Coach's Wife
"Team captain. Away games every weekend. His wife stays home. With me."
Coach Rivera is a legend.
Three Neo-League championships. Fifteen years at the helm of the Neo-Phoenix Raptors. The kind of man who turns promising athletes into superstars and hopeless cases into contenders.
He's also never home.
Away games, recruitment trips, training camps—the schedule keeps him on the road three hundred days a year. When I signed my rookie contract and moved into the team housing, I expected a mentor. A father figure. Someone to guide me through the brutal world of professional holo-ball.
What I got was his wife.
Maria Rivera is everything the league wives aren't supposed to be.
Forty-eight years old. Built like a former athlete gone soft in the best ways—thick everywhere, curves that strain against the casual clothes she wears around the compound. She was a volleyball player in her youth, I learn later. Olympic-level, until an injury ended her career and marriage to the up-and-coming coach began.
Now she manages the team housing. Cooks for the players who live on-site. Takes care of the facilities like they're her own home.
And watches me with eyes that shouldn't be looking that way.
"Mr. Santos." She catches me in the kitchen one evening, two months into my first season. "You've been working late."
"Team captain responsibilities." I grab a protein shake from the fridge. "Coach wants me to review game footage."
"Coach wants a lot of things." She moves closer, and I smell something floral—jasmine, maybe, mixed with the remnants of dinner. "He forgets that people need rest. Recreation. Connection."
"He's focused."
"He's absent." There's something bitter in her voice. "Has been for twenty years. But that's not your problem, is it?"
She touches my arm.
Brief. Light. Electric.
"Get some sleep, Mr. Santos."
"Gabriel."
"Get some sleep, Gabriel."
She walks away.
I don't sleep for hours.
The affair starts small.
Lingering looks across the common room. Fingers brushing when she hands me coffee. Conversations that last longer than they should, full of pauses that mean something neither of us will say.
Coach is in Neo-Tokyo. Three-week tournament. Most of the team is with him.
I'm home recovering from a minor injury.
She's in the kitchen at midnight when I come down for water.
"Can't sleep?"
"Never can. When he's away." She's wearing a silk robe, loosely tied. "Twenty years of marriage and I still haven't learned to sleep alone."
"That seems lonely."
"It is." She turns to face me, and in the dim light, I can see the shape of her beneath the silk. "Do you know what it's like, Gabriel? Being married to a legend? Being invisible next to someone everyone else worships?"
"No."
"It's suffocating. He looks at game footage with more passion than he's ever looked at me. He knows his players' stats better than he knows my name." She moves toward me. "I used to be someone, you know. Before I became Mrs. Rivera."
"You're still someone."
"Am I?" She stops in front of me. Close. Too close. "When's the last time anyone saw me? Not the coach's wife. Not the team mother. Just... Maria?"
I see her.
I've been seeing her for months.
"I see you," I tell her. "Every day. Every time you walk through that kitchen. Every time you touch my arm like you're not supposed to."
Her breath catches.
"Gabriel—"
"Tell me to stop. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me you haven't been thinking about this as much as I have."
She doesn't tell me any of those things.
She kisses me like she's been starving.
Her hands grab my shirt, pull me against her, and the softness of her body is overwhelming. She's thick everywhere—breasts pressing against my chest, belly soft against my abs, hips wide enough to fill my hands completely.
"We can't—" she gasps between kisses. "He'll—"
"He's ten thousand miles away."
"This is wrong—"
"I know." I untie her robe. Let it fall. "I don't care."
She's naked beneath.
Her body is a roadmap of everything the league says players shouldn't want. Heavy breasts with dark nipples, a belly that rounds soft and full, thighs thick from decades of athletic power turned to comfortable abundance.
She's magnificent.
"You're staring."
"I've been wanting to stare for months." I drop to my knees. Pull her toward the kitchen counter. "Let me worship you, Maria. Let me remind you what it feels like to be seen."
I eat her out on her husband's kitchen counter.
She tastes like need—sweet and musky, wet enough to coat my chin. Her thighs clamp around my head, thick and powerful, and she grips the counter edge like she's afraid she'll fly away.
"Gabriel—oh god—yes—"
I find her clit and focus everything on it. Suck it between my lips, work it with my tongue, listen to her moans echo off the walls of the kitchen where she cooks for the entire team.
"Right there—don't stop—don't—"
I don't stop.
I work her until she's shaking, until she's crying, until she comes with a scream that his name has never produced.
"Gabriel—"
That's what I want to hear. My name. Not coach's. Not husband's. Mine.
"Bedroom," she pants. "Now."
We stumble through the dark house—the one Coach bought with his championship bonuses, the one she's lived in alone for two decades. Her bedroom is huge, dominated by a bed that's only ever held one person.
Until now.
She pulls me down onto the mattress. Climbs on top of me. All that weight settling onto my hips, pinning me down, and I feel like I'm being claimed by something ancient and powerful.
"I've wanted this," she whispers. "For months. For years. Someone who looks at me like I matter. Someone who wants me, not the position I come with."
"I want you." I grip her hips. "Every inch. Every pound. Everything you are."
She sinks down onto me.
The feeling is indescribable. She's tight and hot and desperate, and the way she moves—slow at first, then faster—is nothing like the careful, controlled athlete she used to be.
This is raw. Hungry. Wild.
"You feel—fuck—Gabriel—"
"Ride me. Take what you need."
She takes everything.
She fucks me in her husband's bed like she's exorcising ghosts.
All those years of loneliness. All those nights sleeping alone. All those times she cooked and cleaned and managed while he chased championships that never seemed to matter as much as she did.
Now she's taking it back.
"Harder—I need—"
I flip us over. Pin her to the mattress. Drive into her with everything I have.
"Is this what you needed? Someone to see you?"
"Yes—"
"Is this what he never gave you?"
"He never—fuck—he never looked at me the way you do—"
"How do I look at you?"
"Like I'm the only thing that matters—God—like I'm enough—"
"You're more than enough." I thrust deeper. "You're everything. You're every fantasy I've had since I walked through that door."
She comes with my name on her lips.
I come with her body wrapped around mine.
We become careful.
Away games are our time. When Coach is traveling—which is constantly—I slip into her room. We fuck in every corner of the house he never bothers to visit. We learn each other's bodies like new plays, mastering the angles, perfecting the rhythm.
"He's coming home this weekend," she tells me one Thursday.
We're in her bed, tangled together, both breathing hard. The window shows Neo-Phoenix glittering in the dark.
"I'll stay in my quarters."
"He'll want to see you. Team captain meeting." She traces a finger down my chest. "Can you sit across from him and pretend you haven't been fucking his wife?"
"Can you?"
She's quiet for a moment.
"I've been pretending for twenty years. Pretending I'm happy. Pretending I don't resent him. Pretending this marriage is anything but a business arrangement." She looks up at me. "I don't want to pretend anymore."
"What do you want?"
"I want to leave him. I want—" She stops. "Is that insane? To want a future with the twenty-four-year-old rookie I've been sleeping with?"
"I'm not a rookie anymore." I pull her close. "And it's not insane. It's the only thing that makes sense."
The divorce shocks the league.
Coach Rivera's wife of twenty years, leaving him for... well, no one knows who. The feeds speculate wildly. Other coaches? Team owners? Some mysterious lover from her volleyball days?
No one suspects me.
Until I sign with a rival team the next season and she comes with me.
"You're really doing this," Coach says.
We're in his office—soon to be his former office—clearing out my locker. He looks older now. Tired. Like losing her has cost him something he didn't know he had.
"I love her."
"She's twenty-four years older than you."
"And she makes me happier than anyone I've ever known." I meet his eyes. "You had her for twenty years. You never once looked at her the way I do. You don't get to be angry now."
He stares at me for a long moment.
"You're right," he says finally. "I don't."
Three years later, I'm holding a championship trophy.
The first one in my career. The Neo-Seattle Storms, dark horse of the league, led by a captain who plays like he has everything to prove.
And in the stands, screaming louder than anyone, is Maria.
My Maria. Fifty-one now, silver threading through her dark hair, still built like the goddess I fell for in a midnight kitchen. She's wearing my jersey—stretched across curves that make the cameras linger—and she's crying.
"You did it," she says when I reach her.
"We did it." I kiss her in front of fifty thousand people. "Every time I play, I'm playing for you. Proving to the world that I was right to choose you."
"And are you? Right?"
I look at her. At this woman who gave up everything for a rookie with nothing but potential. Who risked scandal and judgment and her entire life because someone finally saw her.
"I'm the luckiest man in the league."
She kisses me back.
And somewhere in Neo-Seattle, a team captain and a coach's wife build something that looks nothing like the careful, professional life either of them planned.
It looks like love.
It looks like home.
Game over.
We won.