My Dad's Hocky Coach Is Obsessed With Me

Chapter three

Maya's POV

I made sure to be at the rink as early as possible, mostly to spite him. The rink was empty and quiet. I did a slow lap around, glancing toward the entrance every few seconds, but the coach didn't show up.

Just when I was starting to tire out from the laps, a sharp crack split the silence. I yelped in shock and turned around.

Nathan Garrison was standing at the boards with a clipboard in his hand. He had just slapped a pen against it. He was already in full gear, and an iPad was propped on the boards beside him. There was a stern look in his eyes.

"Way to watch me take laps like a creep." I skated over, already pissed off. I'd expected a standard drill session, the kind of structured repetition I could run in my sleep. What was he planning to teach me with an iPad?

Coach Garrison didn't acknowledge me further. He made a note on his clipboard, reviewed something on the tablet and made another note, while I stood there and waited.

Eventually he looked up. "Alright, here is our first sequence. I want to see your approach on the left side entry."

Quietly, I obeyed him, and the drill went on for forty minutes. He was even harder on me than he'd been in the team session, calling out his corrections in real time.

"Stop dropping your swing arm before you commit to the turn," he said. "You're telegraphing."

"I've always done things this way." I retorted.

"I know. That's the problem." He skated up behind me and positioned himself behind me, and damn me if I didn't wait hopefully for him to touch me. What the hell was wrong with me?

Coach Garrison reached around, his hands covering mine on the stick, adjusting my grip and then guiding my arms through the motion from the start.

"Like this," he murmured, close to my ear, and my stomach clenched in arousal. I should have moved away, I knew that, but I didn't.

"Do you feel the difference in your arm?" He whisper-sighed in my ear. "I know you feel it, Fletcher. You can't fight it."

I felt a lot of things in different parts of my body, but I wasn't going to admit that out loud to him. Heck, I wasn't even sure that I could form coherent words anymore, not when his solid arms had circled mine, and his chest was pressed against my back, and his mouth was so close to my neck. A strand of his long hair brushed against my cheek when he moved.

"Your weight needs to shift here," he mumbled, moving us through the motion again. "Not after the turn, but before it. You're reacting instead of leading."

"Right," I sighed, vaguely aware that I had fully relaxed against him. I knew he could feel what I felt too, because he sighed as well, and pushed his face further into my neck.

Just then, my eyes traveled up and found a very familiar face, several feet away from the ice.

"Marcus?" I gasped.

He was standing at the entrance in a gray hoodie, hands in his pockets as he watched Coach Garrison and I. And he looked furious. I hadn't seen him since our breakup.

I pulled away from Coach Garrison immediately and put two feet of space between us.

"Oh, hi. I thought you didn't see me there for a minute." Marcus's voice was casual, but there was a cold edge to it. "And I didn't realize you'd moved on from me so fast."

"What are you doing here?" I called across the ice.

"Just wanted to talk after our little fight." He shrugged. "Guess I should've known better."

"It wasn't a little fight," I reminded him in annoyance. "We broke up, and do you remember why? Because you cheated on me."

A look of astonishment crossed his face then, and he dropped the casual routine entirely. "You always love playing the victim, didn't you? The whole campus knows you only have that captain's band because of your father. Now you're out here at six in the morning getting private sessions with the hot new coach."

He narrowed his eyes at a point behind me, where Coach Garrison must have been standing. "Really subtle, Maya."

"Oh, my God!" I pressed a shaky hand to my forehead. I sincerely couldn't deal with Marcus right now.

"Fletcher, what's this?" Coach Garrison asked me, but his eyes remained on Marcus.

"I'm fine, it's nothing." I replied, but he was already moving forward.

"Hey, you need to leave the rink area." Coach Garrison skated to the boards in four clean strides and stood at the barrier, looking at Marcus impatiently. "This is a private session. You don't have clearance to be here."

"A private session?" Marcus looked at him with a slow contemptuous assessment. "Relax, Coach. I'm just talking to my girlfriend."

"Ex," I corrected.

"Leave," Coach Garrison snarled in a voice that shocked even me. "This is your final warning, whoever we are. And the next time you come up here to threaten any player of mine—including my captain—will be the first in a long line of regrets for you on this campus. Are we clear?"

Marcus appeared taken aback by that threat, but Coach Garrison doubled down. "Do you understand, or do you need me to make good on my promise first?"

Marcus quickly nodded. Then his eyes slid from the coach to me, and there was an ugly look in his eyes. He walked away, disappearing through the entrance of the ice rink.

"Resume the drill," Coach Garrison ordered me, already skating back to position.

"You shouldn't have told him that." I muttered. "I was already handling it."

But Coach Garrison didn't answer.

"Why did you get involved?" I asked. "Do you handle personal drama for all your players?"

"I handle anything that affects performance," he yelled. "You lost your focus and that is a performance issue. So get on the f*****g ice and run the drill again!"

My mouth hung open in amazement. The coach was completely different, colder and angrier than he'd been five minutes ago when he'd had his arms around me. I wondered whether the proximity had rattled him just as much as it had made me flustered.

"In fact, the drill is over," he added abruptly, and skated toward the exit without another word. "We will continue this in general practice."

"The drill is—what?" I repeated in surprise. We hadn't even lasted an hour at the private session. What was he on about?"

I watched as Coach Garrison reached the entrance to the ice rink, where a familiar face was waiting for him: Sienna. What the hell was she doing here? I could bet good money that she had overheard we were having a private session, and she had come to interrupt us.

I watched as she said something I couldn't catch to Coach Garrison, showing him her skates. He examined the skates and then murmured a few words. Sienna giggled loudly, turning around to fix me with a gloat.

I picked up my stick and headed off the ice. Between Sienna, Coach Garrison and Marcus, I did not know which one of them was going to finish me off first.