Team Mates (2 page)

He sighed in relief. “Great. Well, that takes care of that.” He glanced at his watch. “It looks like we have our first practice in about fifteen minutes. I’ll see you all in the gym.”

***

Stacie and Tabby walked side by side towards the gym and the locker rooms.

“Day’s looking up for you, isn’t it?” teased Tabitha. “Mr. Glassman as our coach? You’ve been drooling over him for weeks. How wet are your panties right now?”

“No wetter than when I think about you,” the slender brunette retorted quietly. She glanced up and down the deserted hallway, then slipped her hand into the back pocket of Tabby's jeans, giving her buns a loving squeeze. “I’m proud of you, though,” she said softly. “It took a lot of guts to tell him you were bi.”

“Thanks,” said the curvy redhead. Fighting the pleasure that Stacie’s touch always invoked, she pulled her hand out of her pocket and held it, for once able to show her true affection for her.

Born within three weeks of each other and living only a few blocks apart, Stacie and Tabitha had been best friends since they were six years old. Together they had gone through grade school, puberty, middle school, heartaches, happiness, grief, and high school, not necessarily in that order. Unable to conceive of going to college apart, the had both recently been accepted to Iowa State.

And on the night of Stacie’s sixteenth birthday, they had become lovers.

Stacie, tall, slender, brown-haired and brown-eyed, had a gentle, open face that hid the fierce intelligence of her mind and her unswerving loyalty to Tabitha. While she considered herself bisexual, in reality the only woman she had ever wanted was the one who walked beside her now. She had experimented with men, and found their company
very
enjoyable, which was why she had spent half her senior year in a state of unrequited lust for her history teacher.

Tabitha was red-haired and with eyes the color of a winter sunset; dark, dark blue. She was shorter and curvier than her lover. Her face was as attractive as Stacie's, but hers was a more sensual, wicked sexiness, ready to explode into passion at a moment’s notice. Her breasts thrust out proudly from her chest, larger but no less beautiful than Stacie’s smaller bust. Truly bisexual, she was attracted to people of both gender, and had dated boys in the past. But her truest happiness was whenever she was in Stacie’s arms.

Both girls had toned legs and taut stomachs from volleyball practice, and Stacie was on the softball team in the spring. Their interests ran the gamut, from music to movies to astronomy (Tabitha) and mystery novels (Stacie).

“You know there's going to be trouble, though,” Tabitha said quietly. “If I'm starting instead of Heather...”

“You've deserved to start for over a year,” her lover said fiercely. “If Coach Walton wasn't such a bigoted old fart, Heather would have been the one on the bench.”

“That's the point,” Tabby said. “We get a new coach, I'm in the starting lineup, Heather has to pick splinters out of that sweet, sexy ass of hers...she's going to make a stink about it.”

“Stuck-up, hypocritical, repressed bitch,” Stacie said mildly. The days when the closed-minded attitudes of her classmates could drive her to a fury on Tabitha's behalf were long gone. “Just because she and Walton overheard you telling me you thought Heather looked hot. How long are you supposed to pay for one mistake?”

“Forever,” Tabitha said shortly, opening up the door to the locker room. As soon as she did, a flurry of questions from their half-dressed teammates hit them both.

*****

“So what do I do, Lindsey?” Alan said, looking down at his assistant coach.

“Well, if you were Coach Walton, you'd stand around looking grumpy. And every fifteen minutes or so you'd yell at the girls to start another drill,” grinned the equipment manager.

“Well, if I need to look sour, I'll grab a lemon. But I think we should do some drills.”

The girls had finished warming up, young bodies moving through their exercises with the ease of youth. Luckily for Alan, he kept some spare workout clothes in his office, for when didn't feel like going home before he went on his evening run. After the meeting with the seniors, he had quickly changed into sweat pants and a t-shirt and had hung a whistle around his neck.

He felt like a complete fraud.

With a sharp
tweet,
he brought the girls into a circle.

“All right, ladies,” he said. “I'm sure the seniors have broken the news to you. I'm going to be coaching the team for the next few weeks or so.

“I'm not going to give you any rah-rah speeches. I'm going to do my best for you, and I hope you'll do your best for each other.

“So. First drill. I hear the goal of this game is to score points,” he grinned. “And from what I remember from watching Misty May play beach volleyball in the Olympics, you do that by hitting the ball
really hard
so the other team can't play it. So let's do some setting and spiking drills.

“Jasmine, set it up, please.”

The team captain split the girls into two groups. One line took it it turns to set the ball up for a spike for the second line. Each girl made five sets, then rotated. Alan sat on the bench, making notes, trying not to be distracted by the entrancing sight of healthy female flesh.

As Jasmine had said, Tabitha was superior to everyone on the team. The redhead placed the ball with almost frightening precision, right where the spiking player could hit it with the greatest force.

Heather Clark, on the other hand, was wildly inconsistent. A pretty, bubbly, blonde who wore her hair in a ponytail, the junior seemed to have no idea where the ball would go from one effort to the next.

After one errant pass, Alan sighed and turned to Lindsey. “I can understand what the girls were saying. Why was she starting?”

Lindsey shrugged. “She's not much worse than anyone else, and she
is
pretty good at spiking the ball. But with Stacie and Jasmine, we don't need that. We need someone who can get them the ball in a position to make the kill. Heather can't.

“Honestly, Mr. Glassman, we're not very good. It's not Heather's fault. Or even Mr. Walton's. Aside from Jasmine and maybe Stacie, there just isn't much talent out there.”

“So where are we weakest?”

“On offense...”

“Well,” Alan brightened, “if we shore up the offense with Tabitha...”

“And defense,” Lindsey continued.

“Oh,” he said, deflated.” What's the problem on defense?”

Lindsey gestured to the other side of the net, where a few girls were shagging balls as they came flying past. One off of Jasmine's hands hit the floor with a whip-like crack, streaking towards the far wall.

“Offense is only half of the game. To be able to spike the ball for a kill, you have to have control. And you get
that
by fielding the ball when the other team tries to make a kill shot of their own. We're not very good at that. Our back line is terrible, really.”

“Hmmmm.” Alan made a mental note to see what he could find out about defensive drills in the next few days. Maybe he could find something online which would help. “Can I ask you a question, Lindsey?”

“Sure, Coach.”

He looked across the gym at Tabitha. She was standing in the spike line beside Stacie, laughing at something the taller girl said. “That thing Tabitha mentioned earlier this afternoon...”

“About her sexuality?”

“God, yes.” He scrubbed his face with his hands, trying not to feel like a pervert, though he was damned if he could figure out what the hell
he
was supposed to feel embarrassed about. “Do any of the other girls...do they treat Tabitha differently? Harass her? Give her a rough time?”

“One or two might, if they thought they could get away with it. Heather, for one. She's made some bitchy remarks. Maybe Claudia, too. Her parents are into that fundamentalist bullcrap. But they know if they tried they'd have Stacie to deal with.”

“Oh, yes, the twin terrors of Roosevelt High,” Alan smiled. Even he, insulated as he was from teenage gossip by his teaching position, knew the weight the two girls threw around in the social hierarchy of the school. Beautiful, smart, and popular, they could make or break someone just by trying. Luckily enough, however, neither seemed to be terribly interested in the sort of petty power game many kids their age enjoyed. He eyed the lines of girls, which seemed to be moving slower. “I think we've got them wore out, Lindsey. Let's move to the next drill.”

*****

The next few days went well, as far as Alan could tell. When he wasn't teaching or grading papers, he spent all his time researching volleyball and implementing new drills. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he could see improvement from several players.

His main problem, however, came from an unexpected direction. He had never imagined the effect of watching fifteen young women, all of them spectacularly fit, on his libido. After the first practice, he had started masturbating as soon as school ended, so he didn't end up sporting an erection while trying to coach the team.

Added to that was the knowledge that at least one of the girls on his team was bisexual. Tabitha Harrington was one of the most attractive girls in school, and had already played a walk-on role in some of Alan's midnight fantasies. He had been without a partner for months, and he could not help but wonder if she had a female lover. During a few distracted moments his fertile imagination had paired Tabby with some of the other girls on the team, watching them as they stripped their clothes off and pleasured each other.

Sick, Alan,
he thought.
You're just sick. Find someone your own age. You're not a teenager anymore, so cut out the schoolgirl fantasies.

Blinking, he drew himself back into the present. It was Thursday afternoon, and they were having their last practice before their match against Ames West. Blowing on the whistle, he drew the girls into a huddle.

“OK, we've got a new drill today,” he said, ignoring the groans around him. “Right now, our back line is awful,” he said. “We need to get better at fielding the ball when the other team spikes it. So I've brought these.” He gestured to one side of the gym, where a pile of wrestling mats was waiting.

“We're going to use these so we don't hurt ourselves today.”

“What are we going to do, wrestle?” Rachel Adams asked snidely.

“Tabitha might like that,” Claudia Schumaker said, and a few girls giggled.

Alan's light blue eyes grew cold as ice. “One more remark like that, Claudia, and you're going home early.” He watched the sophomore girl until she dropped her eyes. “Twenty laps around the gym. Now.”

Claudia gasped and looked around, but found no support from her teammates. “But Mr. Walton-”

“Mr. Walton isn't your coach anymore. I am. Twenty laps. Now.” He waited until Claudia slouched to the side of the gym and started running.

“All right, let's get these mats out by the net,” Alan said. “Lindsey, get up on that ladder.” When everything was arranged to his satisfaction, he turned to the team.
“The problem, girls, is that you're afraid of hurting yourself. I understand. It isn't easy throwing yourself down on a hard gym floor to try to save a point. But that's what we're going to do. And I'm going to show you.

“Lindsey is going to throw the ball down towards the mat. My job is to save it.” Moving gracefully, he flexed his knees and moved into position. He nodded up at the ladder. “Whenever you're ready, Lindsey.”

The small girl raised her arm and threw the ball as hard as she could at the mat in front of Mr. Glassman. Instantly he exploded into motion, diving to the floor, his arms locked in front of him. Before the ball could touch the mat, he knocked it upward in a slow, gentle arc, an easy ball for anyone to play.

“Again.” The result was the same.

And again.

Standing beside Tabby, Stacie could barely contain her lust. First Mr. Glassman punished someone who had mocked her girlfriend. Now he was showing off his gorgeous body right in front of her! Her teeth bit her lower lip as she watched his sexy ass flex inside his loose sweatpants. With fiery eyes, she drank in his corded arms, his strong legs. After a few minutes, his brown hair was stuck to his forehead in sweaty spikes, and she wanted nothing more than to peel off his clothes and drag him into the showers with her.

“Calm down, girl,” came a soft, sultry voice from her side. Glancing over, she saw Tabby eying her with amusement. “If you don't slow down your breathing you're going to hyperventilate and pass right out.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“What do you think?” Tabby smirked, dropping her eyes to look at Stacie's breasts. Even through her sports bra and her practice jersey, the outlines of her erect nipples could be easily seen.

“Shit,” she breathed. Luckily for her, Mr. Glassman chose to end the demonstration at that moment.

“That was with no knee or elbow-pads,” he said, breathing deeply. “And you girls know technique way better than I do. If I can do this, so can you. You're not going to get hurt.

“All right,” he continued. “Split into two groups. Lindsey will run one side, I'll do the other. Everyone gets ten tries, then go shag balls so the next person in line can go.” He tweeted his whistle and clapped his hands. “Let's go!”