"That's what I like about her."
"That's what everyone likes about her. Mara is the same. What worries me about Mara is whether she's ever going to let anyone past the coaching. Whether there's room in her life for a person who isn't the game."
Lex looked out the window. The afternoon light was fading over Phoenix Ridge, the sky going from blue to pale gold, the first hint of the sunset that would turn the ocean into hammered copper within the hour. A couple walked past on the sidewalk, hands linked, laughing at a joke. The normalcy of it ached.
"There is," Lex said. "I felt it last night. When she kissed me back. There's a whole person in there, underneath the control and the fear and the armor. And she wants out. She just doesn't know how to let herself."
Outside Lavender's, Lex's phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and her stomach dropped.
Mom.
She hadn't spoken to her mother in four years. She let it ring. Watched the screen pulse. Then, before she could think herself out of it, she answered.
"Alexandra." Her mother's voice was clipped and precise, the voice of a woman who coached championship teams and raised her daughter the same way. "I saw the Sports Illustrated feature someone forwarded me. You're playing hockey now."
"Hi, Mom. I'm fine, thanks for asking."
"I didn't call to argue. I called because I watched the game footage. You're good. Better than I expected." A pause. "You're also making every mistake I warned you about. You break the system, you improvise when you should be executing, and you're picking fights with your coach."
Lex pressed her back against the brick wall of Lavender's. Elise stood a few feet away, watching, giving her space. "You've been watching my games?"
"I've been watching your career implode twice now. I watched it happen in field hockey and I'm watching it happen again. You have more talent than anyone I've ever coached, including the players I took to the Olympics, and you waste it because you can't stand being told what to do by someone who knows more than you."
The words landed in the old wounds, precise as scalpels. Her mother had always known exactly where to cut.
"Is there a point to this call?" Lex's voice was flat. Her free hand was clenched at her side.
"The point is that you have a chance. A real chance, in a real league, with a real coach. Don't throw it away the way you threw away field hockey."
"I didn't throw away field hockey. I stood up for myself and the younger players, and the federation punished me for it."
"You burned every bridge you had because you couldn't control your temper."
Lex closed her eyes. The evening air was warm on her face and her chest was tight and she was twenty-eight years old standing on a sidewalk in Phoenix Ridge being told by her mother that she was a disappointment. Again. Still. Always.
"I have to go, Mom."
"Alexandra—"
"Goodbye."
She ended the call and stood there for a full minute, breathing, staring at the faded purple paint on Lavender's exterior. Her hands were shaking.
Elise touched her arm. "You okay?"
"No." Lex shoved her phone into her pocket. "But I will be."
They walked back to the apartment as the sky turned orange over the rooftops and the ocean blazed with the last light. The streets of Phoenix Ridge were quieting into their evening rhythm, the coffee shops closing their sidewalk tables, the surfboard shop on the corner pulling its display racks inside, the woman who ran the flower stall on Main Street carrying armfuls of unsold bouquets to the van she parked behind the post office. Lex breathed in the salt air and thought about Mara driving home to her empty house, feeding Goldie, sitting alone in the kitchen with nobody to talk to about the worst day of her professional life. The image made her chest ache.
Elise made dinner. Pasta with pesto and vegetables from the farmers market. They ate at the small kitchen table with the windows open and the evening sounds drifting in. Elise talked about an upcoming game against the league leaders and a new defensive rotation Lou wanted to try, and Lex listened with half her brain while the other half circled back relentlessly to Mara.
After dinner, Lex sat on the couch with her phone in her hand, not texting Mara, not calling Mara, but thinking about Mara. The blue eyes. The tension in her face. The crack in her voice. Her hands shaking when she'd grabbed her bag and fled.
She was going to have to be patient. She was going to have to prove that this wasn't a game, wasn't a conquest, wasn't the pattern of hot and fast and gone. She was going to have to show Mara that what she wanted wasn't sixty seconds of white-hot surrender but the whole of her, the real Mara, the one underneath.
She wanted Mara Ellison. All of her. The coach and the woman. The discipline and the hunger. The armor and the person hiding underneath it.
And she was willing to wait.
