Capturing Kate (23 page)

“That’s all it was?” Her voice was incredulous. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s not all it was,” he corrected. “I respect you and care about you, and I was also attracted to you. But Kate. It was part of survival for us. It’s not real.”

“But it can be.” She grabbed his hand. “It can be. You like that, right? Dominance and stuff? I liked it, too. It helped me! It did.”

“It’s not the right way.” His voice was rough. “It was a stopgap measure, an emergency brake, Kate. It wasn’t real life. For couples who do it, it’s part of a complex relationship that involves sex, discipline, defined roles, and maybe a little stress relief. It evolves out of mutual desire. But we’re not a real couple. You’d do better with distance from me.”

“But in real life I don’t have such insane emotions. In real life I wouldn’t need it that way. I don’t want you because you—spanked me, Sloan. I’m not asking you to be my life coach. I want you to date me, okay? And have kinky sex with me for fun if we want. Why can’t I want a dominant boyfriend? Is that wrong? I don’t know. Why?”

“It’s not going to work. Trust me.” His voice was rough.

“I trusted you and you saved me.” Her voice broke.

“No. I let you get hurt.” His hands clenched. “I didn’t keep you safe, not really. And for that I will never forgive myself.”

“You took a bullet for me, Sloan! When Allison was distracting us with the fake video, and that guy snuck up behind us? You saw him and you covered me. You saved me.”

“You should never have been there!” he shouted and clenched his hand. “Fuck, Kate. I trusted Allison and she double-crossed me, and I didn’t even see it. She snuck a bug into the cabin and heard about the cardiology office. She sent the people that night to kill us.”

“You had a gun ready,” Kate reminded him.

He lowered his voice. “For some reason I had a gut feeling that something wasn’t good. But I fucked it up, Kate. I didn’t suspect her. I should have read her better and known she was dirty. I should have—” He shook his head. “No, what happened to you is on me. And I will never forget that. I can’t be with you.”

“But you like me. Admit it.” Her voice trembled. “Sloan, you do, right?” A tear ran down her cheek.

“Very much.” He cleared his throat. “So much, in fact, that I know what I need to do for you, and that’s to remove myself. I let you down once, Kate. I won’t do it again. You deserve more from a relationship.” He touched away the tear, and she grabbed his hand.

“But a relationship is something we both pick,” she argued. “And if we both pick each other, and are willing to work through the tough parts, why can’t we try?”

“No. Plus, you know how I feel about my job, and how it can’t work with a relationship. There are too many roadblocks.” He shook his head again and pulled his hand back.

She grabbed his hand again and stood up, legs firm at last. “Look. I fell for you. Somewhere in between the lidocaine and the storm and the spanking and the shitty sandwiches and the late night talks, I fell for you. And it’s real. I’ve never felt this way before about a man. And maybe part of it is that we were thrown together into forced intimacy. But people get together in this world for all kinds of weird reasons, some weirder than ours. We make friends with our college freshman roommates and stay best friends. We end up babysitting for the neighbor for years. You get close to your neighborhood barista and suddenly she’s your best friend for life. Proximity does lead to intimacy of all kinds. Why should ours be wrong?”

She leaned forward. “All I know is that I think I love you, and I want to see where that goes. And if you’re brave enough, you’ll do the same.”

“Kate, I would be taking advantage of you if I stayed.” His voice held pain. “You need to heal and get to a healthy place where you can see whether this is something you want. Kink is a difficult enough thing to embrace, let alone while recuperating from a trauma.”

“But you do want me.” She swayed, and he gently sat her back on the edge of the bed.

“I want you to heal, more. Do you understand me?” He ran a hand through his hair. “I have a dangerous job. And instead of keeping you safe, I put you in harm’s way. It nearly killed you! The images I’m associated with are going to be forever attached to pain, in your mind. Do you want that person for the rest of your life, every time you look over in bed, or across the dinner table? Looking at me is going to bring your panic attacks on, not help them. I won’t do that to you. You need a good six months to just get yourself back to normal.”

“Then you meet me again in six months.”

He crossed his arms and a look of anguish passed over his face. “Kate, stop.”

“I mean it. I’ll still love you in six months. And you know what? I think you’ll realize that you love me, too. And in exactly six months, we’ll meet again. At Lila’s coffee shop, because that’s the first place we met.” She grabbed at her phone on the table. “Today is October twenty-fourth. So, God, I can’t do the math, we’ll meet on let’s say, April twenty-fourth. That’s about six months. We can start over.”

He took the phone and put it back down, then squeezed her hand. His eyes were sad as he got up. “I won’t be there, Kate.” He walked to the door. “I’m sorry. I care for you, so I can’t stay, and I won’t come back. Goodbye. Be well.” And he was gone.

Chapter Eighteen

Four months later

“My therapist is annoying me,” Kate confided to Lila over coffee. The shop was in a lull between rushes, and the few patrons present were slow and steady, sipping coffee and reading. It was nothing like the frantic mornings full of tapping keyboards and barked cell phone convos, where words like “action required” and “absolutely!” and “email me the data” ricocheted, shooting the business day into everyone. At this hour the words were languorous and smooth: “More coffee,” “Seeing the grandkids on Friday.” Kate hoped the ease in the air would transfer backwards into her words and then into her brain, settling her.

“Why?” Lila’s hair was pink now, with a red streak. It made her look young and punk, but her eyes were the same as always, kind, listening.

“She keeps saying that I need to get over Sloan and move on, that I’m dwelling in the past. I wanted to hurt her. Not really! You know what I mean, though, right?”

“I want to hurt people every day,” Lila agreed. “When they ask for cream and complain when their coffee has cream. When they tell me to make a half-caf half-decaf with chocolate sauce and cinnamon and then return it, saying there’s cinnamon in there and they hate cinnamon. Very condescending, demanding. Ugh.”

“But you’re always so sweet.”

“I am. And most people are wonderful. The regulars make my life joy. But those sour people? Sometimes the taste of one sour person lingers in my mouth for an hour. It’s like a rotten pistachio. Have you ever eaten one of those? God. It takes forever to lose the tang.”

Kate laughed. “You make me happy.”

“And you make me happy.” Lila patted Kate’s hand. “And maybe your therapist is right. She’s been so helpful about other things, right?”

“Yes, she has.” Kate looked into the distance, thinking.

“So maybe you should trust her with your rotten pistachio.” Lila smiled but her face was serious.

Kate tilted her head. “She’s helped so much with techniques to deal with panic attacks. My confidence. My fears. I mean, in general I like her okay, I guess. I just wish she could understand that my feelings for Sloan are real.”

Lila’s voice was sympathetic. “I’m sorry things didn’t work with him.”

“The thing is, they did work. When we were together, I really—he’s amazing.”

“But doesn’t your therapist say that it was just, like, transference? You glommed onto him because you were scared and stressed, and he was there and sexy and protective?”

“Yeah. She does. That’s the traditional interpretation. I’ve read a ton of books. They do say that. And maybe it’s true, you know? But also true is that I really care for him. Why can’t it be both? I glommed on because of those reasons, and then I discovered that in addition, there was real emotion there. Sometimes that can happen. It did happen. He glommed right back.” She knew she sounded stubborn, but the feelings were real.

“Well, I don’t know.” Lila shrugged. “What are you going to do?”

“Would it be bad to find him?”

“What do you mean, find him?” Lila wrinkled her nose and glanced up when a customer rose, but he was only getting more sugar packets, and she settled back down, attention on Kate.

“Like, go to him. In Chicago. I know his address. Anyway, a place to send mail to him through his boss’s office. Say, I don’t know, hi?”

“Yes, that would be bad. Well, I don’t know if it would. But Kate, he—he left you. Right? I think that’s important. I’m sorry, but I think you need to let this go. Let him go.”

“But I keep thinking about him.”

“What else does your therapist say?”

“She says that I’m holding onto him as a symbol of safety in my mind. And that I’ll be able to release it—the symbol—when I’ve made enough emotional progress.”

“That could make sense.”

“Or it could be bullshit.”

Lila laughed. “Probably half of therapy is bullshit. I mean, half of everything anyone ever says is bullshit.”

“Yeah.” Kate poked at her coffee cup. “But which half? Life doesn’t label them for you.”

“Unfortunately.” Lila smiled. “I guess that means you get to pick.”

“Well, I think him leaving was the bullshit. He loves me, too. He almost said it. He was wrong to leave, Lila. He said it would hold me back. I don’t agree. I think not being with him—or not having the chance to try—is holding me back. I at least wanted the chance to see what we had, if it could go anywhere.”

“Well, I don’t want to steer you. It’s your decision.”

“You want to steer me?” Kate cheered at the mental image. “Like a speedboat. Can I take a nap, and you steer me right into the future? Maybe one where I’m rich and have a great boyfriend and I’m happy?”

Lila made a wheel motion with her hands. “Brmmm, brmmm! On it. Just watch out, because you know how I like shoe shopping. When you wake up in that future land, you’re going to have a shit-load of heels in the cargo hold and probably a pair on your feet, too. Oh, and maybe I’ll pick you up a few of them dudes.” She pointed to the construction workers outside the window, who were repairing a pothole in the street. One of them thumbed his nose and pulled his pants up over his belly. The other one stared into the distance, jaw slack. The construction never ended—every time they finished something, another issue popped up. Whack-a-mole in cement and blacktop, workers constantly battling against the ravages of relentless weather and time.

“Whatever!” The two of them laughed and laughed, Kate insanely grateful for a friend like this. “I think maybe I should just find him, you know? Ask him one more time. If he says no, then I’m out for real. But this not knowing, it’s driving me insane.”

* * *

In the end, she decided to write. Putting words on paper was more intimate than typing. She wrote her feelings in swirling script, letting them pour and run onto the page wet and wild, the ink leaking her emotions live and hot. A live wire. A circuit waiting to be completed. Her own last attempt to fight against the current of time.

She sent it to him, an envelope sealed in a second envelope. Her heart, sealed inside hope.

Chapter Nineteen

The day was cool, with gray skies and wind, and Kate wrapped both hands around the ceramic mug. Lila’s shop was busier than usual; maybe the impending rain sent people scurrying out of their hiding places to reassess and take stock before diving back into security. Like the woodpile at the back of her grandma’s farm; when the rain started, little insects and lizards popped out, startled, before burrowing back in. It was life tipping itself sideways and then settling back down. Or maybe it was the difference that jump-started them. The lack of sun, maybe, reminded them of other things missing in their life, inspired them to change something. Add joy in little pieces, add something bright to replace the missing rays.

The throng was reassuring: people out living life, taking solace in the shared camaraderie of coffee and pastries before heading into their individualities. She liked rainy days and she liked busy days, too. It made for good writing. Sitting here, letting the rain and the people swirl around, noisy but just far enough removed, gave the perfect combination of stimuli to let her mind drift.

Still, she darted her eyes to Sloan’s table. In her mind, that was his spot, even more his than the woman who regularly sat there, a thirty-something professional with arranged red curls and a perfect French manicure and an iPhone with a blue jeweled case. The woman thought the table was hers, might tell friends, “My regular table is right beside the window, just past the door,” but she’d be wrong: she was trespassing on a ghost she’d never know.

When would a mind give up on an idea? Some things were just so strong. One week with Sloan was tied all into her mind with steel cables. Other things—months at school, for instance, in a certain class, had bonds so frayed that half of them were already gone, a fuzzy rope coming apart. She couldn’t remember half the students, and not a single lecture, but Sloan’s voice, his eyes, his body—those were etched into her mind.

But he was gone.

Maybe everyone was right: her therapist, Lila, the dozens of self-help books she read. It was time to forget him and move on with her future.

A voice interrupted her reverie. “Kate?”

She felt her skin tingle and burn, because that voice was—it was his voice. Sloan’s voice. Was she hearing things now, trying to make him come alive before her eyes with the force of her desire?

Her heart pounded and her body felt a surge of adrenaline, and there he was. It was him—Sloan. He was here.

She stood up, knocking her chair, and he righted it. For an awkward second they stood staring, and then he grabbed her into his arms and held her close, and she threw her arms around him and hugged as hard as she was able.