Page 3 of Her Coach

He was already moving. I watched him lumber off and shook my head and turned back to the bar.

The truth was I loved it here. That was the part that made everything complicated. I loved the smell of this place and the weight of the glasses in my hand and the specific rhythm of a busy Friday night where your body just knew what to do without your brain having to be involved. I loved these guys, even when they smelled like a locker room and ordered seven things at once. I loved my mother, even when she made me want to scream into a pillow.

I had moved back from Portland with two suitcases and a manuscript I had been working on for six years and a master’s program I had put on hold for a semester that had quietly become fourteen months. The manuscript was still on my laptop. Still unfinished. Still something I was going to get back to once things settled down.

Things had not settled down.

I was still paying sixty dollars a month on a storage unit in Portland that held the rest of my life.

“She all right?” Moose reappeared at the bar with a plate of fries and the particular expression he got when he was about to say something I didn’t want to hear.

“She’s fine.”

“Moose told me she was there until eight again,” Rhett said as he appeared beside him, dropping onto a stool. He hadn’t even been there two seconds ago. I had no idea how a man that size moved that quietly.

I set a tonic water in front of him without being asked. “I know.”

“She needs a reason to go home,” he said.

“She has reasons. She just doesn’t use them.”

Rhett looked at me over his glass. “We need a coach, Bry.”

“I know that too.”

“Not a placeholder. Someone real. Someone who walks in and these guys actually listen to.” He set his drink down. “Jett hit the boards so hard tonight I genuinely considered calling an ambulance.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. Drama queen.” Rhett rubbed his face. “Your mom working on it?”

“You know she is.”

“Good.” He picked his drink back up. “Because I love these idiots but another season of almost isn’t going to do it for me.”

I leaned on the bar and looked at him. Rhett was one of the best players I had ever watched, and I had grown up in those stands. He deserved someone who knew what to do with him. They all did.

“She’ll figure it out,” I said. “She always does.”

He nodded. Didn’t look totally convinced, but he let it go.

The bar filled up the way it always did on practice nights, guys drifting over from the arena, loud and loose and ready to decompress. I worked the length of it and took orders and made drinks and felt completely in my element and tried not to think about the manuscript, the storage unit, the master’s advisor I had emailed twice in the last month and still hadn’t heard back from.

Outside, Las Vegas was doing what it always did. Blazing. Humming. Refusing to go quiet.

Dad used to say this city kept its promises. That if you stayed, it gave you something worth staying for.

I was still waiting to find out if that was true.

3

COLTON

Morning came gray through the window.

I had not slept. I had finished the bourbon somewhere around three and stopped myself from opening another one, and spent the remaining hours at the kitchen table with my jacket still on and my phone face down in front of me. Outside, the city hummed the way it always did. I turned the phone over at six forty-five. Thirty-one missed notifications. I turned it back over.

I made coffee. I did not drink it.