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We arrived at the ULA campus in the afternoon. The campus hadn’t changed in the days since we’d been gone, of course, but with this new target on my back, everything felt more sinister, as if I were back in London and my every move were being watched by the CCTVs. Not to co-op somebody else’s words, but the trees truly seemed to have eyes.
The girls disembarked silently, grabbing their bags from beneath the bus and quickly scurrying off into the sunset in groups of two and three. Their heads leaned close together in conversation, which was now no longer taboo since they were out in the open, not pent up in the same bus as Catya and me. Suppose I couldn’t blame them for being anxious to talk about it. I would’ve been, were I in their position.
I’d hoped, prior to the news breaking today, to use the arrival at ULA as a time to congratulate them all on our first big win together, maybe give a little celebratory speech, perhaps even buy the legal ones a round, but that no longer seemed appropriate. For one, it might be my last game with them, and for another, I doubted anyone was in the mood to hear from me. So I stayed silent, letting my first win as a head coach go by unmarked.
I turned around to make sure the bus was empty and saw Catya standing in the aisle.
“Hey,” I said softly.
I wondered what she’d been thinking about during the bus ride, if she’d played on her phone, or stared out the window, or pretended to sleep. It seemed unlikely that she could’ve managed real sleep. I know it was beyond my grasp.
“Hey.” Her tone was hollow, lifeless, as though she’d been tipped upside down and drained of joy.
“Listen,” I began, but she cut me off.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I’m sorry, I should never have told Grace, and I didn’t mean to, of course, it wasn’t part of the plan, but then there was this party and I kept being handed drinks and I got drunker and drunker and there was this guy, Robert, who I didn’t dance with even though he wanted to dance with me, and they, the girls that is, had been pushing me all night, the whole group, to do things and suddenly I was just spilling my guts, like, telling Grace the whole story because I couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take the constant needling, and—”
“Shh, Catya,” I interrupted. “You have nothing to apologize for. I was asking too much of you.”
She hung her head, her tone morose as she said, “No, you didn’t. That’s what people say to children who fuck up. I’m an adult and you can ask anything of me.”
“You’re wrong,” I insisted. “I did ask too much. It wasn’t fair of me to ask you to tell no one. All my friends and family are in a different country, so if I wanted to tell them about you, I could. There was no risk of it getting back to ULA. But you… most of your close friends, like Grace, are at ULA, right? And I understand that your parents might be, er, upset if you explained that you were seeing your coach. What I’m getting at is, I had plenty of people to talk to. You had none. And that’s not okay.”
Catya stayed silent, her brows pensive, as if not quite sure of my argument, so I continued:
“Plus, I knew the limitations of my job when I took it, and I knew the limitations when I became involved with you. I knew them, and I defied them anyways. That was my choice, and you shouldn’t bear any fault. Besides — it was worth it. One-hundred percent, absolutely worth it.”
“Really?” she said at last, a little hope beginning to creep in at the corners of her face.
“Yes, Catya. Of course.”
Without warning, as if the thought had shocked her system, she blurted out, “I can quit the team.”
“What?”
She nodded frantically. “Yeah, I can quit the team. I mean, I doubt they’d want to have me now anyways, not as captain, probably not as anything. So I can quit, and then we can be together.”
“Catya,” I replied, my voice level and not broaching an argument. “You’re not going to do that.”
“I might,” she shot back, hurt by my dismissiveness.
“No, no, I meant… you can’t do that. I couldn’t let you, not in good conscience. You’d lose your scholarship, and I know how much it means to you and your family. If you lost your scholarship on my behalf, well, I’d never be able to forgive myself. And then we couldn’t have a relationship, or whatever this is, because you’d be angry and I’d be guilty and it would be horrid. Your parents would hate me, you’d hate me and I’d hate me.”
