Coach Carol: The Pack

Book two. November to January. Carol is 42. All other characters are above 18.

DISCLAIMER: There's depiction of coach-player sex, an age gap, gangbangs, anal, and spanking in this story. Please be warned.

The Dedication

The athletic director's voicemail was still on her phone a week later. She had not deleted it. She played it once more in the kitchen, standing at the counter in his old team sweatshirt, and listened to a grown man clear his throat four times while he asked whether she would consider, if she felt up to it, if it wasn't too soon, traveling with the team.

It would mean a great deal to the boys.

She called him back the same afternoon and said yes before he had finished the question.

By Saturday the decals were on the helmets: a small navy circle on the back of every one, with his initials in gold. She saw them from the tunnel, a hundred and ten heads bowed for the moment of silence. The cameras found her at once. She stood on the sideline in a navy wool coat and the good pearls and let them have her face for exactly as long as the moment lasted, and then turned to see what the defense was doing.

What the defense was doing was getting beaten on third down.

On the Monday they gave her a title. Special assistant to the interim head coach. The head coach was Dale Halvorsen, who had been her husband's coordinator for six years and was now interim, out of his depth and sweating through his polo by the second quarter. He shook her hand with both of his and said it was an honor. He also meant she would stand where the cameras could see her, wear the lanyard, and be no trouble.

"Of course," said Carol.

Her father had coached high school ball in a town with one stoplight. She had grown up on the end of his bench with three brothers, a box of grease pencils and a projector that ran hot enough to smell. And for her whole marriage she had broken down film with her husband in the den, with the remote in her hand because he always went too fast.

The first film session was on the Tuesday: the defense in the big room with the lights down, Halvorsen at the front with the clicker, and Carol on a folding chair at the end of the second row, where someone had put her with a bottle of water and a kind look.

Halvorsen ran the opponent's third downs and talked about effort.

On the fourth clip she said, "Stop it there."

Nobody stopped it. She stood up, took the clicker out of his hand, ran it back nine seconds and froze it.

"Third and long. Anything over seven, they go empty, trips to the boundary." Her voice carried. It always had: three brothers. "Watch the number three receiver. He runs to the sticks and sits down. Every time. The quarterback never looks anywhere else on third and long. Not in five games. I have it on four tapes. You bracket that boy and drop the safety on top, and that quarterback will hold the ball until somebody in this room puts him in the dirt."

She handed the clicker back.

Silence. A long one. Halvorsen opened his mouth and shut it.

Then, from the middle of the room, the scratch of a pen. Then another, and then the whole room, sixty young men bent over their notebooks, writing it down.

They held the opponent to one third-down conversion on Saturday. On the Sunday Halvorsen asked her, red to the ears, whether she might like to sit in on the defensive meetings. Just to listen.

The Road

After that it was buses.

Buses before dawn, the players asleep in their headphones with their legs sprawled in the aisle. Charter flights and chicken in foil trays. Hotels by the interstate, carpet patterned to hide stains, coffee that tasted of the machine. The staff floor was always the eleventh or the fourteenth, and she was always the only woman on it, the one door down the corridor with no snoring behind it.

She found she didn't mind. She had spent every autumn of her marriage alone in an empty house while he lived at the facility. Here at least the empty room had other rooms around it.

The ledger came with her. It rode in the bottom of her bag under the playbooks, to every hotel by every interstate, with one entry in it in her own hand.

And the players looked at her.

She had grown up among athletes, and men had been looking down her blouse her whole adult life; it barely registered. This was a different kind of looking. It had started in the film room, when she walked to the front to take the clicker and a room of eyes followed her ass down the aisle and stayed on it until she sat. On the sideline she could feel them on it between series. She was five foot ten, and she had played four years of college volleyball and never really stopped. Her arms were long and cut, her legs were long and hard, and her ass was something else. It started high, right under her waist, and stood straight out behind her: the shelf of it, two big round cheeks pressed close together, soft on top and hard underneath, where she had been building the muscle since she was fourteen. They gave under a hand and moved when she walked, and they did not hang. The navy slacks the athletic department issued her were losing the fight with it every day. The cloth pulled tight across the curve and up into the cleft, the back pockets sat stretched flat on it, and the seams strained. Under each cheek, where it folded onto the back of her thigh, the slacks caught in a deep soft crease, and the crease jumped every time she shifted her weight. Assistant coaches lost the ends of their sentences when she walked past. She caught a linebacker staring at it so long in one walk-through that he walked into a blocking sled. Her breasts were full double D cups, more than anyone expected on a woman built like an athlete, more than the staff polo had ever been cut for, and the knit clung to the soft weight of them and stretched the little embroidered logo out of shape over the left one, and the eyes that weren't on her ass were there.

She had not known, until the night of the funeral, what it was like to look back and choose. She liked it very much.

Film Study

The captain was Marcus Dade, a senior linebacker, twenty-two, the quietest man on the team. He played the way her husband had once played, by reading. He was the first one in the film room and the last one out, and he was the one who had started the writing that Tuesday.

On the last road trip of the regular season he knocked on her door at ten at night with his laptop under his arm and asked if she had a minute for the tight end.

She let him in. She had been in bed with her Kindle, and she had pulled on the staff polo over a pair of sleep shorts to answer the door. She did not change. They sat on the end of the bed with the laptop on the desk chair in front of them, and the hotel lamp, and the heater ticking, and for forty minutes they really did watch the tight end.

He was very good. And somewhere in the second quarter she realized that every time she leaned forward to freeze a frame, he stopped watching the screen.

She had not done the top button of the polo. Or the second.

"Can I say something, Coach?"

"You can say anything you like, Marcus."

"I like the way you coach." He said it carefully, to the laptop. "Coach Simmons was a great coach. Don't get me wrong. But he yelled." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You don't yell. You just tell us what's going to happen, and then it does."

His eyes had gone down again. He was trying so hard to keep them up that she could see the cords standing out in his neck.

She let him struggle a moment longer, and smiled. Not at him, exactly. Down at the laptop, coy, a little pleased with herself, the way she used to smile across a net at a girl who'd just worked out where the ball was going.

She leaned forward, with her forearms on her knees, so that the open neck of the polo fell away from her and he could see right down it: the deep, soft cleft between her freckled breasts, shadowed where it ran down into the white cotton of her bra, and the plump swells pressed together above it, rising and falling with her breath. His eyes went down into it and stayed, and she could read it in his face, plain as a play call: God, those tits.

"Just coaching style?" said Carol. "How else am I better?"

He swallowed. "Looking at you on the bench," he said, "is a huge inspiration."

"Oh," she said. "You just want to look?"

He didn't answer. He didn't need to. She stood up between his knees, took the hem of the polo in both hands, and drew it off over her head.

The bra was plain white cotton, the kind you buy in threes. Above it her chest was tanned gold from a summer of hikes, and freckled, and below the strap lines the skin went abruptly pale. She reached back and unhooked it, and let it fall.

Her double D cups dropped free and swung, heavy, and settled. They were glorious, ripe and round, a little lower than they had been at twenty and a good deal heavier, and the cotton had left a red crease under each. Against the tan around them they were startlingly white, two pale triangles left by her volleyball top, with a faint blue vein tracing down the side of each. Her areolas were wide and soft, a deep tawny pink, and the nipples in the middle of them were already pulled up tight and dark in the warm room.

Marcus looked at them. He didn't blink, and he didn't say a word.

"Go on," said Carol. "You can do more than look."

He put out one big hand and cupped her from underneath, as if she might come apart. He was dark-haired and broad, with a neat short beard and a broad chest under his practice shirt, and his palm was so wide it took the whole weight of her. He lifted. He let it settle back into his hand and spill over his fingers. He ran his thumb around the nipple once and watched it tighten further. Then he leaned in and kissed it, very gently, and then took it in his mouth.

She put her hand on the back of his head and held him there. He sucked deep, as if he had all night, and she felt it pull all the way down through her belly.

When she pushed him back on the bed he went. She got his shirt off him. He was beautiful: twenty-two and built for hitting, his chest dusted with dark hair down the middle, his stomach ridged hard, an old surgical scar white on one shoulder. She pulled his sweats down his thighs and his cock came up off his belly and stood.

It was long and straight, smooth and brown, with a fat flared head already slick at the slit and a thick vein running up the top of it under the skin. His balls were drawn up tight and heavy. It smelled of soap and of him, clean and warm and male, and when she wrapped her hand around the shaft her fingers didn't meet, and the whole cock jumped against her palm.

"Coach," he said, hoarse. "Are you..."

"Marcus." She stepped out of the sleep shorts, and then the plain white panties under them, damp through the cotton. She was not waxed, not shaved, just neatly trimmed, the hair a dark coppery red, and she was wet enough that it had gone dark and slick along the lips. "I have been sitting on that bench for three weeks."

She straddled him. She took him in her hand and set the head against her, and rubbed the head up and down through her folds until he was shining with her and she could hear it. Then she sat down.

He was long. She felt the head spread her and push in, and keep going, sliding up through her with a long slow drag that she felt along every inch of her walls, deeper, deeper, past where she thought he would end, until she was sitting on his hips with her mouth open and the whole of him packed up inside her, the tip pressing on something deep and tender at the very back. She stayed there. She could feel him throbbing.

He didn't move. His hands were on her thighs, spread wide over the hard tanned muscle, and they were shaking.

"You can hold on to me," she said.

He held on. She began to ride him.

He lasted. That was the astonishing thing. He was careful and reverent and he lasted, and when she found the angle she liked, leaning back on her hands with his cock dragging along her front wall on every lift, he held her hips and gave it to her from underneath, slow, deep, steady, exactly the stroke she wanted and no faster. Her gorgeous tits swung over him and slapped together at the top of every lift, and he watched them hungrily, as if he were memorizing them. The wet sounds of her filled the little room over the ticking of the heater, and she could feel herself running down onto him, slicking his balls, the sheet.

She came the first time with his thumb on her clit, held there steady as she ground on it, and she bit her lip bloody to keep it off the corridor. She came the second time riding him hard, her round ass smacking down onto his thighs loud enough for the corridor, her own thighs burning, and didn't bother. When he finally asked, in a whisper, she said "Yes. In me," and he came with his face buried in her cleavage, breathing in the warm salt of her skin, and his arms locked around her back, pulsing deep inside her for so long she felt it flooding out around him before he'd finished.

Afterward he lay with his head on her stomach, and she ran her fingers through his hair.

"We're watching the run game tomorrow night," she said. "Bring your laptop."

When he had gone she took off her wedding ring and put it in the drawer with the Bible.

Marcus Dade. Twenty-two. Captain. My room, after film.

The Deal

The quarterback was Tyler Brandt, a junior, twenty-one, with a face off a cereal box and a habit of throwing into double coverage on third down because he thought he was faster than God.

She kept him after the Thursday walk-through. The rest of the offense filed out past her, and he stayed slouched in the front row with his legs stretched out and his hands laced behind his head, grinning at her as if he already knew how this went.

"Six interceptions in five games," said Carol. "You decide where the ball's going before it's even snapped, and you throw it there whether anybody's open or not. Because you think you're pretty."

"I am pretty."

"You are," she said. "And you're about to be the prettiest backup in the conference. Coach Halvorsen asked me on Monday what I think of the redshirt freshman. I told him I'd let him know after Saturday."

The grin went. The color drained out of his face behind it, all at once, and for a second he looked exactly twenty-one.

She leaned back against the table at the front of the room with her hands on the edge behind her, and let him look at her. Even then, he did. He looked all the way down and all the way back up, the way men in bars looked.

"But..." said Carol. She waited until his eyes came back up to her face. "If you do it right. You read the whole field. You throw it away when nobody's open. You take the sack if you have to. Four quarters of that, and you get something from me."

"What kind of something?"

"The kind you'll know when you see it."

He laughed, once, not sure she meant it. She didn't laugh. After a moment he stopped.

"Yes, ma'am," said Tyler.

The Shower

They were down four with a minute and nine to play, at home, in the first round of the playoffs, with forty thousand people on their feet and the snow coming down sideways through the lights.

She had worn the gray wool skirt that day, with thick black tights and her tall boots, and Halvorsen had put her on the end of the bench under the heater. She was supposed to sit there and look like grief.

On third and eleven from the thirty, Tyler dropped back, looked left, looked the safety off to the middle of the field, came back right, and laid it in over the corner's shoulder in the back of the end zone.

The place came apart. The receiver went down in the snow with the ball clutched to his chest, and the whole bench went over the sideline after him. Tyler never made it to the end zone. His own linemen got to him first, five of them, and hoisted him off the turf, and then Otis Brenner came across from the sideline at a dead run with no helmet on, took him off their shoulders, and held him straight up over his head in the snow while forty thousand people screamed. Marcus was hammering on his shoulder pads with both fists. The kicker, who still had to kick the extra point, was crying.

When they finally put him down, Tyler came out of the pile with his helmet in his hand and his mouth wide open, shouting something nobody could hear, and looked straight down the sideline to the end of the bench.

Carol looked back at him.

She was sitting with her knees together. She let them part. A foot of space, the gray wool riding up, black tights and a shadow and nothing at all to see, not from forty yards, not in snow.

He saw it. She watched him see it. His face went perfectly still in the middle of all that noise.

Then she stood up, smoothed her skirt, and walked away up the tunnel.

---

Upstairs, at the end of the coaches' corridor, was the head coach's office, with a private bathroom and a tiled shower her husband had put in the year he was promoted. His key was still on her ring.

She heard Tyler on the stairs before she saw him. He came in still in his game pants and his socks, with his shoulder pads off and his jersey off and his undershirt soaked through and stuck to him, steaming faintly in the warm office, smelling of turf and sweat and the cold.

"Lock it," said Carol.

He locked it. She went into the bathroom and turned the shower on, and when she came out he was standing exactly where she had left him, breathing hard.

"You did it," she said. "You looked off the safety."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Take your clothes off."

He stripped like a boy on a beach, all at once, the shirt over his head and the pants and the compression shorts shoved down together. He was lean for a quarterback, long-muscled and smooth, nearly hairless across the chest, with a farmer's tan from summer camp ending sharp at his biceps and a tattoo of a cross on his ribs. His cock had come up before the shorts were past his knees.

It was a pretty cock, as pretty as the rest of him and as sure of itself. Long and a little curved, pale against the dark nest of hair at the root, the head flushed a deep rose and swollen fat and shining. It stood up toward his navel and bobbed with his pulse. He smelled of the game: salt and sweat, rubber pellets from the turf, the sharp musk of a man who has been running for three hours in plastic armor.

Carol undressed slower. The boots. The tights, peeled down and kicked away. The skirt. Her blouse, button by button, while he watched with his hands in fists at his sides. Under it she had on a black bra and plain black briefs, a coach's wife's underwear, good cotton. She turned to hang the skirt on the door, taking her time over it, and knew without looking where his eyes had gone: the briefs had lost the fight with her ass, the black cotton stretched tight over the shelf of it and riding up into the crease under each cheek. She let him look. Then she turned back, unhooked the bra and let it go, and watched his eyes go to her bare breasts and stay there, greedy, on the pale skin below the tan line and the nipples already drawn up hard and dark, and she hooked her thumbs in the briefs and pushed them down her long legs and stepped out of them.

"Jesus," said Tyler.

"You're filthy," said Carol. "Get in."

The shower was big enough for two linemen. The water came down hard and hot from a wide square fixture in the ceiling. He stood under it with his head back and she knelt in front of him on the wet tile.

She took his cock in her hand and held it in the spray and looked at it, the water running down the shaft and dripping off his balls. Then she put her mouth on him.

He tasted of sweat at first, salty and sharp, the taste of the whole game on him, and she sucked him clean. She took the head and washed it with her tongue, around and under the ridge, and drew back and licked down his shaft to the root and the tight heavy balls, sucking each one into her mouth in turn while he groaned, and came up the other side, and swallowed him. The water ran into her mouth around him. She let it run out of the corners of her lips. She went down until the head of him was in her throat and her nose was in his wet hair, and she held there and felt him throb against the back of her tongue, and pulled off with a long wet sound, and did it again.

"Coach. Coach, oh my God, I'm going to..."

She stood up.

He caught her. She hadn't told him to, and he did it anyway, the cockiness back in him all at once: he spun her around by the hips and put her up against the tile, her chest pressed flat to the wet wall and the water hammering on her back, and kicked her feet apart with his. She felt him behind her, the hot slick head of him sliding between her cheeks and down, finding her.

"Was this it?" he said, in her ear. "The something?"

"Find out."

He drove into her.

One long stroke, up from underneath, all the way. She rose onto her toes on the wet tile with it, her calves going hard. The curve of him dragged along her front wall the whole way in and pressed there at the top, deep, and she cried out against the tile and heard it come back at her off the walls. He held her by the hips and fucked her. Hard, under the water, with the slap of his hips into her ass loud as applause and the water splashing off them both, his curved cock sliding out of her almost to the head and ramming back up into her, each thrust lifting her heels off the floor. Her slick tits slid and squeaked against the wet tile, squashed flat and spilling out at the sides. Her soft ass shook every time he hit it, a ripple running up through both cheeks and dying out against the hard muscle underneath. She could feel the steam in her chest.

"Jesus, Coach. All that ass." He was panting it into her ear. "You looked so good on that bench. I couldn't think. I couldn't think about anything."

"You thought about the safety."

"I thought about the safety," he gasped, and laughed, and slammed into her again.

She reached back and got a hand in his wet hair. She took the other down between her legs to her clit and held it there, and his rhythm drove her into her own fingers, and she came against the tile with her mouth open and the water in it, her slick cunt clenching on that pretty curved cock in long hard pulls, so hard he swore and had to stop.

"That's not a pick, Brandt," she said. "Keep going."

He kept going. He lasted another minute, which she would not have bet on, and then he pulled her back off the wall by the hips and buried himself to the root and came, with a shout into her shoulder, and she felt him flood her, hot and deep and pulsing, and then running back down the insides of her thighs to swirl away down the drain with the rest of the game.

Afterward he leaned on the tile with his forehead and laughed like a man who'd been told he'd won a car.

"Same deal next week?" he said.

"Next week's deal," said Carol, "is that you don't throw a pick."

Tyler Brandt. Twenty-one. Quarterback. In his shower.

The Equipment Room

The defensive end was Otis Brenner, a senior, twenty-two, six foot eight and three hundred and thirty pounds, with a big, friendly potato of a face. He was the biggest human being she had ever stood next to. He was also, for reasons it took her a week of film to be sure of, getting worse every game.

He was coming off the ball late and high, half turned. She watched it in the den at two in the morning, frame by frame, until she saw why.

He was hard.

Every snap, in every game since she had started standing on the sideline. The compression shorts did their best. It was in the way of his first step.

She found him after practice on the Wednesday and took him by the elbow and walked him down the service corridor past the training room to the steel door at the end.

The equipment room was cold and windowless, wire cages of helmets and racks of pads, with the stack of blue tackling dummies against the far wall. She had read about this room, in her husband's handwriting, the week he died. She looked at the dummies for a second. Then she shut the door and turned the bolt.

"Otis."

"Yes, Coach."

"You're coming off the ball wrong. You're late, you're high, you're turning your hips before the snap, and everybody in this conference has seen the tape. What is wrong with you?"

Otis looked at his feet. He went red from the collar of his practice jersey up.

"It's... I don't..." He scratched the back of his neck. "It's kind of a personal thing, Coach."

"Personal."

"Yes, ma'am."

Carol folded her arms. It pushed her generous breasts up and together under the blouse until the top button strained and the soft line of her cleavage swelled up into the open collar, and she shifted her weight onto one hip, and the pencil skirt drew tight over the curve of it all the way down to her knee. She waited. She was very good at waiting. She had waited out three brothers.

"Otis."

He looked up at her face, and then, helplessly, a little lower. Then lower again, down the long line of the skirt.

It started then. She watched it happen. Under the mesh practice shorts something stirred, and lifted, and kept on lifting, and Otis made a small despairing sound and put both hands over it, which did nothing at all. It was enormous. It pushed the mesh out in front of him, past his hands, and it was still going.

"Sorry, Coach," he said. "It's just like that."

"Like what?"

"When you're around." He spread his huge hands. "It just does that. I can't help it. I tried thinking about my grandma. I tried thinking about Coach Halvorsen. It just keeps on." He looked miserable. "It's worse when you walk away, Coach."

Carol looked at it. Then she looked at the ceiling, and let out a long breath through her nose, the sigh of a woman who has found the dishwasher full of clean dishes that nobody unloaded.

"Fine," she said. "Pull them down."

"Ma'am?"

"Pull them down, Otis. We're fixing it. We have a playoff to win."

He pulled them down, and his cock came up out of the mesh.

It was the biggest she had ever seen, on a screen or in a book or in her life, and she had read a great deal about werewolves. It was as thick as her forearm and nearly as long, pale and heavy and roped with veins, with a head on it the size of a plum, flushed dark purple and already slick. It didn't stand so much as hang out in front of him at a slant, too heavy to rise all the way, bobbing with his heartbeat. His balls were the size of eggs and hung low in a sparse nest of blond hair. He smelled of grass and Gatorade and a great deal of sweat.

"Good God, Otis."

"Sorry, Coach."

"Don't be sorry. Hold still."

She unbuttoned the blouse first. She was not an idiot. She took it off and folded it and laid it on the dummies, then reached behind her and unhooked the bra and laid that on top, and turned back to him bare to the waist.

Otis made a small, strangled sound.

The cold of the room found her bare skin at once. She felt the soft weight of her ample breasts sway free as she straightened, and her nipples pucker and swell tight, aching in the chill. She liked the way he stared at them. His cock jumped a full inch, and a bead of wet ran off the end of it onto the floor.

She took him in both hands. Her fingers didn't come close to meeting. He was hot and heavy and so hard he didn't give when she squeezed. She stroked him, root to head, both fists one above the other and the head still sticking out the top, her arms squeezing her tits together until the bare swells bulged between them and bounced with every stroke of her fists, and on the second stroke, with his eyes fixed on it, Otis said "Oh, no," in a small voice, and came.

It hit her square in the chest. Across her naked tits, her chin, her collarbone, rope after thick rope, hot on her bare skin, so much of it she stepped back and it kept coming, splashing the concrete between her shoes. She stood there dripping and looked at him.

He was still hard. He hadn't moved an inch.

"It does that," said Otis apologetically. "I need a couple."

Carol wiped her chin with the back of her wrist and looked at that cock. Then she knelt down on the concrete.

"Then you're getting a couple."

She couldn't get much of him in her mouth. She got the head in with her mouth stretched until it ached, her lips spread around the fat purple ridge of it, and sucked, and worked the rest of him with both hands slick with his own cum. He tasted of salt and bleach. He groaned, low and helpless. She pulled off with a string of spit and pushed her full tits together around him with her forearms, the slick valley between them swallowing the shaft, the slick of him all over her skin, and he fucked them clumsily, moaning "Sorry, they're just so big, Coach," too excited to aim, the huge head popping up between them and bumping her chin. She opened her mouth for it. The next time it came up she caught it on her tongue.

He came again inside a minute, half in her mouth and half up her throat and neck and over her chest, and she swallowed what she could and spat the rest on the floor.

"Still?" said Carol, hoarse.

"Sorry, Coach."

She stood up. She unzipped the pencil skirt and stepped out of it and her briefs, and bent over the stack of tackling dummies with her long legs braced apart on the concrete, her bare ass pushed up and offered to him, plump and goose-pimpled in the cold air, and looked back at him over her shoulder.

"Slowly, Otis. I mean it. Slowly."

He took her hips in his hands. They covered her from her waist to her thighs. He was slow, for Otis. He set the head against her and pushed, and she felt herself open around it and open and open, wider than she had ever been opened, a stretching burn at her entrance that made her grab the vinyl with both fists, and then the head popped into her and she yelped and he froze.

"Coach?"

"Keep going."

He kept going. He fed himself into her an inch at a time, and every inch shoved her open around him and filled her somewhere new, until he hit the end of her with a third of him still outside and both of them groaned. She was so full she could feel him in her stomach. She could feel her own pulse around him.

Then he started to move, and she found out what twice had bought her.

He was methodical about it in a way he had never been on a football field: out, all the way to that plum-sized head, so she felt every inch of him leave her, every ridge and vein of that thick shaft scraping along her walls on the way, and then back in just as slow, the whole fat weight of him dragging over every nerve she had and opening her again from the beginning. Nothing hurried. Nothing missed. It was nothing like the door, or the desk. It wasn't being pounded. It was being gone over, inch by inch, by something too big to miss any of her.

The dummies thudded against the wall in a steady, patient rhythm. Her heavy tits hung under her, sticky with him, swaying with every push, and her firm ass shivered against his belly at the end of every slow push. She came the first time with her face in the vinyl and he didn't change pace at all; the drag went on through it and out the other side and started building the next one before the first was done. The clock over the door said four-fifteen when he started. She looked at it once more, somewhere in the middle, with tears running down her nose, and it said four twenty-two, and she didn't look again.

When he finally came he bellowed, and she felt it rushing into her and then straight back out around him and down the backs of her thighs to her knees. The clock said four-thirty.

He pulled out. She heard it, a long wet sound, and felt the gush follow.

She looked back. That cock was going down at last.

"Thank you, Coach," said Otis, with enormous feeling. "I feel real loose."

"Good," said Carol, with her cheek on the vinyl. "Stay loose."

She lay there over the dummies for a minute after he had gone, legs shaking, his cum running down the inside of her thighs, and started to laugh.

Otis Brenner. Twenty-two. Equipment room, over the tackling dummies. Three times. Him, not me.

Liam

The quarterfinal was on the road, in a mountain town with a two-lane highway and one motel, and Liam drove eight hours to sit in the visitors' section in a borrowed team scarf.

She saw him in warm-ups. She would have seen him anywhere. He was leaning on the rail above the tunnel with his arms folded, and he was not watching the team. He was looking at her, openly, from top to toe and back down to her ass, where his eyes stayed, exactly the way he had looked at her across her own kitchen when he was a sophomore and she was thirty-three, and every time since. Never once ashamed of it. She had remembered him for it for nine years. And she knew what that look wanted, because it had never bothered to hide it: her bent over in front of him, and his face buried in her ass. She stood a little straighter all through warm-ups.

They won by ten. She slipped out of the team hotel at eleven, past the night clerk, in her coat and her running shoes, and walked a half mile up the highway in the snow to the motel.

Room nine. He had the door open before she knocked.

"Coach," he said.

"Don't call me that."

He kissed her in the doorway with the snow coming in around them, both hands down the back of her sweats and full of her ass, squeezing, spreading, kneading it, and she moaned into his mouth and kissed him harder and pushed back into his hands. She could have stood there in the snow all night being kissed like that. Then he handed her a box.

It was flat, matte black, tied with a black ribbon, and the name on the lid was French and meant nothing to her. Inside, under tissue, was lingerie she would never in her life have bought.

Red. Not a pretty red: deep cherry, almost wine, a color she associated with lipstick on other women. A bra in sheer floral lace, her size exactly, a 34 double D, though she had never told him, without a scrap of padding, plunging so low at the center that the two cups barely met, with scalloped edges and thin satin straps. A matching garter belt of the same lace, narrow and high-waisted. Sheer black stockings with a lace welt. And a thong, in the same red lace, that was really no more than a triangle the size of her palm on a string.

"Liam."

"I've been thinking about you in that since the funeral," he said. "Go on."

She went into the bathroom. She took off her coat and the sweats and the running shoes and stood in front of a mirror with a crack across the corner and put it on, piece by piece, and looked.

She did not look like a coach's wife.

The bra held her and showed her at the same time. The sheer lace cupped her from underneath and lifted, red against the white below her tan line, and pushed her heavy breasts up over the scalloped edges, lush and on show, the way nothing she owned had ever let them; through the flowers she could see her own nipples, wide and dark and pushing at the mesh. The plunge went nearly to her navel, a long shadowed line of cleavage running down between the red flowers. The garter belt sat high on her waist above the hard ridges of her stomach and framed the long muscle of her thighs, and the sheer black nylon went up her legs, sleek and endless, to a lace welt with the red clips biting into it. The thong was cut so high at the hips it sat on the bone. She turned around. It disappeared completely between her cheeks. Her ass stood out bare above the stocking tops, every soft inch of it sitting up proud on the muscle, a volleyball player's ass, and she had never seen it like this.

She came out.

Liam was sitting on the end of the bed. He didn't get up. He looked at her, and kept looking, and his face did something she had not seen a man's face do for her in her whole marriage.

"Turn around," he said.

She turned around.

"Slower this time."

She turned around slower, and stopped with her back to him. He breathed out like he'd been punched, and didn't say anything at all.

"Come here."

He kept her standing between his knees for a long time. He touched her through the lace first. He ran his knuckles over the red flowers on one soft, supple breast, so lightly she could barely feel it, and then his thumb over the nipple through the lace until it stood up hard into the mesh. He hooked a finger under one thin strap and lifted it, and set it back. He traced the garter straps down the front of each thigh to the clips. He laid his palm on the triangle of the thong and held it there and felt how wet she was through it, and didn't move his hand, and watched her face while she tried not to push against it.

"You never let anybody look at you," he said. "You know that? All those years. You stood next to him at every one of those things in a sweater."

He kissed her stomach. He kissed the hard muscle under the garter belt and the crease of her hip and the band of bare skin above each stocking top. He turned her around and knelt on the motel carpet and kissed his way up the back of each thigh to the curve of her ass, and bit it, and she gasped. He stood and unhooked the bra and drew it down her arms and let her ripe tits tumble warm from the lace into his hands, and held them up to the mirror on the wall and squeezed, and looked at them there over her shoulder with his mouth open, the red lace hanging off her wrists.

"There you are," said Liam.

He bent her over the end of the bed. Face down on the motel bedspread, in the garter belt and the stockings, her stockinged feet still on the carpet and her lush ass up in the air with the red straps running down over it. He knelt on the carpet behind her, hooked a finger under the narrow strip of red lace and drew it aside, and held it there, and spread her open with his other hand.

She felt the air first. Then his breath. Then his tongue, flat and hot and slow, dragging up through her from her clit to the very top of her ass in one long stroke, and back down again, and she made a sound she didn't recognize and pressed her face into the sheets.

He took his time over that too. He ate her cunt from behind, his nose pushed in against her, sucking her swollen lips into his mouth one at a time. Then he went higher and circled her asshole with the tip of his tongue, around and around, pressing, until it gave and he pushed into her there, and she grabbed a fistful of sheet and bit down on it, hard. Nobody had ever. Not once. He went back and forth between the two, unhurried, the scrape of his stubble on the insides of her cheeks, the lace held out of his way, until she was rocking back onto his face and sobbing into the bedspread with her teeth locked in the cotton. He slid two fingers into her cunt and curled them and kept his tongue where it was, and she came like that, bent over a motel bed with a man's tongue in her ass, shaking so hard the garter straps snapped against her thighs and her toes curled tight inside the black nylon.

He stood up behind her, still holding the lace aside, and she heard his belt and then his jeans hit the floor. His cock was the one she had had in her the night of the funeral: long, slimmer than her husband's, with a curve that found her front wall without being asked. He fed himself into her in one long slide and she groaned into the sheets.

Then he took a fistful of her auburn hair and pulled her head up off the bed, her back bowing, and fucked her right there, bent over the end of it, deep and hard, his hips smacking into her ass. Every few strokes his free hand came down on it, one cheek and then the other, each smack landing with a crack and a shudder and a sting that bloomed into heat a second later, until both cheeks were as red as the lace.

"Nine years," he said through his teeth, "I've been looking at that ass."

The garter straps jumped. The bed walked across the carpet into the wall, and somebody in the next room banged back.

Later he peeled the thong off her at last, over the clips, and stuffed it in the pocket of his jeans on the floor, and laid her flat on her stomach across the bed and came down on top of her. He pushed her thighs together with his knees and slid into her from behind, and with her legs closed she was so tight around him that they both swore. He fucked her pressed into the mattress with his whole weight on her, his chest on her back, deep grinding strokes that pinned her clit into the bedspread. He worked his hands under her and took her tits where they were crushed flat against the bedspread, more than a handful each, and mauled them, pinching her nipples hard between his fingers until she yelped, and he put his mouth on the side of her neck and bit, and held on.

She came. She came again. She stopped being able to tell them apart, one rolling into the next under the weight of him, her teeth in the sheets and his teeth in her neck, and he didn't stop. When he came at last he pressed her down into the bed and held her there and filled her, groaning into her neck, and she felt every pulse.

Afterward they lay tangled in the motel sheets with the radiator clanking. Her stockings had runs in them. One clip had come off the belt.

"The money's coming," Liam said, into her hair. "It's going to be a lot."

"I don't want to talk about him."

"I'm not." He ran his hand down her stomach to the lace of the garter belt she still had on. "Carol. You're free now. You're not just Coach's wife anymore." He kissed her temple. "You should be doing things for yourself."

She didn't answer. She was looking at the red lace on the floor.

Liam. Again. Room nine, in the snow.

California

The semifinal was in California, and Dana and Michelle drove up from Newport Beach to meet her for drinks the night before.

Dana had been her setter in college and Michelle the other outside hitter. She had last seen them in person at Michelle's second wedding, and on Facebook three days ago, and had assumed the photos were filtered.

They were not filtered.

They came across the hotel bar at her like a pair of yachts, both forty-three and neither of them looking any age at all. Dana's face was smooth from brow to chin, with lips plumped to a soft pout and lashes that couldn't possibly be hers, and her brand-new breasts, under a white silk shirt open three buttons, were round, retroussé and perfectly still, a sculpted cleft that didn't so much as tremble when she walked. Michelle had had her neck done, and her eyes, and something to her ass that left it lifted and plump and made the white jeans look sprayed on, and her skin had a sheen to it. Both of them glowed. Both of them had a man.

Dana's was Kai, twenty-six, a surf instructor, broad and sun-bleached. Michelle's was Brandon, twenty-four, who kept his hand on the back of her neck for the whole of the first martini. Both of them kissed Carol on the cheek and went to play pool.

"Carol," said Dana, taking both her hands. "Oh, honey. We're so sorry."

"Thank you."

"We're not that sorry," said Michelle. "He never let you have any fun. Remember Cabo? He made you wear a cover-up to the pool."

Carol laughed for the first time in a month without anyone's hand on her.

They drank. Dana told her who did the lips and Michelle who did the eyes, and they both told her about Kai's stamina and Brandon's tongue, and the place in Laguna that did your whole body in a day, and the shop in Newport where a woman measured you with her hands and not with a tape. Carol sat across the table in her staff fleece and her sensible turtleneck and listened to every word of it. She didn't say much. She listened the way she listened to film, and somewhere around the second martini she realized she was taking notes in her head.

You should be doing things for yourself, Liam had said, in a motel bed in the snow. You're not just Coach's wife anymore.

Michelle caught her looking at the boys at the pool table, and laughed. "Oh, she's thinking about it."

"Maybe," said Carol.

"That means yes," Dana told Michelle. "She always said maybe before she spiked it in your face."

Back in her room that night she stood at the bathroom mirror in her underwear, with every light on, and looked.

She was still a good-looking woman. She knew that. The legs, the ass, the shoulders from the volleyball, the tits that men in airport lines still forgot themselves over. But the light over a hotel sink is honest. There were lines at the corners of her eyes that stayed after she stopped smiling, and two between her brows from a lifetime of squinting at film. Her skin had gone dry and dull from a season of sideline wind and bus heaters, and there were sunspots across her chest from every summer she had never bothered with sunscreen.

You look great for your age, Dana had said tonight, and meant it.

Carol leaned in close to the glass.

She didn't want to look great for her age. She wanted to look thirty.

---

The next morning, with three hours before the walk-through, she drove to a lingerie boutique Michelle had written on a cocktail napkin, and stood in the middle of it among the silk and the mirrors, and found she knew exactly what she wanted.

She bought navy and gold.

Those were the team colors. A bra in midnight navy satin, balconette, cut so low it was hardly there, with an overlay of gold lace scalloped over the top edge of each cup like the trim on a parade uniform. A matching garter belt, navy satin paneled with gold lace, high on the waist. Navy seamed stockings with a gold welt. And a thong in gold lace with navy satin ties at the hips, tied in bows, so that a man could pull one string and have it off her.

The salesgirl wrapped it in tissue and asked if it was for a special occasion.

"It's for a promise," said Carol.

The Promise

The final was in a domed stadium in the South, on the second Monday of January, against the team that had won it two years running.

She went into the locker room an hour before kickoff, while Halvorsen was out with the television people, and stood in front of the four of them on the bench: Marcus with his eyes closed, Tyler bouncing a knee, Otis eating a banana, and Javi Ortega, the senior safety, twenty-two, small and quick and scarred through one eyebrow, who had picked off two passes in the semifinal and had never once looked at her longer than was polite.

They all looked up. She had not told any of them about any of the others. She saw three of them find out, now, in each other's faces, one after another. Javi just looked at her.

"I'm not going to say anything about him," said Carol. "You've got his initials on your helmets. That's enough." She looked at each of them in turn. "Win tonight, and there's something special for you at the hotel. All four of you. At once."

There was a silence in which Otis stopped chewing.

Javi frowned. He looked at Carol, then at the others, then back at Carol, the way he looked at an offense that had lined up in something he hadn't seen on film. "At once," he said. "Like... all of us..."

Tyler leaned over and put his mouth to Javi's ear, and said something nobody else could hear.

Javi's eyebrow went up, the scarred one. Then the grin started and kept going until it went from ear to ear.

"Yes, Coach," said Marcus.

They won by three, on a field goal with no time left, after Javi broke up a fourth-down pass in the end zone, Otis sacked their quarterback twice in the fourth quarter with nothing whatever in the way of his first step, and Tyler threw for two hundred yards and no picks.

The confetti came down navy and gold. They dumped the Gatorade on Halvorsen, who wept. Then the four of them came down the sideline and picked Carol up between them, and carried her around the field on their shoulders under the lights, and she held his initials up on a helmet to the crowd, and laughed until she cried.

The Pack

The head coach's suite on the top floor of the team hotel was hers; Halvorsen, who snored, had given it to her without being asked.

She was ready at midnight. She had showered and dried her hair and left it down, auburn and heavy over her shoulders, and put on the navy and gold in front of the long mirror by the bed, piece by piece, the way she had in a motel with a crack across the glass. The stockings first, rolled up each long leg and smoothed, the seams drawn straight up the backs of her calves. The garter belt, hooked at the small of her back, the clips fastened front and back to the gold welts. The thong, its bows tied at each hip. The bra last.

Then she turned off every light in the suite but one, a lamp by the window, and stood in front of it with the city behind her, and waited for them to knock.

They knocked at five past. She said come in, and they came in single file, Marcus first, in team sweats and bare feet with their hair still wet from the locker-room showers, and stopped.

Nobody said anything. The door swung shut behind Otis on its own.

She let them look. She knew what they were seeing, because she had seen it in the mirror. The navy satin cups held her up and out, so low-cut that her tanned breasts swelled over the top of them, pushed together into a deep cleavage a man could lose his hand in, and the gold scallops lay across them, with the dark of her nipples just showing above the edge where the satin gave up. The garter belt nipped her in at the waist above the hard lines of her stomach. The navy straps ran down the fronts of her long thighs to the gold welts, and the stockings went on down her long legs to toes she had painted gold to match. The thong was a scrap of gold lace on a pair of bows, and it covered almost nothing, and what it covered was already dark with her. She turned to the window and heard all four of them stop breathing. From behind there was no thong at all, only the navy bows at her hips, and the navy straps ran down over her ass to the gold welts and framed it, that magnificent grown woman's ass, soft over the hard muscle, bare between the straps for anyone who wanted it, and she let them look at it for as long as they liked before she turned back.

Tyler said, "Oh, fuck me."

"In order," said Carol.

They moved toward her, all four, in from the edges of the room and out of the dark toward the lamp. Marcus from in front. Tyler and Javi from either side. Otis behind them, already tenting his sweats so badly he had to walk with a hitch.

She had read it a thousand times. Years in bed with the Kindle, with him asleep beside her: the woman alone in the clearing in the moonlight, and the eyes coming out of the trees all around her, one pair after another, and the circle closing. She had never read past that moment without touching herself.

The circle closed.

Marcus reached her first. He put his hands on her waist, on the satin of the garter belt, and slid them up her ribs to the bra and cupped her through it, his thumbs on the gold lace, rubbing over the scallops until her nipples came up hard and pushed out over the edge. Javi was at her side with his mouth on her neck and his teeth in it. Then Marcus kissed her, and his hands left the bra and went down her back to her ass and took hold of it, a cheek in each palm, his fingers sinking in, squeezing until the flesh swelled up between them. Tyler had a finger hooked through the gold bow at her hip.

"Can I?"

"You won," said Carol.

He pulled. The bow came undone. The thong slid down off her hip on one side and hung from the other, and Javi pulled that bow too, and caught it as it fell, and put it to his face and breathed in with his eyes closed.

Behind them Otis whimpered.

Marcus slipped the straps of the bra off her shoulders and peeled the cups down under her perfect tits, and the wire caught underneath and pushed them up and out over the navy satin, the pale skin below the tan line flushing pink, her nipples swollen and aching in the cool air of the suite. Four men looked at them. She felt each one look.

Then Marcus picked her up.

He did it the way they had carried her around the field, as though she weighed nothing, one arm under her knees and one around her back, and he walked her across the suite and threw her on the bed. She bounced. She laughed out loud with her hair across her face. When she pushed it back they were around the bed on every side, pulling off their sweats, and she lay propped on her elbows in her stockings and her garter belt with her flushed tits out over the bra, and looked at the four cocks in front of her, three she had chosen one at a time across a season and one she hadn't got to yet, standing up in the lamplight all at once.

Marcus's, long and straight and brown, with the thick vein along the top. Tyler's, pale and pretty and curved, flushed rose at the head. Javi's, which she was seeing for the first time: shorter than the others and very thick, dark and uncut, the foreskin drawn back off a fat wet head, with a scar across the hard flat belly above it. And Otis's, which simply had to be seen to be believed, and which the other three looked at for a moment in silence.

"Jesus, Brenner," said Tyler.

"Sorry," said Otis.

"Javi," said Carol. "Come here."

He came up the bed on his knees between her stockinged legs, and she let her thighs fall open for him, and he put his mouth on her. He ate her as if he were starving, his scarred brow pressed to her belly and his tongue everywhere, deep in her and up over her clit and down again, with Marcus kneeling beside her head and his mouth on one of her tits and Tyler on the other side with the other, sucking, both of them, each at his own pace, and she had her hands in two heads of wet hair and a third head between her legs and her back arched up off the bed. Otis knelt at the foot of the bed with his cock in his fist and watched with his mouth open.

She came with her heels digging into Javi's back and the whole bed shaking.

When she opened her eyes Javi had rolled onto his back beside her, his mouth still wet with her, grinning.

She climbed on him. She put a stockinged knee each side of his hips and took him in her hand, that short thick cock, slick already from her own wet, and sat down on it. He was so thick that she had to work for the last of him, and when she was down on the root of him she stayed there with her eyes closed, stretched around him, and heard Tyler swear.

Then hands were on her from three sides at once.

Tyler had her hair. He was kneeling up on the bed beside Javi's head, and he wound her auburn hair around his fist and turned her face to his cock, and she opened her mouth and he pushed in. He tasted of soap this time. He didn't wait for her to work him. He held her by the hair and fucked her mouth, short and greedy, the curved head of him sliding over her tongue and bumping at her throat, and she moaned around him and felt Javi jerk inside her at the sound.

Marcus was behind her. She knew his hands by now. They were warm, and they spread her ass open, his thumbs either side of the tight pucker of her, and then she felt the cold of the lube she had left on the nightstand, a slick pool of it, and his thumb circling, and resting there.

She had never. She had asked her husband for it once, the first year, and he had looked at her as if she had suggested they rob a bank.

She pulled her mouth off Tyler with a string of spit swinging from her lip and looked back over her shoulder at the captain. "Yes," she said. "You."

Marcus was slow. He was slow the way he read a formation, as if there were all the time in the world and getting it right was the only thing in it. His thumb went into her first, to the knuckle, and she gasped at it, at the tight sharp burn and then the strange heavy fullness. He worked it, around and in, until she was pushing back on it, and then two fingers, scissoring her open, more lube, his other hand flat and warm on the small of her back, while Javi lay under her and held perfectly still and Tyler stroked her cheek with the wet head of his cock.

Then the head of Marcus's cock was against her ass, and pressing.

It wouldn't go. He pressed a little harder, and waited, and she breathed out and felt herself give, a burning stretch around that fat flared head that went on and on, so wide she thought she would split, and then it slipped through the ring of her and she cried out. He stopped dead. She was shaking from her shoulders to her knees. She could feel the head of him in her ass and Javi's thick cock in her cunt below it, and the two of them were only an inch apart.

"Coach?" said Marcus, very low.

"More," said Carol.

He sank into her. Inch by inch, his hands on her hips, the long straight shaft following the head through the clenched ring of her and filling her ass with a deep heavy pressure she felt all the way up her spine, and with every inch Javi's cock grew tighter in her cunt, until she could feel them both, each one, separately, and then the two of them pressing against each other through one thin wall of her. She had stopped breathing. When Marcus's hips settled against her ass she was so full that she couldn't think. There was no room in her for thinking. He held there, his chest against her back, and kissed the back of her neck once.

Then they started to move.

Javi drove up into her from underneath in short hard strokes, and Marcus worked her ass from behind, long and slow and deep, the way he did everything, the two of them falling into a rhythm without a word to each other, one in as the other drew out, so that she was never empty for a second. Her tender tits dragged back and forth across Javi's chest, her stiff nipples scraping his skin, and every time Marcus bottomed out the jolt went through her ass and up her spine and pushed her down harder onto Javi. Tyler had her by the hair again and was back in her mouth, and she was being fucked from three sides with nothing to hold on to and nothing to do, rocking between them, spit running down her chin, the wet slap of hips on her ass and the squelch of her cunt and the bed rocking on its frame, and somewhere at the bottom of all that noise her own voice, moaning around Tyler's cock without a stop.

Mine, she thought. All of them. I picked every single one.

She came between them. It started deep in her ass and went up her spine, and she clenched down on both of them at once and heard them both swear, and Tyler pulled out of her mouth just in time to hear her scream.

Tyler came first, kneeling up in front of her with his fist flying, across her face and into her open mouth and down her chin into her cleavage in hot thick ropes, and she held her mouth open for it and looked up at him while it landed. Then Marcus, who had lasted through all of it, pressed in to the root and held there with his forehead between her shoulder blades, and she felt it, his cock pulsing deep in her ass and the heat of him flooding her, strange and deep and wonderful. When he eased out of her she felt the warm trickle of him follow, and Javi rolled her onto her back and put her stockinged legs over his shoulders, turned his face to kiss the navy nylon at her ankle, and fucked her into the bed in hard short strokes, swearing softly, and came in her with his eyes open.

She lay in the middle of the bed with her legs open and the garter belt crooked and one stocking down around her knee, dripping from both holes, with Tyler's cum drying on her chin, and laughed up at the ceiling.

"Coach," said Otis, from the foot of the bed, with great dignity. "I've been real patient."

---

She washed up. She came back from the bathroom with a towel and a fresh face and the navy stockings peeled off and left on the tile, in nothing but the garter belt and the gold-trimmed bra, and the three of them were sprawled on the couch in the dark, drinking water and grinning, and Otis was standing by the bed with his cock in his hand like a man waiting for a bus.

She lay down on the edge of the bed on her back, and let her knees fall open, and looked at him.

"Otis," she said. "Use me."

He did. He took her by the ankles, her slim bare ankles lost in his fists, and spread her and pulled her to the very edge of the mattress, and fed that monstrous cock into her the way he had in the equipment room, inch by inch, the burn of it and the stretch, her swollen cunt forced open wider than it had any right to go, and she grabbed the sheets in both fists and took it. Then he forgot to be slow. He held her by the hips and fucked her with all three hundred and thirty pounds of him, and the bed went across the floor. Her big tits bounced up toward her chin on every slam, the pushed-down wire biting into the under-curve of each. She heard herself shouting yes and more and that's it, that's it, Otis, and from the couch she heard Tyler say, in awe, "Holy shit, she's taking it," and Marcus say, "Shut up," and Javi laughing.

She came on him so hard she saw stars. He came twice. Then he came again.

After that it went on for hours, and she stopped keeping count. Marcus in her mouth while Tyler had her on her knees. Javi under her and Otis behind her and the whole bed groaning. All four of them around her on the carpet at four in the morning while she knelt in the middle of them with her mouth open and her eyes shut and took it from every side, on her face, in her hair, streaked across her bare titflesh and down the gold lace of the bra she was still somehow wearing.

When the sky had gone gray over the city she lay across the bed with Marcus's head on her stomach and Javi asleep against her back and Tyler on the floor and Otis, huge and peaceful, snoring in the armchair, and stared at the ceiling.

Well, she thought. There's the pack.

Marcus Dade. Tyler Brandt. Otis Brenner. Javi Ortega, twenty-two, safety, new.

The suite. All night. Lost count.

Coda

The lawyer called at nine, while she was on the bus to the airport in sunglasses and the navy coat, with four young men asleep in the seats behind her.

"Mrs. Simmons. I'm sorry to call so early. I thought you'd want to know." He sounded almost happy. "They've come back with a number. It's not final. But it's close." He told her. It was a number larger than anything she was capable of imagining.

She did not say anything for quite a long time.

"Mrs. Simmons?"

"I'm here," said Carol.

She hung up. She looked out of the window at the highway going by in the low sun, and thought about Dana's lips, and Michelle's eyes, and the red lace on the floor of room nine.

Behind her Otis stirred in his sleep and said, "Sorry, Coach."

She smiled, and put her sunglasses back on.