Chapter 18
Leire has been on autopilot since yesterday, and she doesn't even know how she managed to win her match, because she can't remember playing it. She couldn't focus on anything—voices, people talking to her, and she just nodded and kept moving, no longer sure where she was headed.
Her mind was racing, stuck in a loop with the image of the hotel room, with the way her father—in what he'd defended as an attempt to protect her—hadn't just violated her privacy, he'd violated Kate's too, and handed the material over to a stranger.
No matter how many explanations she tries to find, none of them hold up, and now she's slipped into a kind of paranoia where she doesn't trust anyone.
She also has to deal with Isaac, because her agent is close to her father and she's sure the whole thing was his idea—that he's probably seen the photos too—but yesterday she didn't have it in her to get through another conversation like that.
She was wrecked when she got back to the hotel, body and soul.
She walked into her room, and suddenly the thought of staying there, in a place she knew her father had been able to access, made her feel suffocated.
She grabbed her phone and booked another hotel herself, packed her bag, and went down to the front desk to say she was leaving early.
The girl at the desk stared at her like none of it made sense, but thankfully didn't ask questions.
"Can you get me a cab?" was all Leire could manage before turning toward the sofas.
"We have our own car service," the girl said. "Someone will take you wherever you need to go, right now."
The Spanish woman doesn't remember the ride to the new hotel either; she watched cars blur past the window and they looked like shapeless shadows.
The worst part wasn't her father's betrayal—it was his reasons, and the calm with which he'd explained himself, as if it had been her fault that he'd felt forced to do it.
When she walked into her new room and shut the door, relief hit her at once. She took a shower, put her clothes away, and picked up her phone. Isaac had sent two messages—one asking why she'd left the hotel, and a second asking whether she still planned to play the tournament.
She let out a short, humorless laugh, told him she was fine, that she'd keep playing, that she was at a different hotel. She didn't offer anything more, and he didn't push. Then she looked at her missed calls: two from Isaac and two from Kate, who had probably already heard she'd checked out.
She thought about calling her, about explaining what had happened and telling her where she was.
Knowing Kate, she knew the redhead would come to her if she asked, that she'd do whatever Leire needed—but she couldn't get any of it out loud.
The shock had hit so hard that the only thing she was sure of was that she needed to be alone and try not to think about anything.
She opened her conversation with Kate and spent several minutes staring at the screen, not knowing what to write.
She didn't want to be cold, because things between them were at such a delicate point that one wrong step could break everything for good—but if she wasn't brief, Kate would ask if something was wrong, if she was okay, and she felt so shattered right then that the tears started falling while she typed.
I'm at a different hotel. We'll talk tomorrow. I'm sorry.
Nothing else. She hit send and stared at the screen. She thought about calling her friend Marta, but if she couldn't talk to Kate, she couldn't talk to her either, so she turned off her phone and crawled under the covers to keep crying.
Now she's at the net, sweaty and drained, listening to the crowd applaud while her opponent shakes her hand. Since yesterday, Leire has felt like she's outside her own body—off-balance, absent, only moving when someone winds her up. She's won again, but she couldn't say whether it was hard or easy.
She ran into Kate before the match; she spotted her from a distance and her body just stopped.
There were people everywhere—the hallway packed with players, trainers, physical therapists, venue staff, even sports journalists—and for a second she'd felt the urge to run, to get away from the danger that woman posed to her.
But her body overrode her fear, and she stayed still, watching Kate walk toward her.
"Hey." Kate had stopped at a careful distance, and Leire lost her breath, because the only thing she felt was the need to wrap her arms around her.
"Hey."
"Are you okay?" The redhead's voice was low, barely above a whisper—the same voice she'd used so many times in bed, lying together after making love, and Leire knew that if she stayed with her too long, she'd fall apart again.
"Yeah." She looked down for a moment, at her own feet, then at the Australian's legs. "I can't talk right now, Kate…"
The redhead stood there watching her in a way that made her chest rise and fall faster and faster. It wasn't desire—it was pure fear, tangled with worry.
"That's okay," Kate murmured. "Good luck in your match."
Kate held out her hand the way she would have with any other player, and when Leire took it, something locked up inside her and she couldn't let go—because it was the only moment in the past twenty-four hours when her mind went quiet, when calm moved through her and made her feel safe, like she was home.
"Leire," Kate whispered. "People are watching."
She blinked her way back to the present, but it still took her a few seconds to let go. She did it slowly, flustered, and realized that plenty of eyes were on them.
"You sure you're okay?" the redhead pressed, and Leire had to look back down at the floor, because all she wanted was to lie down with her, trace a finger along the scar, then along her nose, and lose herself counting her freckles.
"Yeah. I'm going to go change," she managed, and she slipped past her.
Now she's in the locker room after winning, and she's grateful Kate hasn't stopped by to congratulate her the way she usually does.
She still doesn't know whether that moment in the hallway will raise questions about their rivalry, but as she heads out for the press conference her mind scatters again, and all she can think about is the photos and her father's betrayal, and what her mother would have said about this if she were still alive.
When she walks into the back room to get ready, Isaac materializes like a ghost. She spotted him from a distance this morning and dodged him, and the only other thing she remembers is that he was up in the stands—same as always—when she walked off the court after the match.
"Hey, what's going on?" he asks quietly. "Why did you switch hotels? You should've told me—I would've handled it."
She looks at him, furious.
"With my dad?"
"What?" Isaac looks genuinely confused. "Where did you two check in? I need to get organized, and we have to figure out what you're going to say about the move, because the press already knows by now."
"You two?" she says, as if that's the only part she caught.
"Your dad and you. He left with you, didn't he?"
Leire's eyes go wide. Suddenly nothing makes sense. Is Isaac really in the dark, or is he just that good at pretending?
"I need to talk to you after this. Just the two of us," she says flatly.
"Yeah, of course, but it'll have to be later. I've got a lunch meeting. I'll call you after?"
"Fine. Right now just tell me what to say if they ask."
Isaac scratches the back of his neck. He's been turning this over all morning, but since he can't find a convincing reason for the switch, he goes with something simple that always works.
"Say it's a personal matter and you're not going to comment. Or, if you'd rather, dodge it with an easy joke—get a laugh, and make it clear at the same time you're not going there."
Leire exhales. The last thing she feels like doing right now is laughing.
"Fine," she says, and heads out to sit in front of the microphone.
The camera flashes blind her for a second, and when they stop, her eyes sweep the room until she finds Candela and settles on her. The woman gives her a brief nod, and Leire bites her lip as her mind betrays her and replays the awful conversation they had.
The first questions come in. They're about the match and her aggressive playing style. Leire handles them as best she can, because when certain shots come up she genuinely can't remember hitting them.
"You left the hotel unexpectedly yesterday. Did something happen? Was there a problem with your room?"
"Lately I just can't sit still. Figured I'd try a different mattress."
She leaves it there, and it works. The room laughs—she doesn't—and the next question circles back to the match.
Leire relaxes a little, one weight shed, because some journalists will chase a bone to the end, and for a moment she was afraid one of them might track down her father and ask him something that would only make them want to dig deeper.
She's still thinking about that when the next question hits her square in the chest.
"What happened in the hallway with Brogan before the match?" A man in his forties, second row. "Have things between you and Brogan gotten closer, or was that a showdown between two rivals? Lately you two have been seen together a lot."
The Spanish woman's mind spins, fear floods through her, and the anxiety starts to choke her. She loses her grip and answers defensively—because that's what she always does when it comes to Kate—and she says the last thing she should ever have said.
"I've said it many times before: Brogan and I are just colleagues who tolerate each other on the court and have nothing in common off it."
A muffled silence rings in her ears when she finishes, while a low murmur ripples through the room as the journalists trade comments.
"Thanks for coming," she says, her voice tight, standing before anyone can ask anything else.
She walks out of the room and into the hallway with shaking legs and the feeling that she's falling headfirst off a cliff.
She just did the exact opposite of what she promised Kate.
She had a clear opening to tell the whole world once and for all that she's in love with her, that she's sick of the questions and just wants the two of them left alone from here on—but she didn't take it, and this time she can't even call it cowardice.
It was her head, her nerves, and the unbearable stress she's been carrying these past few days.
It wasn't the right moment; she couldn't have handled this right now, and she doesn't know how she'll handle Kate when they see each other, because without a single word spoken, she already knows that what she said was like driving a blade straight into the center of her heart.