Love All

by Spangler, Rachel;

  Sadie’s expression softened, and she reached for her hand. With a little tug, she pulled Jay over to an overstuffed loveseat. “Who was she?”

  Jay sank onto the sofa and said a name that sounded too much like a sob. “Katia.”

  “Katia,” Sadie repeated the name, and it didn’t sound nearly as jagged leaving her beautiful lips. “Katia Vitrov, I’ve heard her name.”

  “She was my doubles partner,” Jay said, a little more steadily. “She trained with Hank.”

  “And the two of you were in love?”

  She shook her head and waited for the sharp pain in her heart to subside. “I loved her. She didn’t love me.”

  Sadie sank down beside her, her body so close and warm, her dark eyes filled with sympathy and tenderness. Something inside Jay broke, and all the hurt and pain and embarrassment she’d kept locked away for nearly a decade burst forth in a single rush of anguish. “She never loved me.”

  ★ ★ ★

  Sadie stared in awe, feeling as if her own heart were tethered to Jay’s, as the waves of pain radiated from her. She’d asked for this. She’d demanded an explanation. For two weeks she’d wanted nothing more than to understand what had ripped Jay apart that night in the hallway. If only she could’ve understood then that giving her those answers would take so much more than words, from both of them.

  Jay sat hunched forward on the couch, elbows on her jeans-clad knees and face in her hands. Sadie placed a palm on her back and rubbed in slow, soothing circles, her fingers skimming over the ridge of knotted muscles. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have the words to end the torment. Like a virus, the agony would have to work its way painfully out of Jay’s system, but Sadie vowed internally to stay here, to stay present and close, so Jay wouldn’t have to face any of what came next alone.

  “I went pro on my eighteenth birthday,” Jay finally said, her voice rough. “And I didn’t do badly. I didn’t do amazing, but I loved the game so much, and I made enough money to keep playing, which was all I ever really wanted, you know, just more time on the court. I didn’t have any cohesive aspirations until I met Hank, right after I turned twenty. You should have seen him then. He was ripped, and he had a pornstache.”

  Sadie smiled, not just at the idea of Hank with a creepy mustache, but at the hint of humor in Jay’s memory.

  “He said he thought I was built for doubles because of the live spin on my strokes and my quick feet. He also said he had a new, young player ready to be a star, so he introduced me to Katia.”

  Oh Hank, Sadie thought as her chest tightened. She didn’t even know the story yet, but she understood so much more of the sadness she’d seen in him in those early days of working with Jay again.

  “It took all of two practices to see we’d struck gold,” Jay continued, her voice steadier now. “Katia and I were magic together. We had this unspoken connection on the court. We burned up the tour. People who’d never watched doubles came out to see us. Fans, reporters, other players, and sponsors, man, they wanted us to sell everything for them. And we worked together on camera. We flowed together so naturally, it only seemed natural when that spilled over, off the court and into the bedroom.”

  Sadie’s face warmed with a mix of feelings she didn’t want to examine too closely, but jealousy ranked high among them. She knew the story wouldn’t end well, but she hated the thought of Jay in bed with someone else almost as much as she hated that that person had hurt her.

  “It was my twenty-first birthday. We’d just won the Australian Open. We sipped champagne and talked about the future. I felt on top of the world, and I kissed her. I didn’t even stop to think. Everything else was perfect. The move felt seamless to me, and the first time we made love, I don’t know, I just thought the final piece of the puzzle had snapped into place.”

  “You were young and in love,” Sadie summed up.

  “Yeah,” Jay said, looking up, but her eyes were far away, as if she could see things Sadie could only imagine. “I wanted to shout it into every microphone after every match. I wanted the world to know we were a couple.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  Jay shook her head.

  “She’d been in the U.S. since she was, like, five, but her family was still culturally very Russian. She played for the Russian Federation in the Davis Cup and during the Olympics. A lot of her sponsors came from there. It made sense for her to stay closeted. I didn’t like hiding the best part of me, but I never doubted her intentions. I never suspected anything. Not for years.”

  “Years?” Sadie asked. Of course, she knew better than most how people could go their whole lives without acknowledging their sexual orientation, but somehow Jay didn’t strike her as the kind to hide her joy. “How many years?”

  “Too many. Looking back, I should have seen, I should’ve realized the relationship was the only part of my life not progressing, but when you’re twenty-three and most of the people your age are drowning in debt or working entry-level jobs, it’s hard to get any sort of perspective on the kind of life we were living.” Jay explained as best she could, but Sadie couldn’t imagine what her life had been like then. “It’s hard to ask yourself to answer tough questions when you’re winning and everyone loves you. Things took off for me. Not just in doubles, but singles, too. Playing with Katia, or loving her, or maybe the combination, made me feel invincible. By the time I turned twenty-four, we were the number one team in the world together, and a few months later I broke the top ten in singles, too.”

  “Wow.” Sadie felt both impressed and a little chagrined that she didn’t know Jay had ever achieved that kind of success. “I had no idea you two owned so much of the tennis world.”

  “We didn’t,” Jay said flatly. “I owned a lot. She owned only her share of the doubles. The higher I climbed in the singles, the further she fell. The week I landed at number nine, she dropped out of the top one hundred. I’m not saying that was the end of things, because I’m still not sure what we ever really had, but the disparity in our careers didn’t do us any favors.”

  “You know that’s not your fault, right?”

  Jay shrugged. “Knowing something and believing it are two different things.”

  “If she’d loved you the way you loved her, she would’ve been happy for you, no matter who you were beating.”

  “Well, she wasn’t. First she got cold. She turned away from my kisses and started sleeping in her own hotel room again. Then she got mean. She made snide remarks about me being more coarse and clumsy than anyone would guess, both in private and in the press. And she clearly wasn’t talking about my style of play.”

  Sadie’s face flamed. What a horrible little jab on any level, but particularly in a press setting. “She actually made thinly disguised accusations about your personal life to reporters?”

  Jay snorted softly, then buried her face in her hands again, before mumbling, “She did so much more. And I tried to stop it. I really did. I even offered to quit singles altogether.”

  “When you were in the top ten?”

  “The ranking never mattered to me as much as she did,” Jay said quickly, “but I think she must have been addicted to the limelight more than I ever understood. She loved attention, and eventually all the attention was on me. Even after a doubles win, the press and the fans flocked to my side. I started getting offers for solo endorsements and special interviews without her. That’s when she snapped.”

  “Snapped?” Sadie asked, a quiver in her voice.

  “She went to the tabloids,” Jay said with a resigned sigh.

  “Why?”

  Jay shrugged again. “I lay awake asking myself that for years. I think maybe she wanted to end things between us. Maybe she’d never wanted to start with me. Maybe she felt trapped, but either way I think she knew once we broke up it would be the end of her career, so she panicked.”

  Sadie couldn’t make sense of that explanation. What could make a closeted woman talk to the press? “So she came out?”
>
  “No. She just outed me.”

  “Wait, how could she out you without outing herself in the process? Wouldn’t that be like blowing a hole in her own boat?”

  “She told them I seduced her,” Jay said, then in a whisper added, “more than that, really. She said I coerced her, that she wasn’t gay, but I pursued her so hard, when she was so young, she didn’t know how to tell me no.”

  “What?”

  “She never accused me of rape,” Jay said, as the first tear fell atop her bright red shoes. Sadie watched the spot spread and darken, and she felt as though Jay were actually bleeding in front of her as she reopened the old wound. “But the picture she painted was a pretty clear one of me as the brash, charismatic, older predator who led a younger, more demure girl astray.”

  Sadie could barely process the unfairness of what she was hearing, much less believe anyone who’d been around Jay would sit idly by and listen to someone assassinate her character. “I can’t imagine what a betrayal of that magnitude must’ve felt like on a personal level, but please tell me no one who knew you believed her.”

  “Almost everyone believed her,” Jay said. Taking a ragged breath as if she couldn’t get quite enough air for the force of the words, she continued. “A few of the players who had been around us realized her story didn’t add up, but we’d been so closeted, very few people had really gotten to see our personal dynamic. The fans, the press, even the league officials were all willing to buy into the drama. I was a big story in our circles.”

  “But you told them she was lying, right?”

  “At first I was just too stunned. And I was heartbroken. The loss crippled me. It was like I forgot how to function as a human for a while. Any day that I managed to eat and shower felt like a win at first.”

  Sadie fought the urge to jump up and pace as the anger surged through her, but she didn’t want to put any distance between Jay and herself right now as Jay’s emotion poured out with each anguished syllable.

  “I had been so in love, I’d been willing to throw my entire career away for her, and now every time I turned on the TV or stumbled across a newspaper, there was Katia talking about how she’d never wanted to be anything more than my tennis partner. Nothing made sense anymore. I didn’t know who I was without her. I spent weeks second-guessing every memory, scrutinizing every moment that had mattered to me.”

  Sadie rubbed Jay’s back in slow, soothing circles as she fought her own tears now. How could someone hurt another human being that badly? How could you make love with someone one night and then betray them the next?

  Her heart gave a painful little hiccup, but she pushed her own insecurities away as Jay began to speak again.

  “Eventually I started to feel something other than pain again, and when I did, I realized I was the one who’d gotten played. But then I almost drowned in the crushing embarrassment of how wrong I’d been to give her so much of myself. By then, she had a book deal with some freakish Russian ex-gay group. She was releasing excerpts. She shared intimate details of our lives together, and some of them were close enough to the truth that even I started to believe her version of them, so you can hardly blame other people for buying into it.”

  “I do,” Sadie said, a fire spreading in her chest. “I blame each and every one of them.”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t even blame her. She was scared or maybe she really was confused or felt trapped.”

  “Anyone can be confused for a night or for a short while, but not for years, Jay.”

  “She was young.”

  “So were you!”

  “I don’t know,” Jay said, sounding utterly dejected.

  “I do,” Sadie said emphatically. “I know.”

  Jay met her eyes for the first time in what felt like weeks, and Sadie’s breath caught as the beauty of that gaze peered into hers. The connection seemed to have some effect on Jay as well, because she didn’t push her line of reasoning any further.

  “Anyway, by the time I found the strength to get angry, most of the damage was done. My lawyers managed to stop the book from coming out, but all the excerpts were already online. We couldn’t chase all those feathers in the wind. My lawyers wanted me to sue her for libel, but I didn’t have it in me to try to hurt her.”

  “You still loved her, after everything?”

  “She was my first.” Jay hung her head again. “And part of me still worried she might have been right about me, or maybe that she’d had her reasons at least. I think I needed to believe it at the time, because it was easier than the alternative. Somehow it seemed worse to admit I’d given my heart and soul to someone who disdained me. I certainly couldn’t bring myself to say so in court.”

  “Wait, she got away with everything?” Sadie asked, unable to temper her incredulous tone. “No one believed the truth?”

  “Truth doesn’t sell newspapers or bump ratings, but I thought it would all go away soon enough if I stopped talking about it. Americans don’t really follow tennis the way they do other sports, and I had just barely made the top ten. I didn’t see why anyone else would care about me long-term, but I misjudged the public’s attention span and their bloodthirstiness.”

  “It didn’t go away?” Sadie already knew the answer.

  “No.” Jay wrung her hands now. “I lost all my sponsors. Fans turned on me. They booed and screamed horrible things at me. The press followed me everywhere. Even the gay community didn’t know what to do with me. I mean, they liked having a new celebrity, but they didn’t want one that perpetuated the lesbian-predator myth.”

  “Didn’t anyone stand by you?”

  “Hank tried,” Jay said. “He saw right through Katia. So did Peggy and a handful of other players, but anyone who defended me came under fire or at least under suspicion. Guilty by association. Eventually I stopped going out with anyone I really cared about.”

  “You faced it all alone?”

  She grimaced. “No, that would have been better in the long run, but I was so desperately insecure, and all of a sudden there were all of these women slipping me numbers and sneaking into my hotel. They wanted me, they made their desires abundantly clear, and I wanted so badly to feel wanted that I didn’t tell them no nearly as much as I should have. I’m not sure I slept alone two nights in a row for at least a year.”

  “Got it,” Sadie managed, her voice tighter than she would have liked.

  Jay looked up again, this time her cheeks scarlet with embarrassment. “I’m not proud. I never felt proud, but you deserve to know. You have to know, I wasn’t some helpless victim the whole time. I played into the press and the public’s image of me for way too long. I became the womanizer they all wanted to see. It didn’t matter why, and it didn’t matter that those women got way more out of me than I ever got out of them.”

  “You had your reasons.”

  “Reasons don’t excuse actions,” she said, so emphatically that Sadie believed her. “I humiliated myself, my parents, my friends, the tour. I couldn’t give a teenage fan an autograph without someone raising an eyebrow, and I didn’t even fight back. I hated myself, and it showed on the court. I lost constantly, and within two years, I had dropped from ninth to ninetieth.”

  “But somehow you turned it all around,” Sadie said, desperate to find the happy ending Jay deserved.

  “It was a long, slow process, but it started when I stopped with the women. What I had with them was all flash and no substance, which is what people were saying about me by then, and I didn’t want that to be true. So, I buckled down and focused exclusively on tennis, but in an attempt to find something, anything good left in me, I pushed too hard and hurt my knee.”

  All the air left Sadie in a rush. “Oh my God, Jay, how have you not just curled into a ball and given up?”

  Her mouth curled up slightly. “I kind of did for a while, but eventually self-pity got boring, and I started bouncing a ball off my bedroom wall. Then I started hitting against my garage. Before I knew it, I was having fun aga
in. I started to feel like me again. I didn’t want to lose that feeling, and I didn’t want to be the person Katia had made me out to be. I didn’t want her to have the last word on my career or my life story.”

  Sadie squeezed Jay’s shoulder, grateful to hear a hint of passion in her voice again.

  “I told myself I could do things differently this time. I believed I could play my style of tennis on my own terms and just stay away from the rest of it.”

  “And you have,” Sadie interjected, feeling almost triumphant on her behalf. “You’re back.”

  “I was,” Jay said. “I had clawed and crawled my way back to a place I could feel proud of, and I’d managed to do so without dragging anyone else into my drama. I was just to the point where I really thought I could trust myself again, and then . . .”

  Sadie waited, the slow realization causing her stomach to sink. “And then I kissed you.”

  Jay nodded. “It’s my fault. I got too close.”

  “No,” Sadie said quickly. “I can’t stand for you to blame yourself. Please, Jay, if I was the person who shook you off the foundation you worked so hard to build, I couldn’t live with myself.”

  “Well, I couldn’t stand to see you blame yourself, either,” Jay said, turning to face her. “You are perfect to me, Sadie. You are beautiful and tenacious and kind, and I would rather die than put you through what I went through before.”

  Now it was Sadie’s turn to nod numbly. None of this had ever occurred to her before. Not just Jay’s past, but the implications for her future. She could never date again without causing a field day for the paparazzi. “I feel like I’m living on another planet. Normally I would just say forget everything and everyone. I do what I want. I have always gone with my gut, but it’s not just about what I want, is it?”

  Jay shook her head sadly. “And as reluctant as I am to go through the trauma again, it’s not even about me, either. We have Destiny to think about. If anyone knew I had feelings for you, she’d have to face some very real consequences too.”