Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“Dude, I know.” Takuro laughed. “I can always tell when you’re reading a message from her. Your face lights up like the sun.”
Breathing in the frenetic energy of Tokyo, Danny said, “She’s a lightning bolt to my system. She’d love this city. All the energy it has—she’d fit right in.”
“Is she going to visit you?”
“Yes,” he said, but he wasn’t as sure as he sounded. Catie remained skittish. It might take him far longer than a single rugby season to convince her that she could trust him to keep his word. But Danny hadn’t gotten to where he was in life by giving up. He’d teach Catie to trust him, step by small step.
What if it doesn’t work?
A whisper from the back of his brain where his fears liked to hide.
What if she never trusts you enough to commit?
Danny had been running from that thought since the day he realized they were more to each other than just friends, and he kept on running from it the rest of the day. It became far, far easier when one of his housemates came up with a delivery order that had just been left at their door.
“Chicken soup for you,” Daichi said in Japanese. “Smells good.”
“Thanks, Daichi,” Danny said in the same language; he was far from fluent, but he could understand most simple sentences now as long as he had the vocabulary—which he continued to add to, day by day.
“No problem.” This time it was in English, Daichi as invested in improving his conversational English as Danny was in improving his Japanese. The two of them often spent an hour over a beer, each speaking the other’s language.
When Danny checked the receipt after Daichi left, he found Catie’s name on it. She’d ordered him food all the way from New Zealand. His heart went all soft, and he didn’t care. They’d be fine, he told himself as he opened up the soup. No need to imagine problems that didn’t exist.
But that night, as he lay down to sleep, he found himself wide-awake and staring at the ceiling, that scary “what if” question circling and circling in his mind. The chicken soup had been wonderful, but Catie was wonderful. Her willingness to look after her friends and family had never been the problem.
He fell into a fitful sleep hours later and had no answers by the time he woke… but he did have a message from Catie: Brush your teeth, hotshot. It was followed by the emoji of a tooth.
A snort burst out of him. Yeah, Catie got his weird sense of humor.
As for the what-ifs, they could wait. Because he was planning on fighting for Catie and fighting hard.
* * *
A month after Danny’s hospital stay, Catie saw that she had a three-week block of open time coming up. She’d still have to keep up her training, but she could do that anywhere as long as she set up a stable routine.
When she checked Danny’s schedule using their shared online calendar, she saw that he had one game toward the start of that period, then a full week off. Only two days training the week following. Add in a buffer for travel and recovering from jet lag and they could have almost two whole weeks together.
Despite all her resolutions to be better than her fear, it still took incredible willpower on her part to send him a message with all the details of a possible trip. That was a cowardice too—writing rather than calling—but she could only go so far so quickly. Even just asking had made her break out in a cold sweat.
Asking for things meant people could turn you down, could reject you.
The only people from whom Catie ever asked anything without fear were Ísa, Sailor, and Laveni. Ísa because Ísa was her rock and the core of her family and the reason Catie was in any way a balanced adult. Sailor because he’d come into her life at a time when she’d still had a few threads of trust left in her—and he’d shown her that he’d never breach that trust.
And Laveni because her best friend had been with her since they were in kindergarten—they’d grown up together, each having the other’s back. Of all her friends, Veni was also the only one who hadn’t, in some way, treated Catie differently after her accident. She’d moaned about school during her hospital visits, grabbed notes for Catie so she wouldn’t fall behind, smuggled in nail polish to do her nails, and otherwise been totally normal.
Catie trusted Harlow too, but their relationship was different from the one they both had with Ísa. Because of his own upbringing and the involvement—or lack thereof—of his biological parents, Harlow had always been hungry for his stepmother Jacqueline’s approval. That hadn’t altered when she became his ex-stepmother.