Every Saturday from the end of August to the end of October, Jess Parker set up her folding chair in the same spot on the sideline of Field 4 and did not look at the coach.
That was the rule. She’d made it the first week, when she signed up to be team parent because nobody else raised a hand, and the volunteer coach walked over to introduce himself with a clipboard under one arm and a whistle on a lanyard and a smile that went straight through her like a dropped glass.
“Andre,” he’d said, and shook her hand. “You’re the brave one who volunteered.”
“I’m the one who didn’t look at her phone fast enough.”
He’d laughed, a big real laugh, and she had gone home and stood in her kitchen and said out loud to nobody, absolutely not.
She was thirty-nine. She’d been divorced for two years, and amicable about it, which mostly meant tired. She worked at the credit union on Route 14. She drove a silver Honda Odyssey with a cracked cupholder and four hundred dried-up granola bar wrappers under the seats. She had a body that had done a lot of living, soft through the hips and belly, and she had made her peace with it the way you make peace with weather. She did not get crushes on soccer coaches.
So she did not look at him.
She didn’t look at him when he jogged the sideline in his navy windbreaker, yelling spread out, spread out, find your space at a field full of kids. She didn’t look at the way his calves flexed in his track pants. She didn’t look at his hands, big and dark, when he crouched to tie somebody’s cleat. She definitely didn’t look at him the time it got hot in September and he took the windbreaker off, and the gray T-shirt underneath was soaked through across his chest and back.
“You’re staring,” said Monica Feld, two chairs down.
“I’m watching the game.”
“The game’s on the other side of the field, Jess.”
They talked, because the team parent and the coach had to talk. Snack schedules. Picture day. A kid who needed an inhaler. He texted her about the field being closed for rain, and then he texted about the Bears game, and then one night at eleven he texted her a photo of a mesh ball bag he’d found in his truck with this one’s yours, I think, unless you want to start a collection. She laughed alone in bed for longer than it deserved.
He drove for UPS during the week. He’d coached rec soccer for eight years, long after his own son was grown and moved to Indianapolis. He was divorced too, five years, and talked about it the way she did, without bitterness, like a storm that had come through and taken a tree down.
“You ever get lonely?” he asked her once, packing up after a game in October. It came out of nowhere.
She was holding a stack of orange cones. She looked at them instead of at him.
“Constantly,” she said. “You?”
“Every Saturday about six o’clock,” Andre said. “Right after I watch you drive away.”
She dropped every single cone.
He helped her pick them up. Neither of them said anything else about it. She went home and lay on top of her comforter in her clothes, and put her hand between her legs, and thought about his hands on the cleat laces, and came so hard and so fast she had to put her other hand over her mouth in her own empty house.
The last game of the season was the last Saturday in October.
They lost four to one and nobody cared. There were orange slices and a sheet cake from Jewel and a trophy for every kid, and Jess’s son went home with his dad for the weekend with frosting on his face. By five-thirty the lot had emptied out. The sky to the west had gone a bad shade of green.
Andre’s truck was in the shop with a busted alternator, so he’d caught a ride in that morning, and all the equipment had to go somewhere until the park district took it back on Monday. Jess heard herself say, “Put it in the van. I’ve got room.”
So they hauled cones and ball bags and corner flags across the grass in the gold light, laughing about nothing, about the goalie who’d spent the whole second half picking dandelions, and she had the rear hatch open and the back seats folded flat when the sky split open.
It wasn’t rain so much as a wall. They threw the last ball bag in and dove in after it and slammed the hatch, and the minivan rocked with the wind, and the windows went white with water in seconds.
They were both soaked. They were both laughing. They were kneeling on the folded-down seats in the back of her Odyssey, surrounded by soccer balls and orange cones, with the dome light glowing yellow over their heads and the rain roaring on the roof like applause.
And then they stopped laughing.
She could see his chest moving under the wet T-shirt. Water was running off his jaw into his beard, gray at the chin. He was looking at her in a way she had spent an entire season making sure she never saw.
“Jess,” he said.
“I made a rule,” she said, too fast. “In August. I wasn’t going to look at you.”
“I know. I watched you not look at me for nine weeks.” He reached out and pushed a piece of wet hair off her face. His fingers were warm. “You’re real bad at it.”
She laughed, a broken little sound.
“I’m not anything special, Andre. I’m a mom with a minivan full of granola wrappers.”
“I know exactly what you are,” he said. His big hand cupped her jaw. “I’ve been thinking about you every Saturday since Labor Day. Every single one. Tell me to stop and I’ll stop.”
She grabbed the front of his windbreaker with both hands.
“Don’t stop,” she said, and he kissed her.
It wasn’t a careful kiss. It was nine weeks of not looking, all at once. He kissed her hard and deep, one hand in her wet hair and the other spread across her lower back, pulling her up against him, and she made a noise into his mouth she’d forgotten she could make. Her fleece was half unzipped. He pulled the zipper the rest of the way down and pushed it off her shoulders, and then his hands were under her tank top, warm on her cold, damp skin, sliding up her soft belly to her breasts. He groaned when he cupped them through her bra.
“God, look at you,” he said. “Look at you.”
She’d been self-conscious about her body for so long she’d forgotten what it was like to be wanted for it. He made her remember fast. He peeled the tank top over her head and unhooked her bra and put his mouth on her nipple, and she arched up off the folded seats so sharply a soccer ball rolled into the wheel well.
She got his windbreaker off. She got her hands on the drawstring of his track pants and pulled, and reached inside, and then just stopped, with her mouth open, while the rain hammered the roof.
“Andre.”
“Yeah,” he said, a little smug, a little rough.
He was huge. Heavy and hot in her hand and so thick her fingers didn’t close, and getting harder as she stroked him, and she felt a rush of wet between her legs so strong her thighs trembled.
“That’s—” She couldn’t finish.
“Been carrying that around all season too,” he said, and she laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on his chest.
He laid her down on the folded seats and dragged her leggings and her underwear down her legs and off over her sneakers, and pushed her knees apart, and looked at her for a long moment in the yellow dome light like she was the best thing he’d ever seen. Then he put his mouth on her.
She grabbed the headrest of the middle row with one hand and the back of his head with the other. The windows were completely fogged. The van was rocking, with the wind and with her hips, and Andre licked her slow and hungry and patient, and held her thighs open with those big hands when she tried to close them, and slid two thick fingers into her and curled them, and she came on his tongue with a cry that the thunder swallowed.
“Please,” she was saying. “Please, please, I need it.”
He knelt up between her legs and lined himself up, and she felt the blunt, wide head of him press against her, and she grabbed his hips and pulled.
“Easy,” he said. “Easy, baby. We’ve got time.”
He went in slowly. She’d never felt anything like it. It was a stretch that kept going, a deep, burning fullness that took her breath one inch at a time, and he watched her face the whole way and stopped whenever her eyes went wide, and kissed her, and gave her a little more. When he was finally all the way in, she could feel him pressing somewhere deep inside her that made her whole body shake.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God, Andre.”
“You good?”
“I’m so good. Don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t.
He fucked her in the back of her minivan on the last Saturday of the season with the storm going wild outside, long, deep strokes that made the cones rattle and the ball bags slide, her heels digging into his back and her nails digging into his shoulders. He fucked her slow until she was sobbing his name. Then he pulled out and turned her onto her hands and knees on the folded seats and gripped her soft hips in both hands and pushed back into her from behind, and that was so much deeper she screamed. He fucked her hard then, his hips slapping against her ass, one hand sliding up her spine to wrap in her hair, and she pushed back against him and took every inch and came again, clenching around him, her face pressed against the cool window and her breath fogging the glass.
“Jess,” he groaned. “Jess, I’m gonna—”
“Inside,” she gasped. “Stay inside me. Please.”
He pulled her back against him and held her there, buried as deep as he could go, and came with a shudder that went through his whole body, his forehead between her shoulder blades, his breath ragged on her skin. She could feel every pulse.
They collapsed together onto the seats in a tangle of wet clothes and mesh bags. A soccer ball rolled gently into the back of her knee. She started laughing and couldn’t stop.
The rain stopped around a quarter to seven, the way it does in October, all at once.
They got dressed in the back of the van, bumping elbows, laughing, Andre trying to pull his windbreaker on inside out. When she slid the side door open, the cold air hit her like a splash of water, and the lot was empty and shining with puddles under the one tall light. Every window of the Odyssey was fogged solid.
“Well,” Jess said, looking at it. “If anybody drives by, they’re going to know.”
“Let ’em.” Andre took her hand. He was grinning like a kid. “Same time next Saturday?”
“There’s no game next Saturday. The season’s over.”
“I know.” He pulled her in by the hand until she was leaning back against the van door with him standing close. “That’s kind of my point. I’m not your kid’s coach anymore. I’m just a guy asking you to dinner.”
She tipped her head back and laughed up at the clearing sky.
“Dinner,” she said. “And then what?”
“And then I guess we see what fits in the back of a minivan.”
“Everything,” she said. “Apparently everything fits.”
He laughed so loud a car alarm went off across the street.
In March, when the sign-up sheet for spring rec soccer went around, Monica Feld watched Jess write her name in the team parent box before anyone else had even uncapped a pen.
“Brave,” Monica said.
“Not really,” said Jess, and didn’t look at the coach, and smiled the whole time.
