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“So you don’t have someone you talk to about this? Like, I don’t know, a best friend, or a boyfriend or something?”
There it was. I’d asked the question. Why?! What was I thinking? If she did have a boyfriend, I’d be jealous, and then I would be angry at myself for being jealous. If she didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d have to live with that knowledge, and fight to keep my mind — and my hands — off her.
Catya seemed to know what I was getting at. She sat up straighter, and with a slight tremble in her voice, replied:
“No, I don’t have a best friend… or a boyfriend…”
She’d said them, the magic words. My heart skipped once, twice, and I hung suspended in the folds of the universe. Her lips parted expectantly, but I couldn’t answer that expectation. Just as quickly as my heart had thumped, so too did it slow with remorse. This wasn’t a thing that could happen. The age gap, the power dynamics — none of it would fly. Didn’t make me want it any less.
How she read me so quickly, I don’t know, but shortly thereafter she added, “But yeah, so anyways, that aside, just not a lot of alone time.”
My sick head wondered what she did with the little time she had to herself. I could almost see her, under the sheets, writhing around—
I cleared my throat, and cleared the thought away along with it.
“I’m sorry you’re so busy,” I sympathized. “Being a college athlete’s hard. Everybody seems to think that it’s an easy gig, that there’s some nerd assigned to do homework for you, but at most, that happens for a couple select football players. The rest of us — you, rather — the rest are just expected to do the same amount of homework with half the time.”
She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, exactly. And pre-med in itself is more work than any other major.”
I wanted to ask her about why she’d chosen pre-med, what she planned to do with it, if she saw herself still playing soccer after college, maybe going professional, what her sorority was like, how she felt about the state of the team, on and on and on. I kept my lips shut. We couldn’t sit on this forest floor forever, no matter how good the damp wind smelled or how much I liked our bodies being this close. Even in her sweatpants and ratty old shirt, she outshone nature itself with her beauty.
You need to cut this off, my mind asserted. This isn’t fair to either of you.
If that was true, why did this feel so right?
But no — my inner moral compass was correct, and for once, I had to listen to it. I’d spent years getting up to no good, partying, womanizing, blowing off responsibilities. Catya was too precious to be felled by my indifference to societal constructs.
“I have to go,” I said, my voice low and tinged with regret.
“Yeah, oh gosh, yeah, of course,” she said, rising quickly to her feet, obviously mortified by how much she’d just told me. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that, please just forget—”
I replied, “Don’t apologize. Being yourself is something a woman like you should never apologize for.”
A quick breath escaped her throat. If I just reached out right now and held her, what then?
But I didn’t.
Instead, I said, “I’ll see you at practice,” then put in my earphones and jogged in the opposite direction, leaving Catya alone in the woods.
Chapter 7
Catya
Simon raced away from me, moving far faster than he’d been going when we collided, almost as fast as my pulse was beating.
Just for the record, I hadn’t expected to talk with him like that. Hell, I hadn’t expected to see him, period. The woods were my place, and six in the morning was most definitely my time. What were the odds, you know?
Maybe we can just chalk it up to my bleary state as I don’t drink caffeine before runs, or the quiet of the forest.
Or, um, maybe we can chalk it up to everything about Simon. I wasn’t even sure what I liked most. That wild hair, with a mind of its own? Those blue eyes that put the ocean to shame? Or just, like, his entire body?
No, it’s not any of that, I thought. Those don’t hurt, but it’s… him. All of him, physical and emotional and everything else.
Shit. I was falling, hard and fast — no pun intended. The way we’d talked this morning had been overwhelming.
Confession time — I’d never had a serious boyfriend. Flings and hookups, sure, a few blind dates, but nothing serious. Not like I had a lot of spare time to go around, and if I knew anything from my parents’ awesome, caring relationship, it was that the good stuff took energy and time. I had neither.
