The beep was like a taunt in my ear as, once again, my call to Cat rolled to voice mail.
I pulled at the fabric of my suit pants and smoothed it needlessly over my knee. The team plane was rowdy as everyone else spoke excitedly about the upcoming game, so I cupped my hand around my mouth and turned away from the noise as much as possible.
“Hey, Cat. I’m on my way to the game in Minneapolis. We’re about to take off, and it takes about three hours to get there. I’ll call you when I land, but I have Wi-Fi all flight, so send me an email if you want to get in touch before that. I…” I paused, trying to figure out what to say that would get through to her. “Just… Call me back, okay? I really want to talk to you.”
I’d been trying to get her on the phone for the past three days, all to no avail. When my call went unanswered the fifth time, desperation had set in, and I’d driven all the way to her apartment to try to confront her in person—only, my truck had never stopped rolling.
A crowd of fifteen to twenty paparazzi stood outside her apartment like vultures, waiting for a sign of a wounded animal. To them, that’s all Catharine was—someone to capitalize on, someone with a sordid story to sell. Knowing my showing up would only make things worse for her, I’d kept on rolling and driven right back home. I hoped she’d found somewhere else to go, somewhere to shelter since she obviously didn’t want it from me.
Dr. Winnie Lancaster, the team physician and my boss’s wife, took the seat across from me as I scrolled from calls to messages and clicked to draft one to Cat. Apparently, Winnie was the only one not put off by the waves of disgruntlement rolling off of me.
Swiftly, I typed out a note and hit send.
Me: I know you’re busy with your own life and the problems I’ve caused for you, but I’m hoping that you’ll please, please call me back. If you can’t get me and don’t want to email, I’ll try calling again later. I love you.
I sighed and pushed my head back into the headrest as the plane taxied to the runway. I knew I sounded desperate, but I didn’t mind. I was. Desperate to make this work by any means necessary. I wanted Cat to know that.
Winnie glanced my way, I could feel it, but she was courteous enough to stay silent as I ran through my thoughts and tried to compose myself.
The nagging, sinking feeling of knowing I might have lost Cat for good wouldn’t ease its grip.
My parents had been awful, and I hadn’t done a good enough job of apologizing for it. Their thoughts didn’t reflect my own, and I should have skywritten it if I had to. Then, on top of that, the locusts had come out of the media woodwork. Both official, in the capacity of tabloids, and social, via Instagram and Twitter and every other goddamn thing, people had been on the attack. Her clothes, her skin color, her very involvement in my life—you name it, they picked at it.
I’d made a post discouraging the behavior strongly and asking for, just this once, some privacy in my personal life. Anytime I saw a negative comment directed at Cat on my social media, I deleted it and blocked the responsible user, but it was all just a drop in the bucket. I couldn’t fucking protect her from all of it, no matter how hard I tried.
The engines roared and the cabin shook as the pilot hammered the throttle and sent us barreling down the runway toward the sky. Planes, understandably, had turned into something of nostalgia to me. I tried not to focus on all the memories as I stared out the window and watched the ground fade farther away.
“Okay,” the good doctor finally remarked, turning in her seat to face me. The cabin leaned as our plane made a wide sweeping turn to head back in the direction we needed to go, and I inclined into it to avoid her eyes. “I’ve let you sit over there and stew, thinking it was none of my business,” she went on. “But now I’m thinking you need someone to help you climb out of the tailspin.”
I struggled against it, but as her voice grew softer and softer, it got harder to avoid meeting her eyes.
“Quinn,” she implored, and finally, with a throaty sigh, I gave in. When I looked across the aisle, her eyes were patient and kind.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Thirty minutes of intensely one-sided conversation later and I’d laid it all out for her. Her eyes were shining with moisture, and her posture was sunken. I’d left nothing out—the good, the best, and the ugly—and apparently, Winnie was feeling personally attached.
I understood. I was fond of our story too.
“I’m honestly not sure how to fix it,” I admitted, the words that lent themselves to my painful lack of control burning as they made their way out.
Her body was nearly pliant with kindness. “You obviously care about her.”
I shook my head. “I love her.”
Her shoulders squared as she reached a conclusion, thanks to my words. Her lips curved up, and all the unshed tears in her eyes cleared. “It’ll work out,” she declared. “Right now, she’s feeling overwhelmed and scared, and talking to you is like confronting the problem. As long as she avoids you, she can avoid this. She’ll get over that once she gets her bearings.”
“How do you know?” I asked, afraid to water the little seed of hope in my belly. Once it sprouted, it’d be a lot more painful to kill.
“Because when a man feels about a woman like you feel about her, we know it. I know because of my experience with Wes and my friends’ experiences with their men. Somewhere, under the layers of smoggy doubt and vulnerability, she’s got your love to see her through. Just keep loving her, and she’ll find her way out.”
“But I feel like I should do something, say something, fix something.”
“Can you fix the whole world? No. Can you change the opinions of your…” She frowned. “Closed-minded parents? No.” It was pretty apparent she’d wanted to use a ruder word but had deferred out of politeness. “But you can love her. I can see it with my own eyes, and she’ll see it with hers too. Be patient, Quinn,” she advised. “That’ll put you where you want to be in the end.”
Emotionally exhausted and ready to get some sleep, I settled into the bed in my hotel room in Minneapolis and picked up my phone one last time.
I had to try, to make the effort, just in case she decided to answer.
The rings bled together in my ear, and anticipation fizzled like a soda going flat.
She wasn’t going to answer.
I took a deep breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth, preparing to leave her another voice mail, when the phone clicked, and the sweetest voice I’d ever heard came on the line.
“Hi,” she whispered. Not a question, not a doubt. She knew I was the caller, and she knew the conversation.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to slow my heartbeat enough to sound relatively normal. “Hey, kitten.”
“Quinn,” she said, her voice brittle enough to break in the middle of even my short name.
“I know, Cat. I know everything is shitty, and I haven’t done enough to make it not be, but I think if we can just get together, talk everything out, we can find a way to—”
“No,” she interrupted my rush to get everything out, the desperation in every word climbing higher.
“No? No, what?”
“I don’t think this is going to work.”
“No,” I refused, sitting up in bed. Everything in my body was pounding. “I refuse to accept that. I can fix this. I don’t care what all the other people think. I love you, and they’ll eventually see that you and I are meant for one another.”
She sniffed. “This isn’t just about your parents or the magazines or the people online, Quinn.” It almost sounded like she was apologizing—for all the things I was fighting to render obsolete. “It’s more than that. It’s the day-to-day of how we make this work. There’s always going to be someone thinking they’re more important than our relationship, and in some cases, like with your job, or my job, they might be right. We’re both trying to be what the other needs, and we don’t even have the time to be what we, ourselves, need.”
“That’s not true,” I argued. “When you make something a priority, anything is possible. It’s fucking possible to have it all. I refuse to believe anything different.”
“I wish I could see it, Quinn,” she whispered. “The way you do. But I’m not sure I can. I’m sorry.”
Pain, powerful and swift, violated my every cell as the line went dead.
Winnie had said to have patience while I waited, and it would all work out. But what if I was the only one waiting in the end?