It happened and it almost destroyed my life and my career. And now I’m stuck here, teaching a bunch of schoolgirls who know nothing about soccer instead of being where I belong.
With the team, winning games.
So I need someone who can help me get there, rather than stoke my anger and make things worse.
After leaving the therapist’s office, I ride over to the sports club that my dad used to go to. They have a private area where I can practice my drills and no one will bother me or talk to me about my disastrous injury.
I run. I do weights. I fucking run again.
I do everything I can to get rid of this violent streak that Dr. Lola Bernstein has evoked in me.
When exercising doesn’t do me any good, I decide to ride to St. Mary’s and work on my joke of a job. Maybe there are books that can make it easier, that can teachmehow to teach girls who giggle at everything I say and bat their eyelashes at me like I’ve got any fucking interest in their schoolgirl antics.
So I go to the library in search of a textbook or something, anything to take my mind off what a shitshow my life has become.
But instead, I find someone else.
Someone I hadn’t noticed before. Someone who’s always been in the background.
The little sister.
Salem Salinger.
Eight years ago when my mom told me that two girls would be moving in with us, I didn’t care. I had heard of the Salingers before but never took any interest in them. I had other concerns in life, bigger concerns like soccer and my grades, along with some smaller concerns like girls.
As long as the new arrivals didn’t interfere with that, I didn’t care who moved in or not.
But then Sarah happened.
She was hot. I was horny. I was supposed to take notice of her and I did.
I was popular at school, a star athlete, a straight-A student.
Even though I never had time for friends, people followed me around and I let them instead of wasting my energy and telling them to fuck off. Sarah was supposed to be interested in me like everyone else, and she was.
I thought it would be a fling because girls usually are flings. I don’t want anyone disturbing my focus.
But turns out, Sarah was like me.
She was ambitious, focused, driven. It was like finding a perfect match.
An easy match.
It just made sense for us to be together. It made sense to date her, to make future plans with her. It made sense to convince my mother to let us be together when she found out that we had been going out behind her back for a couple of months. She had objections – namely, about my ability to handle soccer while I was also dating because my mom has always insisted that nothing at all should ever take my focus off the game – but when I won every game that year, we managed to put her mind at ease.
It also made sense to buy her a ring and propose to her.
What doesn’t make sense is that I’m standing here, at the school library, and watching her little sister get up on the ladder to retrieve a book of her own.
I’m not only watching her, I’m studying the curve of her spine and the dip of her waist. I’m studying the tight globes of her ass.
To me, she’s always been Sarah’s little sister.
A kid in the background who hated the cold but loved ice cream. I always thought that was a pretty strange combination but whatever.
I also remember Mom lecturing her about her bad grades and her breaking curfew and whatnot. Sarah would bitch about her too, from time to time.
But honestly, I didn’t care.
