“Hey!” Coach blows her whistle. I glance over at her, breathing like the raging bull I accused Gavin of being not five minutes ago. “Both of you, get off the field and cool down!”
Seething, I jog off the pitch, through the tunnel, and into the locker room, ripping off my jersey over my head and throwing it into my locker. It’s suffocating me. Or maybe that’s the pressure of my anger, the weight of everything I’ve set on my shoulders, everything I’ve bottled up inside for too long.
I hear Gavin’s cleats on the concrete, infuriatingly calm, his gait slightly uneven. He’s in no rush. He won. He got under my skin, got me to fly off the handle and lose my cool in front of the team.
Is that so bad? a voice inside me whispers. For them to see you as a flesh-and-blood human being, someone who has limits and struggles and bad days?
The thought of that…exposure, that vulnerability, it makes me shudder. That’s not who I am here. I’m the reliable one, the always-okay one, the unstoppable optimist who takes his problems home and drowns them in twenty-seven-dollars-a-pound French cheese.
Gavin strolls in, ignoring me, heading for the toilets. He goes into a stall, pisses, then comes out. I watch his reflection in the mirror as he methodically washes his hands, eyes on his task, his expression smooth and detached. I want to scream.
I want to grab him by the shirt and shake him until I have a hold on him like he does on me. A fist around his guts like he has around mine, the need to earn his approval, his professional respect, his decency on and off the field.
Why won’t he give it to me? Why has he never given it to me?
That old, wounded fear curls its way through my thoughts and whispers, Why am I not enough?
“What did I ever do to you to make you hate me like this?” I spit out the words, air sawing from my lungs.
Slowly, Gavin glances up until our eyes meet in the mirror. His gaze rakes down my bare chest, then drifts back up to my face. His expression is flat, unreadable. “Who says I hate you?”
An empty laugh jumps out of me. “How you’ve acted for the past two years says plenty.”
Calmly, he dries his hands, then strolls toward his cubby. “Disagreeing with your choices in leadership is not hating you. Expecting more of you on the pitch is not hating you—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.” I rake both hands through my hair. “It’s every glare and disapproving look. It’s your inability to offer me a polite greeting or engage in civil conversation in all the hundreds of hours—”
“Thousands,” he mutters.
“Thousands of hours we’ve spent on the same team, in the same locker room, in the same—”
“Enough,” he snaps, air heaving out of his chest.
He turns toward his bag, roughly searching it, then pulling out a prescription bottle that I can see from here is a high-dose NSAID. He pops open the bottle, throws back a pill, and swallows it dry. “Go back out there,” he says. “We’re done talking.”
“No we’re not.” I close the distance between us, standing right behind him. “Answer my question. Why can’t you be civil to me? How the hell are we supposed to be co-captains when you can’t even treat me decently?”
He’s silent, that vein pulsing in his temple as he rips open a tub of Tiger Balm from his bag and rubs it on his knee, then his neck, then his temples. He won’t look at me.
Like a beam of light slipping beneath a closed door, the words leave me, quiet, unstoppable: “Why can’t we be friends?”
I wish I could rewind time, take back those words I’ve thought so many times and refused to humiliate myself by saying. But it’s too late.
The Tiger Balm drops. Gavin turns and faces me, setting us toe to toe, face to face. Our eyes lock. Suddenly, I’m keenly aware of the brush of his hard body against mine, the fabric of his jersey scraping my bare chest, making goose bumps bloom across my skin, the spicy scent of what he’s rubbed into his skin wrapped around us like a spell.
We’re so close. I breathe him in, feel his body, warm and hard and just barely touching mine. Our chests. Our hips. Our thighs.
Gavin swallows, his breaths fast and unsteady as he stares down at me, as his gaze lowers to my mouth. I lean in, the faintest sway of my body toward his. Now he’s closer, too. So close our mouths share air, our lips nearly brush.
What the hell is happening?
Time suspends, soundless, weightless. Nothing exists but the pound of my heart, the swift and brutal impulse to taste him, to sink my hands into his hair as his mouth falls open for mine, to scrape my nails down his scalp and make him beg. To pay him back for all the pain he’s caused me by torturing him with such unbearable pleasure, it brings him to his knees.
My eyes fall shut. I can’t believe this is happening, but I’m powerless to stop it, helpless to avoid something I know I’ll regret. Except what comes next isn’t a brush of lips, the taste of his mouth on mine.
His voice is low and dark, the heat of his body pouring over me as he says, “We are never going to be friends.”
My eyes fly open and lock with his. I’m speechless. Stunned.
A banging fist on the door shatters the moment, jolting us apart. “You two!” Coach barks. “My office. Now.”
5
GAVIN
Playlist: “Believer,” Imagine Dragons
“What the hell was that?” Coach shuts her office door behind us. At her pointed finger’s direction, we sit in the chairs on the other side of her desk.
I’m reeling. It’s been so long since I lashed out like that. Granted, I swear up a storm and bark orders at my teammates, but it’s always measured, intentional. I learned long ago that soccer wasn’t the place to lose control—it was the place I found it. Even when I’m on the field, my aggression is precise and controlled, reserved for the unfortunate souls I play against, not my teammates.
Then there’s what happened in the locker room. That’s never happened before.
And it never will again.
As I sit, my knee bends too sharply, too fast, pain knifing down my leg. A sobering, agonizing jolt back to the present moment. At least, until I glance over at Oliver, who’s biting his lip. And then I think about how fucking close I was to dragging that lip between my teeth, earning his breathless gasp—
I straighten my knee, knowing the pain of extending it will be worse, nearly unbearable, before I have relief, an agony that turns my vision blurry. But not long enough. Because once it’s cleared, he’s still there, looking as unsettled as I feel while he stares down at his feet, silent. I’m hit with a terribly unwelcome gut punch of guilt. I see it all over again, the pale blue-flame flicker in his eyes dimming as I told him the truth: We are never going to be friends.
I compress that unwelcome feeling back down inside me. There’s no room for guilt or softness or regrets. There’s room for this game and not a fucking thing coming between me and playing it for as long as I have it in me.
“Any time,” Coach says, plopping down into her chair and parking both elbows on her desk. “Any time you want to explain why, one day into being named co-captains, you’re acting like children on the field. What kind of message are you sending the team? What if there’d been press covering practice?”
Oliver’s head snaps up. “Was there?”
Coach arches an eyebrow, tipping her head. “Could have been, for all you knew. You two weren’t thinking about the press. Or the team. Or the shitty publicity that would come out of brawling. You weren’t thinking at all, and that’s exactly what a captain is not supposed to do. You’re the ones who keep your heads, who keep your cool.”
Fury emanates from her in waves. There’s something dangerous in her expression, a warning. Time to defuse the situation.
“Bergman and I talked,” I reassure her. “It won’t happen again.”
Oliver cuts me a skeptical glance.
“Damn right it won’t,” she says, sitting back, arms folded across her stomach. “’Cause if it does, you can both say goodbye to your captaincy.”
I barely stop my jaw from dropping. “You’re not serious.”
“Dead serious.”
“Lexi—”
“Coach,” she reminds me. “December to January you get to call me Lexi because I’m not bossing you around a field and because what we went through when celebrating the 2012 Olympic gold went south, and however the hell you got us out of that scrape, secured you lifelong first-name status privileges, but then and only then.”
“But the US men’s team didn’t even qualify for the Olympics in 2012,” Oliver says, blinking innocently my way.
I cut him a scathing glare. “And you were doing what in 2012, Bergman? Still getting your ass wiped?”
“Hey.” Coach points a finger my way, then his. “That’s what I’m talking about. Be nice.”
“He started it!” I tell her.