No big deal.
Right.
What I needed to do was get it together and focus on making it through preseason training to ensure my spot as a starter. I’d have to fuck up royally to not start the season, but sometimes the unexpected was known to happen. I didn’t like to play around with chance anyway.
And with that thought, I finished up my conversation with my dad, lay in bed, and talked myself out of going for a late, last-minute, five-mile run. My body needed the rest. It only took me ten minutes of staring off blankly at the wall, to really decide I could save a run for the morning and it would be fine.
One of my favorite coaches when I was younger would always say when motivating us to practice:To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
There’d be no peace in my life if I didn’t do well when practices began, with or without The King being there.
Chapter Three
“The meeting ison the fifth floor today, Sal, conference room 3C.” The guard winked at me as he slid my visitor’s pass across the granite desk.
“Thanks. See you later.” I flashed him a big grin and nodded, eyeing the huge mural on the wall behind him. It was a mixed media piece, multicolored and vibrant, with dozens of snapshots of Pipers players and Wreckers, the Houston men’s professional club. We were their expansion team, created and managed by the same ownership group. Or as I fondly thought of it, we were the adopted kids, the ones that had come years after a successful track record for the men while the owners had hopes and dreams in their eyes for our potential. Why they named the team the Pipers, I had no idea. It was probably the worst name I’d ever heard, all it made me think of was a boner for some reason.
One of the players in the piece was me, right in the middle, my arms thrown over my head after I’d scored a goal two seasons ago. I’d have to tell my dad about the mural, I told myself, taking in the new artwork they’d added to the lobby since I hadn’t really been paying attention when I’d come to see Coach Gardner days before. Headquarters for the Wreckers and Pipers was an impressive building, only a couple years old and located in a developing neighborhood just outside of the downtown area.
It’d been three days since the press conference, and so far I hadn’t heard anything from a single person regarding the huge idiot I made of myself. Nothing. Not a phone call or a text or an email from anyone telling me they saw what happened. I was used to being the butt end of a joke, or being teased for the things I liked or the way I dressed, so I was prepared for it.
But still.
I dreaded the day the video would leak, but I shoved the worry to the back of my head for another time. Priorities. I had priorities, like today.
The staff and the team were scheduled for an introductory meeting before practices began. It was mainly to get the new people acquainted with schedules, rules and a whole bunch of other details that usually went in one ear and out the other.
The conference room was easy to find. There were only a few people already waiting, and I took a seat halfway into the room after waving to and greeting the girls closest to me. I watched a couple of the other assistant coaches and Coach Gardner, who had given me a hug after the press conference as he tried hard not to laugh, talked in one corner of the room.
Someone squealed.
“Sal!” It was Jenny, my favorite goalkeeper in the world. She was half-Japanese, half a bunch of other European nationalities, had the best skin I’d ever seen, was tall, pretty and had a great attitude. I used to hate her guts—in a friendly way—because she’d blocked way too many of my shots when we were on opposing teams. It was sort of horseshit in the world of fairness when someone was good at everything, and then smart and pretty on top of it. But she was such a nice, kind person that my hatred had lasted about twenty seconds.
“Jen-Jen.” I waved at her. She pointed at the chair right next to her and urged me forward. I waved at a few of the other players nearby that I knew, most were looking around suspiciously. Oh lord. I took another quick glance at the coaches to make sure Kulti wasn’t hiding between them.
He wasn’t.
Stop it, Sal. Focus.
Jenny sat up straight to give me a hug. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said. Most of the players didn’t live in Houston year-round and she was one of them, heading back to her home state of Iowa when the season was over. This would be our third year on the team together. Though I wasn’t exactly far from my parents—it was only a three-hour drive more or less to San Antonio—I didn’t mind living in Houston, despite the humidity.
Everyone in the conference room seemed to be buzzing around. The players were all keeping an eye out, an air of expectancy saturating everything. I had to remind myself a couple more times to quit doing it too. I caught Jenny glancing around as she dug in her purse for a tube of lipstick, and she blushed when she noticed that I saw what she was doing.
“I really don’t think this is that big of a deal,” she said, and I believed her. “But… you know, I’m half-expecting him to come here with Hermes wings on his shoes and a halo over his head since everyone thinks he’s some kind of god.” Jenny paused for a moment before quickly adding, “On the soccer field, I mean.”
I winked and nodded. Adding, “Uh-huh, whatever you say,” just to mess with her. I was familiar with her type and it wasn’t brown-haired men who played soccer. Her boyfriend of two years was a six-foot-two beast, a sprinter who had won a bronze and a silver medal at the last Olympics and had quads the size of my ribcage. Show-off.
Jenny frowned. “Don’t make me bring up those pictures I saw.”
Damn it. She had me, and from the smirk on her face, she knew it. My mom had busted out the pictures of me in my younger days during a visit Jenny had taken back home with me. In several of them, my Kulti obsession was well-documented. I think it was the three birthday cakes in a row with his face on them that really sealed the deal.
“Hi, Jenny,” a familiar voice said from above my head. Almost immediately, two hands grabbed my face from behind and squished my cheeks together. Then two brown eyes appeared over the top of my head. “Hi, Sally.”
I poked at the space between the two brown eyes. Her dark blonde hair was trimmed short like always, in a style that would be called a pixie-cut on any other person in the world but her. “Harlow, I missed you,” I told the best defender in the country.
Harlow Williams really was the best and for good reason. She was a little scary. Incredibly nice off the field, but on it, those ancient survival instincts every being is born with begged you to run the other away when she was barreling toward you.
We called her The Beast for a reason.