Catherine stayed unmoving amongst her bedding, the silk sheets twisting faintly beneath the subtle, anxious twitching of her fingers. Yet, the moment that practical warning had left her lips — the second she had questioned Cate's ability not to drink the entire minibar instead of saying what she actually meant — everything she had truly wanted to confess was instantly burnt to ash. Frankly, she wished nothing had left her lips at all. Her gaze drifted back down, tearing away from the Aussie the split second she watched the blonde's fingers tighten around the glass. Catherine's dark brown eyes stayed stubbornly put over pages she couldn't even register. Yet, there was a desperate safety to just... pretending. From the periphery of her vision, she could see Cate moving across the room, stepping toward the separate bed. As those frantic movements etched themselves indelibly into Catherine’s brain, each aching word that left Cate's lips made her chest feel heavier, tighter, more suffocating. Yet, her gaze remained fixed. She had mastered the art of non-acknowledgment — not out of coldness, but out of pure, unadulterated fear. She knew emotions were dangerously high. Their respective masks were slipping in entirely different ways, and the raw vulnerability behind these hotel walls had reached an all-time, heartbreaking peak.
“If this was revenge, I must admit you do it so well. You win and I got what I deserved.”
It was those words. Those exact, bleeding words that echoed and rang brutally through her ears.The accusation made Catherine simply let her eyes fall closed. She didn’t feel like a winner. God, she felt like a woman utterly consumed by terror. It was as though every piece of her legendary armor, every practiced ability to cast herself as stoic and cold, had completely vanished. Beneath the black silk, she was just a woman trying desperately not to snap the final, fraying string holding her together. And then, silence fell. It was louder this time. The air felt impossibly sharp, and the suffocating heat of the room didn't help; all she could hear was the faint, rhythmic crash of the waves through the open window and the light, clinical clink of Cate's glass. Catherine's eyes fell back open. The strain behind them was immense, her gaze desperately clinging to the shadows on the ceiling for a brief, utter moment before she finally closed her book. The movement was gentle, quick, as she let the novel sit upon her nightstand, and switched the lamp beside her off. She turned her entire body, letting her head lay low against the pillow, intentionally facing completely away from Cate's side of the room.She felt something thick and painful catch in her throat, wanting so desperately to let out a breath she had been trapping for hours. A sudden, hot wetness slid over her cheek, staining the silk of her pillowcase, but her body did nothing to stop it. She simply lay in her own grief, frozen.Catherine closed her eyes once more, listening with acute, agonizing precision to every brief movement Cate was making across the room. She kept repeating the same bitter lie to herself, over and over again — convincing her aching heart that this was for the best, that tomorrow they would simply go back to avoiding one another. That cate was just being lead by the several glasses of alcohol. Nothing more.
But no part of her body could rest, nor could it even begin to find sleep. Her mind was entirely wired, trapped inside the cage of her own silence. It was a silence that, for once, felt less like armor and more like a surrender — a desperate choice to stop throwing oil onto a fire, even when there was simply nothing left to burn. The Welsh woman was utterly exhausted; her heart was silently, entirely shattered. As her eyes fluttered back open , those final, defeated words from Cate hit her all over again. You don't have to deal with this ever again. Catherine wanted to hold her breath. She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut and simply disappear from the wreckage of this nightmare. She wanted the hot, silent tears pooling onto her pillow to evaporate her entirely. She squeezed her eyelids tight, hoping the physical strain would finally force her to drift away from this emotional warfare. And then.
DING.
The sudden, harsh glow of her phone screen sliced through the suite. Behind the slight strain and burning redness of her eyes, Catherine caught the name illuminating the display. At first, it took a painful second to register that it was Cate. Cate. A wave of profound confusion washed over the dark-haired woman, her brows creasing deeply as she gently reached out into the cold air for the device. With the back of her trembling hand, she hurriedly wiped the cold, dried tears from her cheek before her thumb pressed against the glass, unlocking the phone to face whatever parting shot Cate had left her. Catherine read it. And again. And again. She read it while the faint, tragic whispers from across the room still echoed in her ears. She read those clinical, detached initials through the thick, suffocating silence until a gentle, double inhale finally caught her. She could feel her entire body begin to vibrate; she could feel a terrifying numbness travel all the way to the tips of the fingers holding the phone. And finally, with a fractured, hollow shudder, she let that breath she'd been holding in for hours, out.
Catherine didn’t talk just yet. With a trembling thumb, she typed back a clinical, devastating "I'm sorry." She let it send, watching the screen illuminate with the delivery confirmation, hearing the sharp, electronic ping echo from Cate's side of the room. She let that silence fill the suite until it became a physical pressure she could no longer endure. "This isn't some cruel game I am playing..." Her voice finally drifted through the dark, low and smoky, carrying the heavy texture of a velvet curtain drawing shut. She could feel the burning heat rushing to her cheeks, but she stubbornly refused to grant a sob the satisfaction of escaping. Her teeth caught the plush edge of her bottom lip as her eyes hooded closed. Her silhouette remained rigidly turned away, a dark shadow carved against the mattress, while her gaze bled back down into the cold, digital ink still glowing on her screen. "I don't want you to disappear," she admitted, her voice cracking under the sudden, immense weight of the confession. "I don't want this to be how things remain between us. God—" She cut herself off, a slight, quiet frustration hitching in her chest. "I just—" She swallowed hard, fighting the suffocating air for breath. "I just don't know where we... how do you go back to where we left things ? Even as friends. When looking at one another is just as painful" Catherine went entirely silent for a beat, letting the stillness rush back in to swallow them both. When she spoke again, her signature velvet voice was fractured into something entirely unrefined, almost unrecognizable. "I feel like everything is... broken," she murmured into the dark. "And I know you feel that too. Trying to force the shattered pieces back into place will drive us both insane. It already has."