Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 76022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Horror of horrors, he was rehired.
And I just… couldn’t do it anymore.
I couldn’t go to that field every day, knowing he’d gotten away with everything, knowing he could keep touching me, watching me. Or doing worse.
There seemed to be no choice.
I had to drop out.
Quit.
Pack up.
Move.
Try to start over.
So that was what I did.
It was the first time since college started that I felt like I could breathe. Having a history in serving and bartending allowed me to get a decent job in a big city. The money flowed in, though flowed out almost as easily, thanks to insane rent prices. I made new friends. I dated. I started looking into community college courses to hopefully get some sort of degree to help build a more solid foundation.
Then one night, there was a shadow under a streetlamp.
And there he was.
In my new life.
With his same old obsession.
Again, I’d tried to get protection. But the police, while not as belittling as the ones at college, informed me that Coach Dover hadn’t done anything wrong, that streets were public, and that unless he did something threatening, there was nothing they could do.
What choice did I have but to uproot and restart again? I couldn’t risk staying and waiting for my former coach to get brave and violent again.
So I moved.
And moved.
And moved.
Each time, I got smarter, more careful.
Each time, he kept tracking me down.
With each move, life got harder, money got shorter in supply. It wasn’t long before I was offsetting costs by living in my car. Which created its own new world of difficulty and terror. Strange men at my windows. Where to go when my car needed repairs. Showers in public rest stops.
Until one night, I woke up with a familiar face near my window, his hand in his pants.
I nearly backed over him in my desperation to drive off.
Many times over the years, across different cities, never able to shake that shadow, I wondered if it would have been better if I had.
Ran over him.
Backed up.
And ran over him again.
Because he only got bolder with each city he followed me to.
There was no more standing under streetlights. He simply broke into my homes. He placed cameras. He left presents. He waited for me.
Once, when I went nearly ten months without a visit from my old coach, I started to think it was finally, finally over.
Until the man I’d been dating for a few weeks had his brake lines fail and wrapped himself around a tree.
He lived, thank God.
But the cops wouldn’t believe me when I told them who cut the lines. Especially since I had yet to lay eyes on Coach Dover in the area. Within a few days, the boyfriend started telling me I was being crazy and paranoid, that sometimes brake lines failed.
He almost had me second-guessing myself as well, thinking I was truly starting to crack under the pressure.
Until finally, fresh off a breakup with that same guy, he showed his face, grabbing me as I made my way toward my apartment, pinning me to the wall, talking rapid-fire craziness at me, his spit coating my face, his fingers bruising my skin.
Luckily, a nosy neighbor was taking her big German Shepherd out for a walk. Her yelling and the dog’s snarling managed to scare off my coach.
“You need one of these,” my neighbor said, patting her dog’s head. “They keep the creeps away.”
I packed up once again.
But on my way out of town, I stopped by a shelter, lied about my living situation, and walked out with a man-hating dog who could hopefully keep one particular creep away.
I had one last run-in with Coach Dover after bringing Trix into my life.
She’d done exactly what I hoped she would.
She barked, lunged, snarled, snapped, foamed at the mouth.
Coach Dover was quick to back away, panic filling his eyes.
It was the first time I felt like I had the upper hand, that I had a little bit of power.
That lack of panic allowed me to think clearly for a change, to try to consider how the hell he’d been tracking me.
At first, I assumed it was my socials. Until I deactivated them. Then maybe my phone. So I got rid of it. After that, I imagined he had somehow hacked into some sort of database for employment records.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in a motel room with Trix as she chowed down on the steak dinner I’d bought her that I realized… There was no way. While I had to admit (reluctantly) that he was a good coach, he wasn’t exactly a genius. If anything, some of the girls used to comment on how uneducated he came off.
He was no hacker.
But he had proven good at things like cameras.
It didn’t feel that big of a leap to assume that he might also know a thing or two about trackers.