“Really?” she asked a little too incredulously.

“Yeah.”

She wiped at her forehead and gave me this funny look. “Okay. Sure. That sounds great.”

I rattled off where I parked my car in case she really did want to go and wasn’t just saying she did. By the time we finished talking, everyone else had finished their sprints too, even the slower players. Not that anyone was slow exactly, but slower.

Practice finished soon after that, so I finished getting my stuff together, keeping an eye to see where Gardner was so I could give him a tiny piece of my mind. Regular shoes on, a clean pair of ankle socks beneath them, I made my way toward the head coach busy counting balls to make sure they were all there.

“Are you ready for the game?” he greeted me first thing.

“I’m ready,” I agreed, watching his sneaky face for any sign that he felt remorse for taking advantage of my trust.

“Everything okay?” he asked, straightening up when I didn’t move from where I’d been.

Glancing around to make sure that no one was too close, I turned my attention back to the male Gossip Girl and scowled. “Did you tell Kulti what I said?”

The old bastard had the decency to look just a little sheepish. “I had a talk with him this morning on the way here. I figured it was time,” he neither agreed nor denied.

“Did you tell him it was me who said something?”

His brown eyes were careful and consistent. “He must have guessed it was you since you’re the only one that’s ripped him a new one.”

He didn’t deny it. I’d also been the one he saw coming from the offices too. It wasn’t like the cookie trail hadn’t been left behind. On top of that, I had laid into him for being a piece of horse crap to my dad. Once again, it was my fault.

It was done, and there was no point in dwelling on it.

“You can tell me if there’s a problem,” he stated in a careful honest tone that I couldn’t help but believe.

What was I going to do? Tell him oh, he gave me the stare down? Nope. Or worse, tell him about me picking him up from a bar? Yeah, no.

Instead I gave him a reassuring smile that I didn’t necessarily feel. “Everything’s fine, I was just… curious if you said something or not. No big deal.”

“No. I didn’t say anything.”

“Great, thanks G. I’ll see you later then,” I sighed, turning around to walk toward the bathroom, feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I sighed to myself.

The last thing I wanted was to bring negative attention to myself, especially where Kulti was concerned. The team had a lot banking on him, and though I was considered one of the hometown favorites because I was from Texas—and I was the leading scorer for the team—I understood priorities. One of us was a lot more popular than the other, even if it was only me playing, and one of us got paid a lot more.

I would lose every time.

Patting my phone over the material of my bag, I thought about calling my dad to rant but then thought better of it. The bratwurst had already done enough. I didn’t want to bring him up unless I had to. My mom? Jenny? No and no. Plus, I’d have to explain everything for my predicament to make sense, and I wasn’t all about that either.

So I weighed my options and accepted again that keeping it all to myself was the best way to go about dealing with everything.

Chapter Nine

There’s that saying some people use: Be careful what you wish for.

My first coach when I started playing club, a select group of players that wanted more than what their local school or rec center offered, told us almost daily, “A dream is just a wish without a plan.” After you hear it enough times, it grows on you and the older you get, the more you realize how true the words are. So it wasn’t that I didn’t take wishes seriously, I just didn’t put much weight into them. There weren’t a lot of things I wanted, but I knew that if I wanted something expensive, I had to save for it by cutting out other expenses in my life.