Page 63 of Not Another Yesterday
He froze mid-step. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Cat kissed some guy at the party. I walked in on this asshole with his tongue in her mouth,” I said, nearly choking on my words.
“Did she kick the motherfucker in the balls like she did Drew?”
I shook my head and narrowed my eyes at him. “She wasn’t fighting him off, Shay. She was kissing him back.”
Shane spent the next hour trying to talk me off the ledge, telling me—over and over again—not to do anything rash, to sleep on it. “I know it hurts like hell, Ran, but I’m sure it was just a mistake. I’m sure it really didn’t mean a damn thing to Cat. She was drunk. It was a mistake.”
Yeah, he’s probably right, but what he doesn’t understand—what no one truly understands—is that the issue goes way,waydeeper than Cat kissing another guy at a party while she was drunk.
And it’s exactly that realization that causes me to pull up in front of Cat’s at just before ten this morning.
I put my Mustang in park and slowly shut off the ignition. I linger in my seat, breathing deeply. There’s a tightness in my throat, squeezing my windpipe as if I have a noose around my neck. It only gets worse when I step out of my car and force myself to walk up the short walkway, then the steps to her front door. I stand for a second, trying to gather the strength to knock.
Cat must have heard my car, must have seen me approach, because she opens the door before I can announce my presence.
“Hey,” she says meekly, her hazel eyes huge, full of emotion. I can tell by the red rims around her eyes and her blotchy skin that she’s been crying. A lot. She looks as beautiful as ever, even with her hair pulled into a messy bun, her oversized sweater—mysweater—and her pajamapants. It doesn’t matter what she does, what she wears, she will always be utterly perfect to me.
Cat stands back, bidding me into the house. It’s quiet. Her parents and siblings must be out. It’s a good thing, because we really don’t need an audience.
I stand in the hallway, unwilling—or unable—to move deeper into the house, to walk to her room. I need to get this over with before the paper-thin resolve I built dissolves and we’re right back where we started. “I… We need to talk.”
She looks as tired as I feel. I bet she didn’t sleep any better than I did last night. The dark circles under her eyes make that obvious. “Yeah,” she says. I hear the regret and shame in her voice.
“Ran, I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice cracking, her shoulders heavy. She directs her gaze to the floor.
I nod. “I know.”
She lifts her eyes and searches mine. The emotions are etched into her face, reflected on her brow, her mouth, those beautiful hazel eyes. “I don’t know what came over me. I shouldn’t have been drinking. I know myself better than that. I promise it was meaningless. I didn’t want this; I… I’m so sorry.” The words spill from her lips as if the speed with which she says them can stitch up the emotional wounds, could halt the damage done last night.
I want her to stop being so hard on herself. I didn’t come here to yell or make her feel even shittier about her obvious slip in judgment. “Listen, Cat, I’m sure you were still in a weird place after our fight last week.”
She nods hesitantly, like she can’t believe I’m letting her off the hook this easily. “But that still doesn’t excuse my behavior.”
Every part of me yearns to pull her into my arms, to tell her it’s alright. It would be so damn easy, too. It would be so easy to ignore last night away, to avoid the painful, uncomfortable conversation. I could just tell her that it’s fine, I forgive her, we all make mistakes. Part of me truly feels that way. I know what happened last night was a mistake,that Cat didn’t set out to hook up with another guy, to… cheat on me. I’m sure it meant nothing. We had a terrible fight a week ago that we never worked through; she was drunk. I get it. Shit happens.
But I can’t ignore it away. I can no longer avoid it; what happened last night was just what I had anticipated all along. It was inevitable. We’ve finally arrived at the point that I instinctively knew we would reach—the moment my mother always predicted.
I allow my eyes to close for a moment, to inhale Cat’s scent—lavender and rosewater—and really feel her presence. She was the absolute best thing to ever happen to me.
I take a deep breath, bracing for my next words.
“I think… I think we should break things off.”
My words are a black hole, pulling all oxygen from the room and into a vortex of darkness as I let the one thing that makes me truly happy slip from my hands. Saying it out loud hurts more than anything my mother ever did.
Cat recoils from me, her eyes wide with panic. “What? No! Ran, please,” she chokes, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m so sorry I hurt you. I know I messed up last night. I—”
“Cat, I’m not good enough for you,” I say. She falls silent. “I’ve never been good enough for you.”
“You keep saying that, but it’s not true,” she sobs.
“But it is. There are things that you want, that youdeserve, that I can’t give to you. You deserve to have everything; you deserve to be happy.”
“But Iamhappy with you,” she says through her tears, her voice off-pitch, cracking.
“You say that now, until you’re ready to have a family, for example. Then you’ll start to resent me when I can’t give you what you need.”
