My heart swelled at the same time the stinging hit my eyes. I could have started crying, but I tamed my flaring nostrils and the pulling in my throat.
“Taylor, that’s…that’s really sweet of you.”
“It’s true,” she mumbled.
“I believe you. I really appreciate that,” I said with a pat on her shoulder. “I really needed to hear that.”
I don’t think she knew how much her words resonated with me, how much I needed the last push in the right direction. I’d been desperately searching for inspiration. I’d accomplished Olympic gold and had realized how much of my life I’d given for those slabs of metal. I needed a new purpose. I had no idea that this camp would open my eyes to how much my story could influence others. I’d never expected to meet a teenager whose insecurities reminded me so much of mine: what I was going through currently, what I went through at her age and throughout high school. If I expected her to push through it, crawl out of her comfort zone to make friends, and own the butterfly when she didn’t think she was good enough, I needed to do the same. Because kids were watching me more closely than I thought they were.
I wanted to be the person I’d desperately needed when I was younger.
I had to go to Japan. For Taylor, for others, for me, and for my thirteen-year-old self.
“I’ll be back in the pool on Monday,” I assured her. “I promise. Hey, maybe I can come cheer you on in your next meet? Show off your badass fly skills to me?”
Her eyes lit up. “Seriously? You would do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? You’re only an hour away. That’s nothing. And maybe I can bring my friend Talia. She can give you the secrets to mastering the fly.”
“Really? Oh my God. That would be so cool!”
“Consider it a date.”
She rammed into me, showing off all the strength inside her. She wrapped her arms around me and thanked me again as I hugged her back. Her tight, comforting embrace told me how much my words resonated with her, and I squeezed her back, hoping that she could feel how much her words resonated with me.
We’d found one another at the right moment in our slumps.
As I sprinted to my car, I whipped out my phone. Are you free right now? I want to talk. In person.
Once I got in and started the car, my phone dinged with Kennedy’s response: Yes, I’m free.
Can I please come over? I want to see you and talk. I promise no fighting.
Chapter Fifteen
I pulled up in Jacob’s driveway with my hands suctioned to the steering wheel from my clammy palms. Lights illuminated the townhouse windows, Kennedy’s safe space for the past week. Her hour-long commute from Santa Clara to Berkeley had been a major commitment to avoid me when it would have taken just a half hour to Uber if she’d stayed in the city.
On the fourth ring, I took in one last heavy breath and held it.
“Hey,” she said softly, sounding so unsure.
“Hey,” I said, my voice rattling. “Can you come outside?”
Silence. For a split second, I thought the call dropped. I watched the outline of her head peering through the window.
“Okay, one second,” she said.
My breath finally escaped.
I got out of the car and rested against the door to brace for this conversation. She came out in sweatpants and my navy Berkeley sweatshirt. I laughed at how bold it was to take one of my favorite sweatshirts when we got in a fight. But since I always allowed her to wear it, I didn’t think she did it out of spite. It could have been an accident. I told myself that she took it to have a bit of me.
She stopped a couple feet short of my car, crossed her arms, and through the darkness, I saw her struggling to make eye contact, flitting from me to the driveway.
“I wanna talk. For real this time. No yelling.”
She hugged herself tighter, and I wasn’t sure if it was because she was cold or because she felt so uncomfortable. It broke my heart thinking of the latter. “Sure, go for it,” she said, her voice still soft, and her eyes falling to her shoes.
I assessed the distance between us, a distance two strangers would have stood at to have a conversation. A distance that was a gaping hole for people who had ten years of romantic history and who were supposed to be in love. This was my girlfriend…I thought. I thought we were still technically together. Whatever the technicalities were, this space between us, those tightly crossed arms, those civil sentences, weren’t supposed to bind us. We were so much more than civility. I was madly in love with her. Had been since I was seventeen, when the spark of love I felt when we slow danced at our senior prom had fully bloomed. It had become such a part of me that I couldn’t imagine my life without it or her. The only way for me to kill this awkward space was to swallow the lump in my throat and spill my guts. This was my last shot, and I was ready to tear down this wall and have her in my arms again.
“I told Lucy that I want to see a therapist. She emailed me a list of some in the area that specialize in helping athletes, and I scheduled my first session. It’s on Wednesday.”
Her arms loosened, and she painted on the smallest smile. “What? Really?”
I nodded. “I’m tired of feeling this way. I want to get my life back.”
“Quinn, that’s…that’s amazing. How did you…what changed?”
“Well, for one, I missed you,” I said, biting my lip to steady the shaking in my voice. God, I hadn’t even said two sentences of my confession, and I was already starting to lose it. “Like, so unbelievably much. I’ve been absolutely miserable without you, and not having you to come home to or fall asleep with…it was a big wake-up call. I was just so scared of telling you everything and scaring you back to New York. And I realize now that I scared you away by not telling you everything, and I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I was just really afraid of losing you.”
A part of me thought the silence would prompt her to say how she missed me back, but she didn’t say anything. And I was determined to barge through the thick walls to get the truth out of her because I knew how she felt. I knew she loved me. She didn’t have to say it. How she’d acted the past few weeks showed me how much she cared because if she didn’t love me at all, she would have done more than stay with her brother. She would have broken up with me. She would have told me that the hell I was putting her through wasn’t worth it. She would have been back home the second it got hard, but instead, she’d pleaded that I get help, and even when I’d continued to refuse and stared at that boulder, she still left the door open for me to waltz back in. Kennedy stayed. That was love.
“I also met this camper. This girl, Taylor,” I continued. “She reminded me so much of myself when I was thirteen.”
“How so?”
“She doubts herself so much when she has no reason to. She’s a really great swimmer with so much ambition. She just needs to believe in herself. I feel like she needs someone to guide her and believe in her to help her realize that she has so much potential if her inner voice doesn’t get in her way.”
“And that’s your own problem,” Kennedy said quietly.
“I know. After I told the camp my journey, Taylor told me that Tokyo was her Beijing Games. Tokyo inspired her to go after her own dream, and I was the one to do that.”