Chapter 9: The Reckoning
I ran them until their legs could barely lift their boots.
Derek stumbled first, his hands on his knees, chest heaving. Marcus followed a lap later, bent double and gagging. Tyler kept going out of spite, his face red and jaw clenched, but his form had fallen apart. I let him burn another two laps before I blew the whistle.
“That’s enough.”
They staggered to a stop, three of them lined up like broken soldiers. I walked slowly down the line, letting my footsteps sink into the damp grass. The field was empty now. The rest of the team had cleared out, too smart to stick around and watch the show.
“You want to tell me what that was about?” I stopped in front of Tyler. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Cornering a cheerleader after practice. Three of you. Like wolves.”
“We weren’t gonna hurt her,” Derek said, still breathing hard.
“You don’t get to decide that.” I turned on him. “You surround someone, you crowd them, you touch them? That’s not harmless. That’s predatory. And I don’t run a program that raises predators.”
Tyler straightened up, a bitter edge in his voice. “Alex used to do the same thing. Never saw you run him till he puked.”
The words hung in the cool air. I held his gaze, letting the silence stretch until he started to fidget.
“You have no idea,” I said, my voice dropping to something cold and quiet, “how many times I’ve yelled at Alex about his callous ways. How many times I sat him down and told him he was making a fool of himself. How many nights I lay awake wondering what I was doing wrong as a coach, as a man, to let him turn out that way.”
I let that sink in.
“Three laps. Every day this week. If I see any of you within ten feet of a cheerleader, it’ll be ten. Now get out of my sight.”
They shuffled away, shoulders hunched. I watched them go, then turned toward the admin building, my jaw tight.
I unlocked my office door with the spare key. Steam still rose from the private bathroom, curling into the late afternoon light. The air smelled of soap and warmth and her.