Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
CADEN
The imprint of the LEGO still lingers in my palm even though it isn’t there anymore. When I handed it to Theo before dinner, I might as well have been cutting out my own heart and putting it in his hands. It was stupid, reckless—and the truest thing I’ve done in fifteen years.
Because it isn’t just a toy. It never was. It’s him. It’s us. It’s the reminder of a night when we thought we had the whole world ahead of us, when everything still felt possible.
And I’ve carried it everywhere. Every move, every new start, every time I tried to convince myself I was over him. It’s been in my pocket, in the top drawer of a nightstand, sometimes in a shoebox shoved under a bed, but always close. Always safe. Even when I didn’t feel safe in my own skin.
Now Theo has it. And the hollow ache in my chest tells me he understands exactly what it means.
We step outside together after the dinner and the speeches, away from the laughter and the music and the clinking of glasses.
The night air is thick and humid, carrying the sweet sharpness of cut grass and the echo of cicadas.
The gym doors shut behind us, muffling the sounds of the reunion until it feels like the world’s holding its breath.
Theo’s beside me, his suspenders catching the streetlight. He looks a little ridiculous—no, not ridiculous. Brave. Free. The kind of brave I’ve never been. And it guts me how much I want him.
We stop at the edge of the parking lot. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched like he’s holding himself together. For a second, I think he’s about to run again.
I can’t let him. Not this time.
“You still had it,” he says quietly, his voice shaking so that I hear the crack beneath. “All this time?”
“I always had it,” I answer. My voice is low, rough with honesty.
“Everywhere I went, Theo, that little guy came with me. Through every move, every camp, every hospital room, every game I had to watch from the sidelines. Sometimes it was in my pocket, sometimes on the dresser. But it was always there.”
His throat works, and he looks away, like the truth is almost too much to look at head-on. “Why?” he whispers.
“Because it was you,” I say simply. “Because even when I hated what happened, I couldn’t hate you.
That night, when we swapped them—you knew what it meant.
I was in your pocket, and you were in mine.
And when I left, when I couldn’t face you anymore, I kept mine.
I guess it was the only way I knew how to keep carrying you. ”
Theo’s lips part, but no words come. His eyes shine in the low light, and I don’t know if it’s anger, grief, or something else breaking through. Maybe all of it.
“You don’t understand,” he says finally, his voice hoarse. “When you cut me off, I thought I’d lost you. Not just your leg, not just the future we thought we had—I thought I’d lost you. That night…. Caden, I can’t forgive myself.”
I step closer. My chest feels tight, like every word costs me air.
“Theo, don’t you get it? I never needed you to forgive yourself.
I needed you to be there. And I know I was the one who stopped you and pushed you away.
But I get it now. Have made peace with it.
We were barely adults. Scared. I was angry at the world, and you…
you respected my choice. Even if it killed you. ”
His jaw trembles. “It did.”
The silence that falls is heavy, but not empty. It’s filled with every word we never said, every night we missed, every ache we carried alone.
I lift my hand, hesitating only a fraction before brushing my thumb along his jaw. His stubble scrapes against my skin, grounding me in the here and now.
Theo’s breath catches, sharp and fragile. “Caden….”
My name, his voice—it’s enough to undo me.
I lean in, drawn to him like gravity, and before I can stop myself, I close the distance. For the second time in my life, I’m the one to kiss him first.
It isn’t cautious. It isn’t gentle. It’s everything—fifteen years of longing, regret, grief, and love bursting through the seams. His lips are warm, achingly familiar, and when he makes a soft, helpless sound against mine, something deep in my chest finally breaks open.
It feels like coming home.
The kiss lands like a door swinging fully open.
Theo presses back with that small sound I haven’t allowed myself to imagine in fifteen years, and the heat of it pours through me—sure and startling, like sunlight after a storm.
His mouth tastes faintly of the sweet tea the caterer served at dinner and something that’s only him.
I angle closer, careful with the line of my body, careful with the prosthesis and the unevenness I still feel on hot nights like this, when the socket rubs and my balance shifts.
His hands leave his pockets and find my sides, then curl into the fabric of my shirt as if he needs proof that I’m not a dream he’ll wake from.
I force myself to ease off first. We’re outside the gym.
There are reunion name tags and committee clipboards on the other side of the door.
If I don’t calm down, I’ll forget the rest of the world exists.
I rest my forehead against his for a breath and count to three.
Our chests lift and fall together. The cicadas burn the air with their endless electric hum.
“I missed you,” he says. It’s not eloquent, but it’s honest enough to make my grip on his waist tighten.
“I know,” I answer, because anything else would be dishonest. “Me too.”
We stay this way for another long inhale. He’s the first to lean back. His dark eyes shine in the streetlight and carry a thousand questions. He doesn’t let any of them out. I understand that choice. If we let them all out now, they’ll flood the parking lot, the gym, the town, and maybe the state.
“How is it?” he asks. His gaze dips, almost apologetically, toward my leg and then back up. “After the game. Are you in pain?”
“I’m okay,” I say, and I mean it. “It was a good ten minutes. Fast, and I felt it at the end, but it was good.” I study him. “You saw the moment.”
“I did,” he admits. “I’ll always be able to read you.”
There’s no triumph in his voice. There’s only the assertion of a skill he’s had since we were boys playing one-on-one in his driveway.
He could read my body like a book; I could trust him to tell me the truth when it lied.
The fact that this is still true shouldn’t matter so much, shouldn’t squeeze my throat tight after everything that’s happened. But it does anyway.
He looks down at his pocket and taps it lightly with two fingers. “Thank you for this,” he says. “I’m trying not to cry over two inches of plastic, but I’m not making any promises if you keep being… you.”
“Don’t,” I say, trying to make my tone light, “slander the hot dog vendor. He held a program together single-handedly. But I’ll also be needing it back.”
Theo’s laugh comes out half choked and wholly beautiful. He wipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand and takes a step back after passing me the LEGO man, as if he needs to put a breath of space between us to stay upright. I let him. I don’t want him to feel cornered by his own heart.
“I watched you leave after the alumni game,” I say. “I wanted to follow. The guys stopped me, and I let them because it felt easier than pushing through. And then it was too late. I hated myself for that.”
“I didn’t leave to hurt you,” he says quickly. “I left because I felt like my skin didn’t fit. I was angry at Soren and at myself, and honestly, I didn’t trust my mouth not to make everything worse. You have a game face when you play. I had to put on my teacher face and keep my shit together.”
“That tracks,” I say, and it pulls another laugh from him—a small one that unspools my shoulders.
A pair of alumni come outside with their phones lit up like fireflies, talking loudly about who won “Most Changed.” We step a few paces deeper into the shadow beyond the outside lights.
I can still see him clearly enough: the line of his jaw, the clean cut of his hair, the suspenders that should be ridiculous and instead make me ache with a complicated kind of tenderness.
“You look good,” I tell him, and I say it like a fact. “The suspenders are criminal.”
He glances down at them, then up again with a sheepish tilt of his mouth. “They’re dorky. I love them. I promised myself I wouldn’t shove parts of me back into the dark when I came home, no matter who didn’t get it.”
“I get it,” I say. “I always did.”
His eyes soften. “You did.”
We let the quiet expand again, and it’s not empty, but full of the kinds of things people only understand when they’ve lived long enough to know what they almost lost. I hear a faint run of synth and drum machine from inside the gym, a beat that would have made us laugh in high school and is somehow perfect now.
Theo rocks once on his heels and then looks at me like he’s decided to risk something.
“Tell me about the leg,” he says. His voice is steady. “Not the medical chart. Your chart.”
I breathe out. “It’s carbon and silicone that fits me well enough that I can take stairs without thinking.
It grips better than most shoes, even if I have to choose function over style.
Some days I barely notice it. Some days I feel a phantom itch in an ankle that’s not there, and I want to argue with my own body.
” I pause. “But it’s solid. It carries me. ”
Theo listens the way he always did when it mattered. He doesn’t rush to fill the silence. He doesn’t pull the spotlight onto his own guilt. He lets the last sentence sit between us until it finds a place to land.
“I read about sockets and liners and suspension systems,” he eventually says, and his blush is immediate and unhidden. “That sounds creepy when I say it out loud. I’m not a creep. I—”