“Tell me why you’re here,” I demanded.
She was breathing heavily, fighting the desire I knew she had for me. It was shooting sparks at me from her honeyed eyes.
“My dad needs you,” she forced herself to say. She didn’t want to, you could tell. It was so not in her to cave, to succumb. She hated it. She didn’t want to have to ask for anything. She wanted to demand it and have it given to her.
“Your dad,” I said, trying with every fiber in my body not to touch her. My hands were on either side of her head, my wide stance surrounding her body, and that was as close as I could get while we talked.
“There’s a good chance the board will let him go if he loses you,” she said, and I heard the wobble in her voice. The emotion. The sadness for her dad.
It took me more seconds than it should have to process all her words and what they meant. Doubt, first, because Coach Crandall was known for his dogged approach and eeking out the best from players who shouldn’t have any talent. Then, anger came next, because it meant she’d told him I was declaring.
“You told him?” It was the anger that curled from my lips instead of the love I’d wanted to state just minutes before.
She looked down in guilt. Then her eyes met mine, defiant again. “He was taunting me about you. About us.”
“No way he knew about us,” I all but snarled.
“He did. I guess your pals Kelly and Murray told him.”
“Hell no, they didn’t.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“Maleena, I can guarantee whatever they told him, it was still all guesswork until you confirmed it for him.”
She had the graciousness to blush, because she realized it was probably true. Her dad had tricked her into confirming something he might have suspected.
“So, you just threw back at him that I was leaving as a way of, what…getting even for him knowing about us?”
My anger was burning out, being replaced with sadness. It had to have hurt him. Disappointed him. He’d been the best coach I’d ever had. Matching my talent with his drive for perfection.
I stepped back. Conflicted. The range of emotions that had run through me in the course of a couple of minutes were more than I was equipped to handle.
“He wanted me to come talk to you. To ask you to stay one more year,” she said.
My eyes flew to her face, shock filling me. “He wanted you to have sex with me so I’d stay?”
For three years, we’d kept our relationship a secret because she’d insisted if he knew, he’d pretty much kill me on the field. Now, she was saying he’d basically sent her here to win me back. I shook my head. No. No fucking way. He wouldn’t pimp out his daughter. That wasn’t Coach.
“No. God. He’s not an asshole like—” She stopped herself before she could complete the sentence. Not an asshole like me.
My heart twisted and turned in my chest. Gripped so tight it felt like it was turned to ash. I backed away farther. Her words icier than any cold shower I could have taken. Her words burning like frostbite at all my extremities and slowly tearing their way into my chest until nothing was left but a frozen muscle.
Maleena
MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABY
“Well I, I wanna kiss you baby
While we're standin' underneath the mistletoe.”
Performed by Christina Aguilera w/ Dr. John
Written by Moore / Baxter
Ty backed away from me with a look on his face that was equal parts disgust and hurt. I’d hurt him. In a way I didn’t think Ty was capable of being hurt. And yet, I should have known. He’d told me once, when we’d been tucked up in his bed after a night of passion, after a day of no clothes and Froot Loops because it was all he’d had in his apartment. He’d told me his biggest fear about being a successful football player was someone using him for his fame and fortune. That someone would have sex with him just to achieve something. Their own fame. Maybe someone crying rape. Or somehow forcing a paternity test for a baby he hadn’t fathered. Ruining his career with charges he’d never shake even if they were false.
At the time, I’d brought him out of the serious moment by telling him he wasn’t going to make it to the pros. It had worked.He’d smiled and tackled me, but we’d both known the truth. He would make it, and his fear was a legitimate one. There were a million and one people out there who would love to have a piece of his pie. Who would stop at nothing to have a piece of it.
Now, I was here, basically saying I was supposed to have sex with him to get him back. To get him to go back to my dad and UTK.
“That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” I told him instead of apologizing. We both did it a lot, deflecting instead of saying I’m sorry. Assuming the other person knew what we really meant.
He just stared, his emotions having been shuttered behind his game face. The look he had when fighting the enemy. That look wormed its way beneath the barricade I’d tried to put up because I knew the truth about Ty. I knew, behind the bravado and the snarky attitude and the ego, there was a little boy who had always been compared to an uncle he hadn’t known. To someone he couldn’t possibly have ever lived up to because that man had died.
I took a step toward him.
“I just meant Dad needs you, and I wanted you to know that before you made a decision you couldn’t take back.”
“So, you’re only here for him.”
Was that the case? Was I truly only there for my father? God. Probably not. I missed Ty. I missed his crappy attitude and his ego. I missed his hands and his lips. I missed the passion I felt when I was with him. I missed how much he understood me. How he didn’t look at me and see a girl pretending to know football, but, instead, saw a woman who breathed football.
I took a shaky breath and took a leap I didn’t even know I’d come to make until I was there, looking at him. The knowledge winged its way from my brain to my heart to my toes and back. I loved him. More than I should have. More than I thought I was capable of loving someone.
“I came for him,” I said quietly. “But I’d like to stay for us.”
“What?”
We stared at each other, and I finally said, “Don’t make me say it again. You know it’s too painful.”
He smiled that goddamn lazy smile. The smile a million other people, along with me, thought was sexy. He closed the distance he’d put between us, wrapping his arms around my waist so I was tight up against his body. His body with too few clothes. The body that always caused mine to burst into flames.
Then, he was kissing me with the ferocity he’d always used and matched my own. We weren’t tender, because we weren’t tender people. We were passion and heat and savagery. We were tearing-clothes, shoving-against-doorways, biting kind of people. Until I’d met Ty…until I’d had sex with Ty…I’d been afraid to let all of that out of me. I thought the guys I was with would have said I was a slut, or a whore, or that my passion would simply be misconstrued. But Ty had let me show every ounce of my strength and desire and met it with his own.