Chapter 10 #3
And I had been thinking about it, too. Sometimes when I was alone here in my apartment with no one else, just me solo, no roommate and no pet, I had imagined being with Ronan. I’d thought about touching him and him touching me…I thought about it again now and breathed a little faster.
“There’s a possible downside,” he continued. “I’ve seen it go wrong.”
“Like that one of us would get jealous. Or want more. Or meet someone else.”
“Those things,” he agreed. “Or maybe we wouldn’t be compatible.”
That idea didn’t worry me at all, but there was a larger concern. “It could ruin our current relationship. You’re my friend and I wouldn’t want to lose—I would be very—” I didn’t usually have trouble with verbalizing my thoughts, but this wouldn’t come out right.
“Hey, Cate?” He sat up and faced me. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I don’t want to lose you as a friend, either. I would be sad if that happened.”
I nodded because I would have been sad, too. Bereft, heartbroken, those things. “I don’t want that.”
“Yeah, so we’ll forget it. Dumb idea, in the past, over with, kaput. Ok? So, you don’t have to look so upset…come here.” He hugged me. “We’ll do this, instead. I’ll ask you to hold my hand, probably, because I’ll need it this season. I’ll want you to pat my hair.”
“Like this?”
I felt him nod. “Exactly. Like I’m a dog looking for attention.” Ronan tightened his arms a little and I relaxed against his chest. “We won’t do anything that would lead to my brother’s situation.”
“Ok,” I sighed. I would hug him all day, but the thought of jeopardizing what we had?
Of not seeing him, of not talking to him?
What if I didn’t get little texts saying hi, or just an H?
He would do that and then prompt me to respond with extra letters.
We’d spelled “hello,” but also “hoisin,” “hussy,” and “hippopotamus.” That had taken a while, going back and forth.
“Ok,” he concurred, and let go. I did too. “Let’s hang out and practice hand-holding.”
“Don’t you need to get home and sleep?” I suggested. He did, since I knew that he’d be back at the stadium tomorrow.
“Yeah, but I’m living on the edge tonight,” he said. “What do you have to eat?”
Not as much as he had at his house, since we usually cooked there. But we gathered enough high-protein snacks to make him more full, and then we sat back on the couch and he insisted on watching baseball. “You’ll like it someday,” he promised. “Someday, if the only other thing on is the yule log.”
“I used to watch the yule log every year, if I could find it on the motel TV. I guess it prepared me for this,” I said, pointing at the guys having a conference on the mound.
But it was relaxing to settle in together and honestly, the game was kind of interesting once I learned more about it.
I hadn’t understood the general obsession with football in this area but now it made perfect sense to me.
I thought that I might become a baseball fan, too.
I made Ronan go home after a while, though, because he did need rest with the schedule he was supposed to keep. I didn’t want to say it, but he was a little older than the rest of the rookie class and there was no way that the Juniors dealt with this kind of pressure and level of fitness.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, but then shook his head. “No, I have to be at the stadium and we’re having dinner together there.”
“Oh, ok.”
“I’m a little afraid that you’ll starve if I’m not cooking with you,” he told me.
“I do fine in the kitchen.”
He patted my cheek. “Keep telling yourself that.” He didn’t move his hand and looked down at me. “We’re ok, right?”
“Yes,” I promised. “Absolutely.”
“Good.” He pulled me to him again, and I rested my cheek against the Woodsmen logo on his chest. I agreed—this was good. So was our friendship, which I wasn’t going to jeopardize.
I was still worried, though, and that played out in my dreams. There was a cat chasing me, for one thing, and it wasn’t a normal cat, the kind I actually liked.
This one was deranged. But the worst part was that my dad was also there.
I didn’t think about him very much, but the date of his death was approaching and maybe that was why he had appeared in my nightmare.
I heard him coughing and trying to draw in a deeper breath like at the end when he was sick.
Then he grabbed my wrist and he was just as strong as he’d been in his prime.
I tried to pull away, and I woke up to find the sheet tangled around my arm.
“Are you all right?” Kiya asked me the next day at lunch. “You’re really pale.”
“She’s not as pale as Taylor,” Victoria noted. “No, Tay looks a little yellowish. Maybe green.”
“Please.” Our other friend didn’t pick up her head from where it rested on her arms. She had gone out the night before and was feeling it today.
“My dad always says a greasy burger…oh, sorry,” Victoria called as Taylor bolted out of her seat. “She’ll feel better to get it all up and out.”
“You have dark circles under your eyes,” Kiya pointed out to me. That was because I hadn’t slept again after waking from that nightmare. “The purple makes them look even lighter blue.”
“They’re cool blue,” Victoria corrected, and they argued over the shade, whether you’d call it icy or Nordic. “Anyway, they’re pretty,” she concluded.
“You were going to come over so that Tay and I could fix your hair,” Kiya said, and we discussed different possibilities for that until Victoria got a text and wanted to go back to her desk.
When we were alone, Kiya leaned forward. “Channing’s been trying to talk to me,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What is he saying?”
“Just that he thinks he screwed up and he wants to see me. He apologizes but then he adds stuff like, ‘I can’t understand why you’re pissed at me.’” She rolled her eyes.
“Tell me again what he’s supposed to be sorry for?”
“You know!”
“I thought that you wanted him to be something he’s not. Is that it?”
She stared at me and her lips tightened. “Are you trying to piss me off?”
“No! I really don’t understand,” I said. “You wanted him to come visit your parents and make your relationship more serious, but he didn’t want to. He was afraid of saying no to you so he hemmed and hawed.” That was the terminology she’d used to describe his behavior.
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, for sure,” I promised. “What am I getting wrong?”
“The part about how he shouldn’t have hemmed and hawed. He should have come out and told me what he was thinking,” she said angrily. “If he didn’t want our relationship to move so fast, then he should have said it!”
“That’s true. I completely agree.”
“But I get that he was afraid to say anything,” she continued.
“I had already told him about my ex and how I wasn’t going to waste time with someone who wanted to play games and not be serious.
So he knew that I’d break up with him if he backed off, and he was afraid to lose me.
I think that he was falling in love with me and he was scared, so that was why…
” She blinked. “We had different timelines. It’s not your place to say that mine was wrong and his was right. ”
“I’m not saying that,” I told her. “You want what you want, and I understand that. I’m the same way. I have goals and I work until I achieve them.”
“Yeah, exactly.” She seemed to relax. “I have goals, relationship goals. I’m not messing around and I only accept serious candidates. There’s no trying things out.”
“Well, maybe there is,” I said. “He had a tryout with you but it didn’t work.”
Now Kiya laughed a little. “Right, he didn’t get picked for the roster and he was sent down. Maybe next season,” she told me. “Except that I’m not waiting around because I know what I want. What about Ronan?”
Did the discussion that he and I had the night before somehow show traces on my face? They’d all been looking at me very closely. “What about him?” I asked cautiously.
“He must have new Woodsmen friends who are searching for the woman of their dreams,” she prompted. “Or maybe I’ll go back to enjoying myself for a while instead of looking for someone special. I need a break after all this.”
“I can ask him,” I said. “I’ll say that you’re interested in both things, or either. Actually, I might know somebody, too.”
She nodded. “Thanks. I’ll just ignore Channing. I don’t care what he wants to talk about.” I saw her eyes go to her phone. “I don’t care,” she repeated.
“I think it’s easier to be alone,” I told her. “There are a lot fewer complications.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. Then she looked at her phone again and sighed. “You’re absolutely right. I’d rather be alone.”
“Me too,” I responded. I didn’t think she meant it, though. For the first time, I wondered if I did.