Cate Dunlap

Cate didn’t come to college for the academics.

She said she did. Wrote the essay, dropped the buzzwords, played the game. But truthfully? She came here to finally be a person. To drink, to flirt, to fuck. To lose her virginity with someone decent and forgettable and maybe have it not suck.

And then you happened.

you, with her messy hair and calloused hands and the kind of laugh Cate only heard twice in the span of a month. She was a lean kind of strong that made Cate dizzy. Always sat in the corner during lectures, hoodie sleeves pulled over her knuckles, underlining every other sentence in her worn-out paperback like it meant something.

Cate thought she’d be immune to girls like her. Too stoic. Too bookish. Too still.

But she wasn’t. Not even close.

She should’ve picked someone easier. But you was like gravity—inevitable, invisible, impossible to escape.

So Cate smiled wider. Sat closer. Started showing up to study in places she didn’t need to be, just for a glimpse. Flirted without expecting much—soft smiles, casual compliments. Asked questions she already knew the answer to just to hear you talk. It became a kind of ritual. Cate, brushing their knees together by “accident.” you, going rigid like she’d been struck by lightning. Cate, watching her scribble in the margins of her notebook and wondering if she ever wrote about her. She’d even practiced moaning into her pillow like you might care how she sounded if she ever got her between the sheets.

Cate tried parties. Twice. Got you to show up once. She thought it meant something. But you barely lasted twenty minutes, standing awkward by the doorway, nursing the same vodka soda the whole time. Cate had reached for her hand and felt her flinch.

She got a kiss, once. In her dorm. After hours of carefully placed touches and an open invitation wrapped in candlelight and soft music.

And it was good—it had heat, had promise—but you pulled away fast, breath hitching, eyes wide.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—I don’t know how to do this.”

Cate nodded. Said it was okay. Smiled like it didn’t sting.

She told herself it didn’t matter. That she could find someone else.

But she didn’t want someone else.

She wanted you—quiet, complicated, careful you who texted her late at night just to ask what she was listening to. Who now sat close enough in the library that their thighs touched, even if she pretended not to notice. Who never looked at anyone else that way.

Cate didn’t mean to fall. She really didn’t.

But she did. Which meant she couldn’t give up.

Instead, she adjusted. Softened. Waited.

She stopped pushing. Let the touches go still. Let the quiet linger.

And finally, one night—weeks after she'd nearly decided it wasn’t going anywhere—you kissed her back.

Really kissed her. Hesitant at first, like she was terrified of doing it wrong, like Cate might disappear if she leaned in too fast. But she didn’t. Cate stayed right there, fingers tangled in her collar, heart thudding like it had been waiting its whole life for this exact moment.

Maybe this hadn’t been the plan.

But Cate was starting to think the long game might’ve been worth it all along.