The soccer team party was in full swing when we arrived. My son immediately stripped off his jersey and jumped into the pool, splashing all the parents who'd been unwise enough to sit too close. As always, I felt socially awkward, despite the fact that I'd known most of these parents for years, particularly since my husband hadn't been able to come. I searched for the friendliest face, a mom named Kayla, and walked over to greet her. I showed her the bottle of scotch I'd brought. "Where's the bar?"
She looked at the bottle and rolled her eyes. "Everyone else brings Bud or, at most, an IPA, and here you are with a bottle of scotch." She laughed. "That is so you. Come on, the booze is over there, on the patio." She pointed to the other side of the house, where another group of parents were sitting around a firepit. I saw the usual suspects, but also saw J., my son's coach. We locked eyes for a brief moment before I looked away. My arrival had been noted. Kayla turned and looked over her shoulder. "What are you waiting for? Come on."
I busied myself at the booze table, which was spilling over with all manner of flavored vodka, Southern Comfort, fruit schnapps, and other atrocities. I picked up a clean glass from the table, dipped it into the ice bucket, collected a few cubes, and poured myself a measure of the scotch. It's amazing the things that can make a woman unusual in the eyes of other parents--the fact that she reads a book instead of scrolling through her phone at a game, for example, or her choice of drink. You'd have thought I'd asked for a snifter of motor oil the way the dads teased me when I sat down. "What can I say, I also like tweed jackets and book-lined studies," I finally joked. "I must have been an Oxford professor in a former life."
The conversation went on as it usually did at team events. Friendly banter to start, relaxed laughs, but as the drinking continued, long, boring recaps of games long past dominated the conversation. Empty beer bottles accumulated at a clip. Someone told the story of a young coach who had gotten into a fistfight with a referee at a weekend tournament. Another shared a boring account of a futsal game that had gone into overtime. I listened, mostly, still hyperaware of J.'s presence. He sat across the fire pit from me, drinking and laughing amiably and listening to the conversation around him. I tried not to look at him because I felt sure that all the things I'd been thinking about--all the things I wanted to do to him, all the things I wanted him to do to me--would be obvious the moment I looked him in the eye. I was pretty successful--you would've thought I had no idea he was even there. Women can be very good at that.
It had started last winter. I remember the slush puddles in the soccer center parking lot had frozen and refrozen so many times that all matter of debris--wads of gum, candy wrappers, hair binders--remained trapped in them like fossil insects in amber. Even the sky was like a dingy muslin curtain. I'd felt like it had been years since I'd seen a single white cloud, and I remember wondering if a sports season had ever ended early due to mass Seasonal Affective Disorder. I would walk into the dome after my kid, find a bench near the turf to sit, preferably away from the door that always seemed to be opening and closing and inviting the polar vortex in, pull out my book, and start to read while the other parents used the hour to walk around the track, listening to podcasts. I wasn't anti-social, exactly, just shy. Terrible at initiating conversations, okay at maintaining them, always desperate to be done, particularly if they were the same recycled chats about soccer schedules, winter driving, or the weather. Over the years with this soccer club, I'd learned that having a book in my hand was like being surrounded by a force-field. Hardly anyone talked to me when I was reading. Which was just fine with me.
But I was often pulled out of my book by the sound of J.'s voice as he coached the boys on the other side of the running track. He been their coach for about five months now, since last fall, and he hadn't really registered before--he was just another in a long line of coaches my son had had over the years. But I had caught him watching me so many times that it was impossible not to notice him, so eventually I did.
One practice, Ellie, one of the divorced moms, had sat down next to me and pointed at J., telling me she'd asked the age group coordinator if J. was single (he was), and that once the season was over, she was going to make her move. "He's really cute, right?"
For the first time, I really looked at him. He was trim and lean, not overly tall--typical former soccer player. He wore athletic warm-ups, tapered at the ankles and had a nice face, with kind, dark eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and a baseball cap that I'd never seen him without.
"Cute, right?" Ellie pressed.
"I guess so," I replied. "I'm not really into guys with beards. And besides, it's kind of hard to tell from a distance."
She looked at me. "A distance? Haven't you ever talked to him?" I shook my head. I never talked to my kids' coaches. Besides being incapable of initiating conversations (though just fine if initiated by someone else--weird as always), I didn't have anything to say to a coach. I figured if a conversation needed to be had, he'd start it. I decided to needle Ellie a little. "He's way younger than us, though, right?"
Ellie waved this away. "Please, he's over thirty. What's ten years?"
Over time--over the course of four practices a week--I started to agree with Ellie. J. was cute. Watching the way he interacted with the boys made me smile--and he was obviously very good at what he did. And I wasn't bothered by the way he looked at me, especially because I could tell he was trying to be discreet. The obvious leer on the street, the creepy stare from across the bar, the straightforward eye contact that demands to be noticed--that all leaves me cold. What makes me hot is the almost unconscious need a man has to look at me when he thinks I won't notice, when there's no obvious motive, besides appreciating for himself a woman he finds attractive or maybe even imagining what it would feel like to have her.
So I actually began looking forward to practices when I could look up from my book to see his eyes wander from the boys on the field to where I sat. It made me feel desirable and attractive, to the point where I began paying more attention to how I dressed on practice and game days. In the cooler months, I'd wear tight jeans and knee-high boots, with my leather jacket cropped at my waist and my hair in a high ponytail. As summer approached, I changed to fitted tanks tucked into flowing midi skirts, paired with my mirrored aviator sunglasses.
It felt nice to be dressing for someone else, and to feel that the effort was appreciated. I'd been led to believe that once I was out of my twenties, everything would be strictly downhill, at least physically speaking. For me, though, it was the opposite. I became much more comfortable with my body than I'd ever been in my twenties. I understood my body much better now, and I better understood how to pleasure a man and pleasure myself. That's one of the recompenses of getting older, I suppose. What I didn't expect, though, was the unrelenting surge of sexual feelings and desires. I thought about sex when I was driving, when I was working, when I was falling asleep at night, when I was in the shower. Was this what it was like to be a man? Exhausting. At first, I assumed it was strictly a biological phenomenon. More children, my body must have been screaming at me. I figured I'd just have to ride this out. And I tried to. Initially, my husband was an enthusiastic partner, but very quickly it became obvious to me that my needs dwarfed his capabilities--and his interest. It didn't help that domestic cohabitation has a way of stripping away the sexual intrigue and mystery that is so important, at least for me. I have no doubt the same was true for him.
So I retreated into my fantasies about other men, men I found attractive, who I'd encounter in my day to day. The handsome dads who stole glances at me down the sideline during games. The twentysomething who cut my kid's hair. The brash, immature young coach who did supplemental training and who I liked to imagine bending me over his desk and fucking me as he called me a dirty whore, which I felt sure was how he fucked. I could work all of them in to my elaborate fantasies. Masturbation was almost a daily ritual, stolen moments in the shower, or even late at night, after my husband fell asleep, in the bed we shared. I mastered the art of coming in silence. And what got me off the best was when I thought about the way these men looked at me, especially J..
Of course, as we sat on the patio at the soccer team party, he had no idea about any of this. But as the night wore on, I felt his eyes on me often; when I did gather the courage to return his gaze, he quickly averted his eyes and returned to his conversations. Was that a tell? Was it a tell that he studiously avoided me? Literally every other parent, mom or dad, it didn't matter, had at least interacted with him at some point during the season. Everyone except me. I'd even wondered if he disliked me. "You have to look out for the quiet ones," Ellie had told me about J. once. But as she sat next to him, chattering, I could tell he wasn't interested.
Eventually, Ellie got up to check on the kids, and Kayla gestured at me to take her empty chair next to J.. "You're sitting out in the suburbs, professor," she said. She patted the cushion. "Come, sit down." Everyone was now looking at me--refusing would be odd, so I carried my drink over and sat down next to J.. He smiled at me and I returned it, but nothing more.
The night wore on, tongues loosened, and Kayla lit the citronella tiki torches that lined the patio. Around this time, someone thought it was a good idea to remind everyone that I was a writer and that they'd read my book for book club and that it was "so great" and "so weird." I wanted the earth to swallow me up whole. Writers hope people will read their books, true, but being the center of attention is nightmare fuel.
"You wrote a book?" one of the dads exclaimed. He opened his hands like he was opening a book. "Like a book-book? Like you'd find in a library?"
"Yes!" Kayla cried. "I checked it out at the library!"
