by Amy Faye
Everyone she knew was a dancer, and everyone she knew was going to be a dancer for most of her life. By the time that she had time to do other things, she'd be in her late thirties, at least. And then she's a little past the age to be finding someone, settling down, and starting a family.
Those weren't things that she could easily ignore, in spite of herself. She wanted all of that, and the fact that whether she wanted it or not, she was never going to get it… it burned in her chest. But she could put it away, she could look past it.
She'd learned how to look past all of that. So even though her initial reaction wasn't an immediate, excited 'yes I want to be a dancer,' it was easy to say, after only an instant to check all of those concerns.
But when she'd tried to decide on Jeff, she hadn't had to say, 'no, I mean if it didn't mean having to risk everything else in your life. Just, is it on the list of things that would be nice.'
She didn't even think about the possibilities, the dangers that she might be facing. She just wanted to be with him, simple as that. And that was as dangerous as anything she'd ever done, as worrying as anything she'd ever thought.
Because she knew what it meant in terms of the next questions.
What were the costs of being a dancer? Well, for one thing—she'd already listed them. She wasn't ever going to be a woman, not entirely. Not in the fullest sense of the word. She wasn't going to be a mother, she wasn't going to be able to be a wife. Not until she was past her youth, past her chance to have kids and raise them.
She'd be able to adopt, of course. Everyone always said that. You can adopt! But it's not the same, and nobody thinks it's the same. Having kids wasn't something that was ever going to be entirely off the list. It was just a sacrifice that she had to make to get what she wanted. Priorities were what they were.
What were the costs of being with Jeff?
Well, for starters, they had to keep it a secret. Which was a big one. What if they didn't keep it a secret, though? What would that mean?
Well, it would mean that they'd have to figure out a way to explain to their parents why they'd been keeping it a secret. They wouldn't be able to get married. What the press said, that would be hard to say. If there was no secret about it, then they'd be able to argue pretty easily that there's no blood relationship, but…
At the same time, that didn't exactly hold water, did it? No. Not really, not at all. The odds were much better that they'd take the story and run with it, and their faces would be all over the press, at least for a few days. They'd be ruined.
So that was a cost associated with it. Either it's a secret, and they're constantly worrying that the secret gets out, or they just accept the consequences of the secret getting out right away. You still have to pay the price, but at least then you know you're paying the cost and you know what it is. No more need to worry about it, because you've already made the decision not to worry.
Which solved at least some of her problems, but not nearly enough to get around it completely.
She didn't know whether or not he'd accept her, either. Not just because she'd asked him to break up, and of course he'd be pretty upset about it. Would he be willing to accept the reality that she wasn't going to be able to put her life on hold?
That was a lot to ask of a guy, regardless of who he was. A guy who was going to be on the road half his life, with women practically right there for the taking? It wasn't exactly the sort of thing that any woman wanted, and it wasn't as if she could just keep coming with him like this.
He'd be spending most of his time on a bus, in hotels for a night or two before moving on. Imagine the expense of having to cover a second person who traveled separately, but traveled everywhere that the team traveled. Then imagine how hard it would be to meet up during the few hours that he might have free.
Would he be willing to accept that she couldn't have kids? Who would? She couldn't afford children, though. Not if she was going to get what she'd always wanted, to be on the big stages, to be under the bright lights. To be a star, in her own way.
She laid her head back against the headboard. She was too deep in her own head. Thinking too much. She should have been packing. She didn't have tickets made up yet, but it wouldn't take too long to get them.
As soon as she talked to Jeff, she'd just have him buy her a plane ticket home. If she wasn't there to be with him, then her being there was just a distraction. Not just for him, but for her as well. She could do much more if she were back home, if she were close to her studio.
She closed her eyes.
Now if only she could stop thinking about him entirely. Because the conclusion had been obvious from the start. She'd just wanted to try to find proof that she'd been looking at it wrong. Whatever she did, the conclusion was completely inescapable. The only way that she could get what she wanted out of life, the only way in the whole world, was if she accepted first and foremost that she couldn't have Jeff.
It was dancing, or it was a relationship.
She didn't have a gut reaction to that. Which worried her in its own ways. She'd always wanted this. Always wanted to have a career dancing, and now she had a ticket to the best dance school in the country, and she was only months out of starting her first semester there.
Why was she starting to doubt herself now? What gave her the right to question her decisions after how hard she'd worked to make them a reality?
Chapter Thirty-Six
He wanted to go talk to her. It was the right thing to do, and he was better than that. He was smarter than that. The question still burned. Was he ready to give her up? Was he capable of it? If he was ready, and he was capable, was it really what he wanted anyways? He was ready and able to become a waiter, but that wasn't really an option, either.
The fact was that he knew the answers to all of those questions. He could do it. He could let her go. If he had to. It would hurt, but it would only hurt for a little while. Only a few months, maybe a year. Maybe two years.
Or maybe it wouldn't go away, not entirely. Maybe he'd keep feeling it whenever he closed her eyes. In either case, there would always be something there. There would always be a little part of him that was ready to take her back at a moment's notice.
And the last question, the question of whether or not it was what he wanted in the end, well he knew the answer to that, too. It wasn't hard to figure out. Didn't even require much in the way of thought. He didn't want to give her up. Whether she wanted it or not, he wanted to stay with her and if he had the power, then he'd make her see it his way.
But that was exactly why he wasn't going to do that. Because if he did that… well, she'd always had the option to say no. He wasn't a monster. He wasn't going to force her to do anything. Push her, sure. Try to make her see things from his perspective, definitely. Force her to see things in a light that he wanted her to, rather than however it was that she wanted to approach things.
He'd put her in positions she didn't like. He had done it already, more times than he could count. Once the image was in her mind, once she'd come to think about it, it would take her over. The same way that he knew it always would. She couldn't quite resist it.
If she still wasn't interested, though, he'd let it go. And he had done plenty of that, too, in spite of himself. He'd passed over plenty of opportunities she didn't like.
If she wanted to stop, then he'd stop. Because she got what she wanted, in the end, even if he wanted it to look like it was him taking whatever he wanted. And even if he focused on his own needs, most of the time.
She took priority when it counted.
Jeff let his eyes slip closed. He should have gone to her anyways, though. Because there was just as good a chance that what she really wanted was to know that he was concerned, and he wanted her to know that, too.
He still wanted to hold out hope that in the end, she'd see it from his perspective, that she'd know what he thought and how he felt, and she would change her mind.
He had played it out a thousand ti
mes in his head—scenarios where he went in, he said that he didn't want her to go, and she'd fall into his arms and they'd hold each other and make love again and everything would go right back to the way it had been. He'd forget that anything had ever been wrong by morning, and they'd be a happy family again.
It wasn't going to happen that way. Even the best case scenarios weren't that good. And as much as he was willing to accept her walking away, on an intellectual level, even though he knew that he owed it to her to let her walk away from the relationship because that was what it meant to be a good lover…
He wasn't ready to look her in the eyes as she did it. He wasn't ready to give up the last vestiges of hope that she was going to come back, and change her mind. And he wasn't ready to have her looking him in the eyes when he did it.
So she deserved for him to be there. She deserved a response. She deserved a lot of things. But in the end, after everything…
He wasn't strong enough to give those things to her.
So he did what he always did, when things got real hard. What he'd done for years, since he was a kid.
He went on the web, he booked one-way back to Detroit, and he ran away from the problem. Distance would make it easier. It had to make it easier. Because if it was going to stay this hard, if it was going to always hurt this much, then he couldn't keep going.
If it was going to stay this hard, then he'd made a big mistake already, and there wasn't going to be any cleaning it up. So he had to do the next best thing, and give her what she wanted, even if it meant that he was giving up whatever he wanted.
He clicked to send the flight details over to her, and sent a heads-up text. He hoped she wouldn't respond, and when she didn't, he let out a sigh of relief, laid his head back on the soft hotel pillow, and let his heart rip itself out through his rib cage.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
There was a conscious sort of feeling of relief that went through Cathy any time she got a chance to cancel plans, or walk away from commitments. Like she was feeling all the pleasure of going to it, all at once, without needing to leave her cozy little world.
Plenty of other people had talked about the same thing, had remarked that they loved walking away from plans. It wasn't unusual, she was told. Like a god damn drug.
The weight coming off her chest when she'd gotten the flight info from Jeff, when she'd realized that she could go home, and she'd be fine, and she could just walk away and even though everyone's feelings were hurt they were just going to both ignore it…
It was amazing. The best. It stung like a son of a bitch in her chest, and there was nothing that she could really do about that, but the fact that she could get what she asked for, regardless of whether or not it was what she really wanted, was an amazing feeling. A confirmation of everything she'd believed from the beginning.
It was all a big facade, and she could walk away from it any time. She was his, but she wasn't his property. And they both knew it, so the minute that she wanted out, she was out.
Her heart was still thumping in her chest when she stepped through the doors of the airport.
Some part of her wondered, almost hoping, if he'd show up like some hero in a romance movie, desperate to stop her getting on the plane. But there was no reason for him to do that. He was a busy man, and going home—leaving and just separating their lives—was the right decision. So he wouldn't stop her, obviously, because she wasn't doing the wrong thing.
She was doing exactly what they should have done the minute that they'd been sat down on the couch together and told that they were going to be a family now.
It had only been a few months since then. Most of them torrid, crazy things, making decisions that were unwise by even the mildest of standards. They probably shouldn't have played around on the roof, for example. That might have been a mistake.
The memory made her smile. It had been fine when she was just sitting there in her jeans, looking out across the property. It was better to call it 'the property' rather than 'the yard.' Because she'd had a 'yard' at the old house. It had been amazing, because in an apartment you really don't have anything like that. You're not even supposed to walk on the grass. Not really. Though everyone did.
This was at least a half an acre, and went back long enough that she suspected—though she wasn't sure—that you could put an entire football field back there. Certainly you could fit a baseball diamond, though you'd have a pretty small outfield. So 'the property' felt right.
They probably shouldn't have been up there in the first place. Once clothes had started coming off, the rough surface of the shingles had started digging into her skin, and…
She smiled a little more. That was a good night, rough shingles or not. It had just meant getting a little creative with clothing placement, after all.
The trouble being, though, that she shouldn't have been thinking about it. The T.S.A. here was a little different than Detroit. In some ways the same, but different, too.
No longer the harsh grays of Detroit, and the ticket lobby was smaller. It seemed surprising—Florida must be a more popular destination, after all. It was only after a little thought that she realized that there were probably several other airports in Florida.
Was there another airport in Michigan? She wasn't sure. Couldn't think of one, but then again, when you never need to go any further than Detroit Metro, why would you bother looking into it?
You wouldn't. Obviously. So she hadn't, and as a result, she had essentially what bordered on no idea whether or not a second airport existed. Certainly not anywhere near Detroit, which is where almost everyone is going in Michigan, unless small air strips met the qualification. Which they didn't.
Someone behind Cathy tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, confused. "Yes?"
"I'm sorry, miss—the line?"
She turned, surprised to find that it had moved several spaces up. Three feet was a long time to be distracted, standing in line like that. Shame that to walk it only took a second, and then she was right there.
She was right there, and Jeff, who had no reason to be, wasn't. That was the way it was supposed to be. That was how she'd wanted it. If he had asked, then she would have told him. Leave her be, let her go, don't come to the airport to try to stop her. Don't come to the airport to be supportive, because it just makes the rest of it harder.
Don't do anything like that.
Cathy swallowed hard. It was the way that it was supposed to be. The way she wanted it. Jeff always gave her what she wanted, in the end, whether he was willing to admit it or not. Whether she even knew how to ask for it, or not.
So he shouldn't be here because she wanted to be able to leave in peace.
So why was she feeling so unhappy that she couldn't find him?
Chapter Thirty-Eight
There were worse things that could have happened to him. Plenty of worse things. He could have taken an injury. He could have gotten cracked in the head with a line down the center.
Was it likely? Well, no, not really. But it wouldn't be the first time it had happened in the history of baseball, either. So really, he should be thankful. A little breakup would build character, right?
Right. He reminded himself of it every couple of days. At first it was every couple of minutes. Eventually, it didn't fade, but he got less excited about reminding himself to ignore it. Just soak it in, instead. Feel it.
Sure, it sucked. Sure, it was unpleasant. Those things were completely expected. But what was the point of having any feelings at all if he was just going to ignore them?
So he didn't feel any better but he reminded himself less. And just like he'd thought, it was just as easy after three weeks as it was after a day to turn the hurt off long enough to throw a baseball. Easier, because eventually he got practice throwing when he was upset.
Eventually he got used to flipping the switch, too, until he could do it so fast that sometimes he thought the sting was getting less, until he ran out of steam and it hit him again, hard
, as if he were paying for his hubris with the pain of distance.
He let out a breath. What was she doing in Detroit? Was she busy? Was she practicing? Was she thinking about him? Or had she moved on? Would she find some new guy? It seemed unlikely, given her single-minded focus on dance. It was amazing that she'd let him close to her, and they'd lived in the same house.
He let out a breath. No, there wasn't really any time to think about her, was there? If he had time to mope, he had time to do something else. The idea that he could find something else to do, though, was nowhere near as useful as it should have been.
What was he supposed to be doing exactly? He spent six hours a day watching game footage. He was under strict orders to let his shoulder rest. So what the fuck was he supposed to be doing with his time? Jerking off? Eating more?
There was a whole lot of nothing to be done, and a whole lot of nobody to do it with. So it was a little difficult, to say the least, to really buy into the notion that he should have been doing something else.
The frustration spiked an instant later when her face flashed through his mind again.
What was he supposed to have done exactly? What was it that she wanted from him?
He pulled his phone out. No missed texts. No missed calls. Which is what he had expected, what he should have expected. A month of nothing was what he'd had so far. Why would it be that today something would change?
There was one easy answer. One that came to mind right away. He hesitated for a moment before he decided to do it. His thumbs weren't used to clicking at the digital keyboard. You don't need to text a whole lot when you're always worrying about practice.
At least, that was Jeff's experience. Maybe other folks texted their coach a lot, or something.
'Hey, Cath. How have you been?'