him? Is Tate Reed in there, waiting for you?” His voice was accusing, each new question seeming more condemning than the next. But he kept asking, not pausing, as though not wanting to hear her actual response.
Tate. Every warm enticing feeling she was having left her and she felt cold again as guilt washed over her. She tried to move even further back but felt the wood of the door against her. Tate loved her, Matt had never loved her, and she felt empty inside, thinking about both men.
“I’m not discussing my relationship with Tate with you and you have no right to ask me,” she whispered, not being able to bring her voice above the intimacy his question had possessed but still containing the outrage she felt. “You need to leave.”
He didn’t reply. He simply lifted his forehead, replacing it with his lips. She felt both heat and memories surge through her before he backed away and pressed her key into her hand. She remained against the door as she watched him leave, not trusting herself to move until he was gone.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood against the door even after he left. She felt like part of the wood, except for the small spot where her forehead burned with the memory of his soft lips pressed against her. It took hearing the beat of her shivering against the door to force her into action. She walked through the apartment in the dark, removing her clothes and leaving them in a wet trail behind her.
She stepped into the shower consumed by the cold inside and out. She had loved Matt then she had hated him, and now she had no idea how to feel. Part of her wanted to act out for the first time in her life and force him to tell her why. Why had he done it? But her instinct for self preservation was stronger. No matter what she had told herself about why Matt had left, it would hurt more to hear him say it aloud. Seeing him today had not only brought out her anger but also unleashed every painful question and feeling of self-doubt she had tried to bury away and forget.
It took the water transitioning to cold before she thought of leaving the shower. She changed into scrub bottoms and a cotton tank top and ate the only thing she had the energy to prepare for supper—toast. It wasn’t long before she was lying on the soft yellow couch cocooned within the gray blanket, trying to focus on her medical textbook and not the memories that kept replaying in her mind.
As a child she had been outgoing and bright, ready to tackle and succeed at every challenge presented to her. She had been fearless with the knowledge that her parents had always been behind her, supporting her and loving her. Then things had changed when she was eleven. Her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and for two years everything had focused on her mother and the disease. Kate had watched helplessly as nothing had worked, nothing had made things better, for her mother or her family.
She’d died when Kate was thirteen and from then on her family had no longer existed. She remembered one of their last moments together at the hospice. Her father had been sobbing and with what little energy she’d had her mother had stroked her hair and told her not to cry. And she hadn’t.
Without her, Kate had felt lost, but not as lost as her father had. Kate’s parents had been the loves of each other’s lives, and without her mother Kate’s dad had withdrawn from life and from his daughter. She had lost both parents, one to cancer and the other to depression, which as a thirteen-year-old she’d had no capacity to understand.
Kate’s memories of middle and high school were not normal ones, something she had realized but didn’t have time to care about. She spent those years trying to be the perfect daughter, student, homemaker, and friend to her dad, anything to make him happy, to make him come back to her. She hid every feeling of unhappiness and loneliness away, afraid that her pain would make her father worse and ruin what little they had together. She never discussed her mother and carried her grief alone. Every new womanly feeling or change she experienced she ignored, because it hurt too much to miss the mother she wanted to share those moments with.
Kate was terrified to graduate from high school, knowing that it meant she would have to leave home and her dad. It wasn’t until she arrived at Brown University and had some time on her own that she realized how different she was from the other students, especially the other girls. They all seemed so beautiful and confident and, next to them, she felt completely inadequate and unprepared for life as a woman. She went home every weekend, not just to see her dad but also to escape the weekend social gatherings where she felt so out of place.
This eventually became a comfortable routine that lasted three years, until one weekend she came home and her dad introduced her to Julia. Her father had found love again and for the first time since her mother’s death he was happy. Kate shared his happiness and at the same time felt her feelings of loneliness hit rock bottom.
Watching her father and Julia made her feel even more alone than she had before because they were together, a team, and she had no one. It was no longer necessary for her dad to be her focus in life, and she was now being forced to focus on herself and she didn’t even know who she was or who she wanted to be. All her anxieties and feelings of inadequacy battered her every solitary moment while she continued to play the role of the perfect daughter, stepdaughter and student. Her dedication towards a career in medicine was her only life raft in the storm in which she found herself.
She met Matt three months later and her world changed. She had been studying at her favorite coffeehouse when she glanced up and saw the most attractive man she had ever seen in her life. The glance had easily turned into an irresistible stare. He was tall and broad shouldered with thick dark hair and piercing blue eyes. He was standing beside her table and it took her an embarrassing amount of time to acknowledge to herself that he was talking to her and to figure out what he had said. He asked to share her table, because it had an electrical outlet in the wall beside it for his laptop computer.
Previously, she would have just offered him the table, making some excuse as to why she needed to leave, but she was so drawn in by everything about him that she just managed to say yes and slide her own computer toward her to make space. He thanked her and while he started studying, her mind completely shifted, thinking only of him. He was perfection. His strong jaw was covered with a shadow of stubble that screamed masculinity to her. A gray T-shirt spanned his broad chest so that she could see the outline of every muscle group she had just been studying attentively in her textbook before he’d joined her. His shoulders led to muscular tanned arms and hands that were twice the size of hers. She could imagine the strength in his hands and what it would feel like to be held by him, to feel his jaw brush against hers, to press against his strong frame.
She started and blushed when his voice broke through her thoughts with an offer to buy her coffee. She barely managed to tell him her order without stammering, feeling completely stunned by the most outrageous thoughts she had ever had and insecure with her inexperience.
When he returned to the table with their drinks he didn’t reopen his computer. He introduced himself and she was drawn in by the kindness and genuine interest she saw in his eyes. There was something about Matt that had made her feel instantly safe, and with that feeling grew the confidence she had been lacking. They spent the rest of the afternoon talking and Kate felt more important in those few hours than she had in years.
In the course of their conversation she learned about his long-distance girlfriend and on hearing that felt crushed and disappointed, but still intrigued by the man who already had someone special in his life and was still interested in her, even if she wasn’t girlfriend material. The more they talked the more she liked him and the more she wanted him in her life, no matter what he had to offer.
And that was exactly what followed. At first they would see each other casually, both studying. Matt was pre-law and she was pre-med, which meant they studied a lot. She got used to him joining her on Saturday and Sunday afternoons at the coffee shop, and even had the confidence to join his table when he arrived there first. The only time she didn’t see him was when he went back to New York for a weekend with his family and girlfriend, though he never talked about the visits and she didn’t ask. They eventually started meeting outside of the coffee shop and beyond studying, until they were together several times a week and spoke on the phone daily.
It was hard for her to understand her feelings. Matt was her first university