Chapter 12
CATARINA
To get ready for our dinner late on Sunday night, I took a nice hot shower at Dustin’s place, a brownstone house in Lincoln Park. Chicago was much colder than Washington, D.C., and after the trip to buy my dress I appreciated the hot stream of water a little more than normal.
When I got out of the shower, Dustin was ready to go, wearing a suit, and talking on the phone to someone who seemed to be from his team’s organization. I wasn’t sure if it was his agent or coach.
As I straightened my unruly hair and put on makeup in Dustin’s giant bathroom, I reflected that, in spite of the craziness of the past weekend, I was thoroughly enjoying the escape from the tedium of my day-to-day profession for a little adventure.
I had always weirdly enjoyed role-playing in scenarios that were different from my everyday life, and this was crazier than any scenario I could have made up myself.
I also didn’t have another shift until Wednesday afternoon since I had been forced to off-load my shifts.
I was still trying to process the fact that I would actually not have to leave the country.
The hospital didn’t even know yet. And for now, I was enjoying my little impromptu vacation.
I tried to remember the last time I played dress-up like this, and I realized I hadn’t been on a proper date since last summer, half a year ago now.
“Coach Slanch is excited to meet you,” Dustin hung up the phone and was doing his ‘lean on the doorframe’ move again.
“Do I call him ‘Coach Slanch,’ too? He’s not my coach.”
“I think Mr. Slanch will do. And Mr. Bells, for the owner. Then there’s Old Man Bells’s granddaughter, Jackie.”
“Why is she coming?”
Dustin cleared his throat. “She takes an interest in the team’s dealings.
She’s heir to the throne, and he’s, you know, ninety-two.
Personally, I think he’ll keep going for another twenty years, but that’s just me.
Physically he’s in good shape, but there are times when his mind doesn’t seem all there. ”
“Okay.” I finished putting the last bit of eyeshadow on and turned to face him. I wore a black dress, pearl earrings, and my locket.
“Damn, Wife.” He took a step toward me and ran his hand through my hair and let it drift down the small of my back. “You look absolutely gorgeous. You’re the full package, aren’t you? Looks and brains.” he smirked.
I bit my lip. “Same for you, El Hubs.”
“I don’t know about the brains part. For me, I mean.”
I smiled, and we hung in the air there for a moment, locked on one another’s eyes.
It was all a little surreal. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, but I wondered what else was behind his brown eyes.
Maybe he wasn’t a doctor, but he also didn’t come off like a typical jock, the more I saw behind his curtain.
“You know,” he said. “Our twenty-four hour anniversary is coming up.”
“Good thing we’re going out to dinner tonight to celebrate.”
“I think we can have appetizers here, though.”
I furrowed my brow and gazed out from the bathroom. “What do you mean? I don’t smell any food cooking. Are you heating something up?”
Dustin smirked. “That’s not what I was referring to.”
My heart palpitated and my eyes widened as he lifted me up onto the marble sink counter, and my dress rode up my thighs with a little help from his hands.
“Don’t worry,” he winked. “I won’t mess up your makeup.”
Dustin drove us over to Mr. Bells’s mansion, and on the way, he turned on the radio.
“Mind if I change the station?” I asked. “I’m not a big fan of The Beatles.”
“You don’t like Norwegian Wood?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to stop with these dick jokes.”
“That’s not a dick joke,” he said. “It’s the name of the song that’s playing right now. Norwegian Wood. It’s a classic.”
“Oh,” I said, then shrugged, listening a little closer to the song. “Just not my cup of tea.”
He shot me a confused look. “How can you not like The Beatles? Their songs are simple but genius. They changed music forever.”
“Look, I just don’t like them, okay?”
“Well, what kind of music do you like?”
“My favorite is eighties music. Prince, David Bowie, Billy Joel to name a few. You? Besides, apparently, The Beatles.”
“The Beatles aren’t my favorite, I just think they are music meant to be appreciated. I’m more of a late nineties music child. I like stuff like Sublime, Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, The Dave Matthews Band.”
“Who is the Dave Matthews Band?”
He sighed. “Ha funny. No, seriously.”
“Seriously. I’ve never heard of them.”
“This marriage isn’t going to work out, is it?”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Just kidding,” he said. “I’ll grant you a pass on Dave Matthews since you grew up in Spain.”
After a half hour of musical wrangling and finally settling on an alternative station we could both mostly appreciate, we pulled up to Mr. Bells’s mansion, which had to be one of the biggest houses on the south side of Chicago.
The outer perimeter of the mansion was surrounded by a fence, and once we pulled up to the security station at the gates, we had to hand the security guard our identifications.
When we made it to the door, we were greeted by a butler, who directed us to walk toward the back of the building. The rooms inside were spacious, and I was fairly certain I saw an original Picasso on the wall on the way in.
As we made our way down the hallway, the buzz of voices could be heard, and we turned into a room full of people with a circular table.
The voices stopped when we entered the room, and I could feel all the eyes in the room land on us.
Dustin wrapped his arm around me. “Hi everyone. I’d like you all to meet my wife, Catarina.”
“Hi, everyone!” I said, feeling shy all of the sudden. “I’m Cat.”
I shook hands with Coach Slanch and his wife Hanna, and finally Mr. Bells and his granddaughter Jackie.
She had dirty blond hair and was quite attractive.
I felt like I was Cady from Mean Girls meeting Regina George for the first time, the way Jackie fake-smiled at me. Something about her had me on edge.
The butler gestured for us to take our seats, and Dustin and I sat down next to each other. It wasn’t lost on me that Jackie sat down on the other side of Dustin. Mr. Bells sat to her left, and Coach Slanch and his wife filled in the rest of the table of six.
“Thanks for coming on short notice,” Coach Slanch, or Daniel, as he’d directed me to call him, said. “But after the shakeup we’ve been talking about with the team—and how that video circulated, we were worried about you, Dustin. We thought you might have lost your marbles.”
“I mean you didn’t need much notice to get married, so I’m sure this isn’t a problem,” Jackie added.
I wasn’t sure if she was making a joke or not, but we all laughed awkwardly just in case.
Dustin started to say something, but Mr. Bells cut him off.
“We’ll start with some appetizers and some libations,” he said in his quiet but authoritative way.
“Appetizers,” Dustin echoed. “Yum.” He winked and I felt his hand on my knee under the table. My body warmed.
We made small talk about the weather while the servants poured our wine, which I was pretty sure was harvested before I was born. I was no wine connoisseur, but growing up in Spain had given me a decent education on wine, at least. So I could fully appreciate this bottle.
As I sipped it, the chef brought out several different appetizers, and I inhaled their aromas: fresh tomato and burrata with warm French bread, fried calamari, roasted cauliflower, and ahi tuna tostadas.
“This looks delicious!” I said. “Thanks so much for the invitation tonight.”
Mr. Bells—he had not instructed me to call him Jerry as Coach Slanch had—then spoke.
“You’re probably wondering why I wanted to have you here for dinner tonight,” he said.
“Mr. Bells,” Dustin smiled, “You don’t have to have a reason to see me. You know that.”
“Let’s cut the crap, LeBlanc,” Mr. Bells said. He spoke like an old-school P.E. teacher with a fantastic bullshit detector. “You know I tried to trade you this morning, and it wouldn’t go through.”
“My agent told me.”
“Do you know why it didn’t go through?”
“I don’t,” Dustin said. “Why didn’t it?”
“It didn’t go through because you and this—” he looked over at me. “This woman—got married recklessly.”
“The video posted to YouTube has now been viewed over twenty-one million times,” Jackie added.
My heart started to pound.
Coach Slanch, who was obviously trying to play peacemaker between Team Dustin and Team Jackie/Mr. Bells, hovered his fork in front of his face with a big bite of burrata on it.
“Well, a billion more views and we’ll be in Taylor Swift Territory!”
No one laughed at Dustin’s joke, so he wiped the smirk off his face and played serious. “True love comes in many forms.” He wrapped his arm around me. “But when it hits you, it’s the best feeling in the world.”
“Ha! Really! This is true love?” Jackie pulled out her phone and showed a video I had taken in the limo ride on the way back from Freddie’s Walk-In Chapel.
Stupid idea, taking that snapchat video. I figured only my friends would see it. Silly me.
“Woo! I just got fucking hitched!” Dustin yelled in the video.
Dustin wrinkled his forehead. “What’s wrong with that? I’m excited. We’re excited.”
“You just met her.”
I interjected with our planned lie, putting my hand on Dustin’s knee. “We actually met a while back, and rekindled things this weekend.”
“Did you, now?” Jackie smiled, using an ahi tuna tostada to add to her gesture. “Now that’s an interesting detail. Why don’t you tell us about that?”
“Well it’s a little scandalous,” I said. “I was in my first year of postgraduate medical school at the University of Michigan, and he was visiting from Ohio State during his senior year, playing hockey.”
“Oh, I see,” Jackie narrowed her gaze on me. “So you were a puck bunny even then?”
I cleared my throat. “I was—”