Coach and me, we show him, without a spotter and in spitting distance of the depthless purple gorge so beautiful I want to cry into it.
I feel my phone buzzing and I don’t even look at it, dropping it to the ground.
Coach and me, we’re laughing now, Coach’s hair tumbling against me as we scramble to the most solid patch of an unsolid turf.
Lunging forward, she calls to me and I set my bare foot high atop her bended thigh, lifting myself, swinging my other leg over her shoulder, as she rises to her feet. Wrapping my thighs around her, twining my feet behind her, and we are one.
We are one.
I never did a stunt with Coach before.
At first, we are a sorry case, weaving and laughing, and Will drill-sergeants us until we get focus, my thighs locking tight around her and Coach grinding her feet into the frosty grass.
Then I unlock my feet and thrust my legs forward, Coach reaching under and between my thighs to grab my clammy hands in hers. Dipping down, she gives me a pop, pulling me over her head, my legs swinging from behind her, then together again, my feet landing hard on the ground.
The sear up my leg is nothing at all. Nothing.
We are stupendous and Will is cheering and yelling and hip-hollering and it echoes through the ravine in bewitching ways.
Up above her shoulders, fixed tight upon her, it is something. My eyes wander down to the icy bottom of the gorge and we are higher than we ever thought we’d be.
My house is farther, and Coach gets dropped off first, which is a mind-bending prospect.
Will pulls over a half block from her house. Watching them kiss, watching the way he opens her mouth with his, her sneaky looks back at me, the pleasure on her, I feel myself go loose and wondrous inside. I want to be a part of their kiss, and maybe even they want it too.
It’s only a five-minute drive to my house, but it feels like it lasts forever, all the misted lightness of Lanvers Peak gone.
“Tonight was the first time I ever saw you without that other girl,” Will says. “The one with the freckles.”
This seems the craziest way to describe Beth ever, but it makes everything go tight in my head and I remember, coming off the peak, flipping open my phone and seeing missed call, missed call, missed call. A text: you’d best pay attn to me.
He looks at me and smiles.
Suddenly, I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone.
“Seeing her tonight, I understand now,” he says. “She needs this.”
For a second I think he means himself. And, thinking of her that night, so carefree, all the antic restlessness blown out of her, I think he is surely right.
But then he gestures toward my Sutton Eagles duffel bag, and I see he means being coach.
“She needs you girls,” he adds.
I nod, meaningfully as I can.
“I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”
These are the words he says, but they sound like something I’m overhearing, a conversation I’d never be a part of.
“I guess it’s funny, me talking to you like this,” he says.
I guess it is. Sometimes Coach doesn’t seem that much older than me, but Will, with his tragic dead wife and tours of duty, sure does.
“I know we don’t really know each other,” he admits. “But we know each other in a strange way.”
I nod again, though really we don’t know each other at all. It makes me think Will is one of those people who just tell everybody everything right away, and usually I don’t like those people, those girls at summer camp sharing tales of cutting and kissing their babysitters. But this feels different. Maybe because he’s right. Because we share a secret. And because I saw them together that day in the teachers’ lounge, which felt like seeing everything.
“She has it hard,” he says. “Her husband, he’s not the guy you might think he is. She has it very hard.”
Maybe it’s the bourbon, or the bourbon wearing off, but this doesn’t sound exactly right either, not really.
“He gave her that house,” I point out.
“It’s a cold house,” he says, looking out the window. “He gave her a cold house.”
“It’s her house,” I say. “I mean, even if it’s cold, it’s hers.”
He doesn’t say anything, and I feel