Page 139 of Running Home to You
“I guess it’s a lot easier to know what you want when you know who you are. Instead of thinking that you know who you are after someone told you what you should want.” Kate glanced over at Abby. “I think you always had that part figured out. Knowing who you are.”
Abby shrugged and kicked a rock down the sidewalk. “Yeah, but the knowing what I want part, I could never fully wrap my head around. I had to travel the world to figure it out.” She smirked. “I always admired that you had a direction. You had your eyes on this plan. And not just the plan you were told to want.”
“Well, the law school part, sure. But the other part—marriage, a husband—I tried pretty hard to make that work.” Kate’s brow furrowed. “But then we had this pre-marriage counseling assignment. Ryan and I. Write a letter to your future children. All I could think was, what if they’re like me? Like that was some sort of bad thing, but also, I finally just admitted it to myself.”
Abby held her breath as Kate paused.
“I started panicking,” she said. “Not because of who I was, but because I suddenly worried about raising my kids to feel the same pressure I did. To be perfect, to follow rules out of fear, to marry someone they didn’t love because of it.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” Abby said.
“But how could I stop them if I didn’t stop myself ?” Kate frowned. “It made me despise my parents all over again. I started thinking I’d keep my kids from them to protect them. Then I realized, what’s the point of that? Isn’t that who I’m getting married for? Isn’t that who I’m having these hypothetical children for? If I erased them from everything, would I even want any of it?”
They’d reached the edge of campus, a place for Abby’s eyes to wander while she contemplated what to say, because this loomed like the perfect pitch. Like the timing might finally have worked itself out.Only now she wasn’t quite sure how to swing away. They stopped at the library. Abby stared at the phrase etched in marble that belonged to the philosophers, but she always considered theirs:Ad astra per aspera.
“I told them,” Kate said.
Abby swiveled from the library to Kate, her eyes expanding as if she might read from her face what her ears didn’t believe. “What?”
“I came out to them.” Kate raised her eyebrows. “I told them I couldn’t marry Ryan because I’m attracted to women. I always have been, and I always will be.”
Abby gasped. “Kate, I—” She struggled for the words, overwhelmed by an excitement she didn’t think appropriate to express. “That was brave. I know how much that took for you.”
Kate twinkled with a half smile, something playful but restrained, before striding onward. Abby stood stunned for so long that she had to run to catch up with her.
“How’d it happen? How’d it go?”
“Well, I rehearsed the phone call a hundred times. I can’t remember everything I said, but I remember what they did.” Kate tensed. “Mom said she always knew, but not in a motherly, intuitive way, but anI always hated you for itway. She said I was sick and threw every Bible verse at me to prove it.”
Abby’s empathy rooted so deep that she gritted her teeth, unable to unleash the storm inside. So, she didn’t. She didn’t stop walking, didn’t speak or curse. She grabbed Kate’s hand, and she didn’t pull away. She laced their fingers together and squeezed tighter.
“My dad cried, hard, which was somehow worse.” Kate’s voice wavered. “He offered to help and pray for me—and I had to tell him I didn’t want him to. I had to tell him I wanted to be exactly who I was while he begged for me not to be.” She brought them to another stop between the trees. Her eyes glistened, that chin crease wiggled, but she didn’t cry. “It doesn’t make sense, but I always thought he might be the one to accept me anyway. I always hoped for it. I thought he understood me, maybe not all of me, but my heart. Andit’s a different kind of breaking to realize he never will. That who I love diminishes the rest of me.”
“It doesn’t,” Abby whispered.
Kate smiled. “I know that now.”
Abby wrapped her arms around her. A hug not for lust or want or even to get her back. A hug for the years Kate had carried on, silently hurting, fearing the worst, and then having it actualized. A hug for the abandonment that came with her self-acceptance. For all Abby’s grief, she never had to face that version of pain. She wished to take it away, but then she understood that she didn’t have to, because Kate was still here. Kate was standing stronger, fuller, braver than she ever had been before.
“I’m proud of you, but I’m sorry you went through that alone. I never wanted you to. Not even back then,” she said.
“I think I had to.” Kate pulled away and peered up at her. “I didn’t want you to go through what you did alone either, but didn’t we have to? Would it even have meant anything if we weren’t trying to find our way back here?”
Abby couldn’t answer, too lost in awe. As they stood within Insley’s green confines, the mountain looming like a guard above, the river a moat for trouble below, together but alone, Abby knew she was right. This was the only way.
Kate smiled in the long silence, slowly backing away with Abby’s hand, letting go of it when their fingers no longer reached. “It hasn’t all been bad,” she said. “Getting to know myself the last year. Doing what I want, relearning my faith, my relationship with God, meeting new people. Work is a whole different world, and dating—”
“Dating?” It knocked Abby back.
“Yeah.” Kate narrowed her eyes. “What about you? Back to posing as a windsurfing instructor? Impressing everyone with your four languages?”
“Not four. My Japanese is shit.” Abby blushed. “But uh, no. Crazy schedule and…and I don’t want to, I guess.” She chewed her lip. “It’s been a while for me.”
Since rehab specifically, too fearful, too busy, too jaded to try.Mostly too stuck on Kate. Abby trained her stare on the pavement, mind spinning at missing her shot.
“Don’t worry,” Kate said. “You’re still the only person I’ve been with.”
Her head shot up. “Good. I mean, not good. Not that you can’t, or it would be bad if you did. I mean, if you wanted to, I wouldn’t—”
