Page 95 of Forever Offsides

“Kay. Have a good day.” I get a kiss on my cheek.

“You too.” She slips past me, and my gut sinks, watching her go. I miss her already, and I hate that she won’t be on the field with me until the end of the week.

I watch as she goes down the street to her building with hurried steps. Her head swivels over her shoulder as she reaches the steps that lead to her door, and she nails me with a smile and a wave before she blows me a kiss.

Then she’s gone, and my day has to go on.

Fuck I’ve got it bad for her. I think I have since I first laid eyes on her.

I take a shower, eat some breakfast, drink two cups of coffee, and decide to head into work early, since what the fuck else do I have to do? I park in my spot, show my ID badge to the guard, who waves me in without glancing at it, and up I go to my office, only to head down to the weight room. I have too much in my head, and I need to burn it off.

Except when I get here, I find that I’m not alone.

Asher is here, doing the same thing I came to do.

“Mornin’,” he drawls as he finishes a set of pull-ups.

“Mornin’,” I parrot. “Hope I’m not interrupting.”

He shakes his head as he pulls his body up until his chin rises above the bar. Two more reps before his feet land on the mat, and he grabs his towel off a holder and his bottle of water from the floor.

“Not at all,” he finally answers as he wipes his forehead. “I like coming here early. It’s quiet. Allows me to think.” He grins. “Plus, Wynter went into the hospital early.” A chuckle escapes his lips. “How she gets excited over being paged in for an emergency femur fracture is beyond me.”

I open my mouth and nearly say that Quinn is the same way, only to stop myself before the words slip out. I’m sleeping with my boss’s daughter, and he has no clue. Part of me is tempted to tell him. To come clean to him. To tell him that I think I’m falling in love with his daughter and see how he reacts.

But this just started for Quinn and me. Yes, it was months in the making, and yes, we already know each other from that. But this side of us is new and fragile, and I don’t want to push Quinn too far too fast. Not to mention, all the other stuff that tells me I can’t—or shouldn’t—have more than this as a fleeting affair.

“That’s wild,” is what I go with and head over to the weight machines. Bench presses will hurt, and that’s exactly what I need right now.

“I remember my first loss as a head coach,” he says from halfway across the room, moving on to an ab machine. He laughs softly. “It was also my first game as a head coach, so that sucked. I thought for sure I’d get fired and booed out of this city. It was a terrible loss.”

“How bad?” I ask, curious because I didn’t know this.

“Thirty to three.”

I wince, and he sees it and nods.

“Yeah. The first loss is the worst. It doesn’t ever fully get better because it’s still losing and we hate that as competitive assholes, but it happens to all of us and it’s something we have to live with.”

“Thanks,” I tell him, actually needing to hear that more than I realized. “That helps a lot.”

Asher’s a really good guy, and he’s taking a big chance on me to lead his team. A team he’s devoted his entire career to. It makes me feel like even more of a dirtbag for going behind his back.

“How’s it going with Russel?” he asks. “Any behavior issues or problems with the other guys?”

“Not that I’ve seen or heard about it,” I tell him, glossing over the woman he had in his room before the game. I laid into him about that, and the GM doesn’t exactly need to know. If it happens again, that’ll be a different story, and I won’t let him off the hook if it impacts the team. “I think he’s trying hard to shed the bad boy, difficult to play and work with image.”

“Good. I don’t think there’s any love still between them, but they seem to be tolerating each other.”

“Agreed,” I grunt as I press three hundred and fifty pounds up with my feet. I used to be able to do four hundred no problem.

“We’re making it work,” he says. “Now we just have to make it through the season without any distractions derailing us.”

“Right.” This time I managed to hold in my wince. Just barely.

30

QUINN