Bex #2
“Probably.” Her shrug is insouciant. “Bryce had told everyone about me and Theo at that point. Only a few of us knew your marriage was fake, though I imagine everyone suspected.”
I press my face to my hands. It’s humiliating, the way I tried so hard to act like his wife with half of them knowing the truth and all of them knowing about his relationship with Wendy.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and speak to him,” she commands without sympathy.
“He probably should have told you the truth instead of trying to make it go away, and yes, it was bad of him to let you sit there in the bar pretending it was real when we mostly knew it wasn’t.
But I don’t think you were together then, yes? So he didn’t owe you answers.”
She somehow knows we’re together now, though, which means he’s still confiding in her—something he never did with me.
My palms press flat to the table. “He’s supposedly angry with you, yet he still told you we were together.”
“No, he didn’t,” she replies, brushing at something invisible on her damp skirt.
“But he’s so bloody upset, in a way he never was about Fiona and certainly never was about me, that it was obvious.
” She presses a finger to the inner corner of her eye.
“So I have to commend you, I suppose. You’ve gotten the reaction out of him I worked nearly twenty years to achieve. ”
I want to believe her. But will it make a difference if I do?
“You seem pretty certain of all that, but you’re the one who flew across an ocean to tell me this, not him.”
“I’m not sure you’d have believed him, you cynical little thing,” she replies. “And the truth is that I had a layover on the way to California, or I wouldn’t be here either. But he’s moving mountains to get back to you and set this right, and it would pain me to see you throw that in his face.”
My arms fold across my chest. “Why would it pain you? It seems to me you’d find it ideal.”
She gives me a sad smile. “I would, if I thought it would work out in my favor. This is my attempt at making amends. He’s a good man, just as his brother was. If you break his heart, I don’t think anyone will be able to repair it, and he and his mother have suffered enough.”
She rises, frowning at the downpour outside, and goes to the front door for her coat and bag.
“Bryce has sold the story, and it will be out by morning,” she says, sliding her arms into the jacket’s sleeves.
“They’re going to make both of us look very bad and it will all be hideous, but much easier for Theo if he knew you were able to move past this. ”
She raises a brow at me, a subtle scolding, then opens the door and runs through the rain to a car idling at the curb.
It’s not the visit I wanted. It doesn’t fix everything, but it leaves me unsure where I stand.
Theo shouldn’t have slept with her. He should have taken some sort of deeply principled stand.
But how many of my mistakes has he been willing to forgive?
My academic record, my gross relationship with Brian, the thousands of stories he must have heard from Jessie.
I could look past it pretty easily. What I can’t look past is that he didn’t tell me any of it, that he has allowed me to go through all these months completely in the dark—not just about what was going on behind the scenes, but about where I stood with him.
And I allowed him to keep me in the dark, because I was so terrified of the answer I might get if I pushed.
I wish he’d been the one to show up here today, but it wouldn’t have been enough if he’d remained the same guy he was: the one who was closed off and couldn’t say the words, which I suppose is unfair since I never said them either, but I did try.
It will kill me to lose him, but the truth is…I’ve still got no proof I ever really had him. He’s never told me how he feels. He’s never called this a relationship or referred to me as his girlfriend or asked me what I’d like to do when filming ends.
That’s what needs to change, and it needs to come from him.
Me: Wendy came by and explained things.
He attempts to call but I don’t pick up. There are things I need to say, and I’m not sure I’ll get them out if I hear his voice.
Me: I don’t want to talk to you by phone.
Look, I know you were largely blameless, but it doesn’t change the fact that I left London believing the worst because you never told me anything.
You left me so far in the dark about where we stood that I didn’t even know if you were sleeping with someone else. I STILL don’t know.
Theo: God, of course I’m not with someone else. Please pick up the phone so we can discuss.
Me: Tell me this, Theo: How would I have known you weren’t with someone else? You never told me how you feel. You never told me a single thing.
Theo: I assumed you knew.
My laughter is pure frustration. Here Theo is, still unable to tell me how he feels. And maybe he’d manage it by phone, or maybe he’d just keep talking in vague terms that leave it all undefined. I’m no longer willing to settle for ambiguity.
Me: I’m not interested in having to *assume* how someone feels because he’s never breathed a word of it to me. You’ll be here in a few days for the marathon. Please figure out what you want between now and then…and anything less than 100% isn’t enough for me.
The dots circle as he types his response. I wait with bated breath for him to give me something, anything, that indicates what he feels.
And then his response lands on my phone with the weight of a punch to the gut.
Theo: Okay.
Okay.
Not I’m crazy about you and I’m sorry I haven’t said it. Not even I can’t swear I know where this is heading, but I’m happy with you and I want to see where this takes us.
Just okay.
I swallow hard. He’s got other things going on, but yeah…I’d hoped he’d say or do something more. That he’d tell me he was flying out, that he’d call though I told him not to, that he’d declare his feelings in some unequivocal way.
But that isn’t who he’s been, nor is it who he’s likely to become.
And I’m pretty sure it’s what I need.