirt.

“Must be nice,” she says.

“Gets boring sometimes.” I glance at her. She changed into a pair of cut-off jean shorts and a light cream-colored top that buttons up the front. She left the top two buttons undone, showing off a hint of her skin, just enough to make me not want to look away.

“Still though, you don’t have to worry about, you know.”

“What other people think?”

She nods. “Sure.”

I smile a little. “That sort of thing matters less as you get older.”

“Does it though?” She sighs and leans her head back. “I don’t know. I feel like it only gets harder.”

“Depends. You happen to live in a place where the superficial stuff matters a lot right now.”

“Yeah? I guess so. LA isn’t exactly my scene, though.”

“How’d you end up here?”

She shrugs. “I like California. I wanted to move here. CU is the only school that gave me a scholarship though, so here I am.”

“Ah,” I say with a grin. “You’re more of a Stanford girl or what?”

She snorts. I love that little noise. She does it when she thinks something’s funny, but it’s also absurd. “Hardly. I mean, I applied and got in, but no financial help.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh, damn. You got into an amazing school but they didn’t throw any money at you.”

“I know. Rude, right?”

“Idiots. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

She laughs as I pull onto campus. A horde of kids wearing shorts and carrying backpacks, some of them pushing skateboards, a couple on roller blades, come storming over the road. We wait at a stop sign until it clears and I roll forward. I turn toward the far side of campus and park in the same lot as last time in my usual spot. I kill the engine and hop on out.

She gets out next. It occurs to me that it might be a bad thing if someone saw us coming to campus together, but I push the thought from my mind. Nothing we can do about it now.

“What about you?” she asks me as we meet up on the sidewalk and head toward the athletics building. We pass under big green leafy shade trees, the sunlight making patterns on the red and light brown brick walkway. More students pass us, some in groups of threes and fours, some wearing headphones and staring at the ground. One guy wearing a bright orange wig rolls past on a scooter and honks a horn with a grin on his face. “How’d you end up here?” she asks.

“Boring story,” I say. “I got a job at my old high school, and my first year there, the head coach got cancer. He’s okay now, but I took over his role for three seasons. I took a losing team in the first year, turned it into a winning team the next year, and turned them into the state runners-up in my third year. That’s when a few colleges scouted me and offered me a position. CU was the only place to offer me an assistant coach job, so I took it.”

“Wow,” she says, frowning at me. “You must be good at coaching.”

I shrug a little bit. “I’m good,” I say. “But I think it’s because I get what I’m supposed to do.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

We come around a bend in the sidewalk and stop outside the brick athletics building. Kids stream in and out, and we linger over near a small grass lawn where two girls lie on a white blanket, staring at a phone and laughing together.

“Coaching isn’t about coming up with amazing plays,” I say. “It’s about fostering talent. It’s about finding out what guys are good at it and making them even better at it. I was very good at figuring out where people should play and shifting them around when things weren’t working. Our playbook was pretty simple, but I had guys in the right positions, and we just had a really good team cohesion.”

“Is that what you’re doing here?” she asks.

“More or less.” I shrug a little and scan my eyes along the crowd of kids. I know I probably shouldn’t be seen chatting with Chloe. I have no good reason to do it. If someone does end up asking, I can tell people that I’m looking into how my guys are doing with her tutoring, but that’ll only fly once or twice. “As much as I can, anyway. I need to be a good judge of character.”