19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Now
“Ow, ow, ow, ow,” I hiss, leaning over the sink and plunging my wrist under a stream of cold water. “Shit!”
As the water flows over the angry red skin and the pain begins to ebb, I glance around the kitchen. The counters are strewn with dirty dishes. The sheet pan chicken and vegetables that look like they’ve been through the pits of hell are smoking on the stovetop.
Luckily, it’s too early for Theo to get home from work. I still have at least an hour before--
The garage door rumbles open.
“Shit!” I say again. I look around wildly, as if there’s any chance of me cleaning up this mess before Theo gets inside. I end up staying right where I am, and when Theo comes in from the garage, it’s to a wrecked kitchen and a guilty grimace.
“Sass?” He kicks his boots off by the door. “What’s burning?”
I point at him in blind panic. “You’re home early!”
“I’m sorry for not clearing that with you ahead of time,” he deadpans. He heads for the stove, but changes course when he notices what I’m doing. “Did you hurt yourself?”
I turn my arm over and study the scorch mark on my wrist. “I'm fine."
Theo steps up close behind me. I inhale sharply, surprised by his proximity, but he’s oblivious as he peers over my shoulder. His long fingers curl around mine, and he turns my wrist so he can better see the burn. “Ouch.”
“It’s fine,” I insist, even though it really does hurt.
He strokes his thumb along the skin, and the sensation is like he’s applied a layer of aloe. Together, we move our hands back beneath the faucet. I watch the water cascade over us, the protective curl of his hand around mine. My shoulders drop their tension, and without thinking about it too much, I lean back against him.
“Sass.” It’s a sigh. Almost a reproach. Even so, he doesn’t pull away. “What are you doing?”
It’s a valid question, and one I don’t have an answer for. I flick the faucet off and turn into Theo, the throb of my injury nearly forgotten when I press my forehead to his chest. For a split second, he stiffens—then his arms come around me, and I breathe out in relief, lacing my fingers together at his lower back.
“I don’t really know how to cook,” I confess into his shirt.
“Yeah? And you thought you’d learn today?”
“I was trying to make myself useful,” I gripe. “It was all going really well until I forgot to set the timer.”
Theo hums his understanding. “Rookie mistake. How did you get burned?”
“I was washing the dishes,” I say, flicking my arm back to indicate the sink, “and then I smelled smoke. I was in a hurry and I only pulled the oven mitt over half of my hand.”
An exasperated groan rumbles in his chest. “You’ve got to be careful, Nina.”
The kitchen is a complete disaster, smoke still heavy in the air, but Theo only scolds me for not taking care of myself. I’m not sure of the last time I was made to feel like a priority—like the priority—to another person. It may well have been ten years ago, in this town. In these arms.
I can’t allow myself to become wrapped up in Theo again, and my brain is sounding the alarm that this is dangerous territory—but it doesn’t feel dangerous when he’s holding me like this. It’s warm and familiar, something I thought was lost forever, and the memory of grieving him keeps me right where I am.
Theo must know what I’m thinking, or maybe he’s just feeling the same, because his grip on me suddenly tightens. My feet are lifted off the ground; I press my face into his neck, my palms against his back, and hold on tight. It’s been a couple of weeks since we first saw each other again, but somehow, this feels like the real reunion. We clutch fiercely, desperately, anchored by raw emotion and a bond that runs deeper than our conscious memories.
“Nina,” he breathes, cupping one hand around the back of my head. “I thought I was going to die when you left.”
“Don’t even say that.”
“I mean it.” My shirt has ridden up, and the calluses on his hand scrape against my hip when he squeezes even harder, his words falling into my hair. “I didn’t want to die. I spent the rest of that summer trying to find you, and I couldn’t, and I hated myself for it. I should have answered the fucking phone. I should have kept on driving.”
“No,” I whisper against his skin. I may have been blaming him for the past ten years, bitter that he evidently didn’t need me as much as I needed him, but I know now that I was wrong. He didn’t abandon me. None of it was easy for him, either. We were so impossibly young. “It’s okay.”
Theo bends at the waist, placing my feet back on the ground. I brace myself to separate, but he only draws back enough to look me in the eyes. His are a little bit wild. “I would lay in bed at night, trying to figure out what else I could do. Where else I could look. I couldn’t sleep or eat. There was this feeling in my chest—this... this knot that never went away.”
“Like when I was in the hospital,” I say softly.
He closes his eyes briefly, lets his chin fall. “It was exactly like that.”
“That’s how I felt, too.”
For a long, loaded moment, we’re connected in a shared gaze. Theo leans in closer, but even as my heart trips over itself, I know he won’t kiss me. This is not a romantic interlude. The fact that we were involved for a month as teenagers is a significant, but small, part of our history. We may have been each other’s first love—but for the seventeen years before that, we were each other’s whole world.
Right now, it feels like we’re rediscovering that part of us.
Pausing with his face a breath away from mine, Theo’s hand comes up to touch my cheek, fingers curled over my ear, thumb at my chin. “When did your chest stop hurting?”
Those early days without Theo are a blur, but I know that by the time my mom demanded that I “do something besides wallow”, I was at least coping well enough to appease her. Over time, I became an expert at suppressing every complicated feeling I had—about Theo, about my family, about myself—until I believed that they no longer existed.
“I don’t think it ever did,” I admit. “Not until now.”
Theo gives a slight shake of his head. “Me either. And I didn’t even realize it until you were standing in front of me again.”
He does close the gap between us, then, but only to drop a light kiss on the tip of my nose. I receive it with butterflies in my stomach, and when he goes to pull back, I don’t let him.
“No,” I say, not remotely embarrassed to be locking my arms around his middle, holding him in place. “Not yet.”
Theo goes along with it, giving me another hug and laughing quietly against my ear. “Tell me when.”
***
Eventually, we get around to cleaning the kitchen. The rhythm comes to us naturally: by silent agreement, I load the dishwasher, he wipes down the counters, and we move around each other effortlessly. When Theo picks up the sheet pan and tilts it, none of the food budges. It’s securely burnt on. He goes to the trash can and casually drops the entire thing inside. “Let’s go pick up a pizza.”
My blood pressure spikes. “In town?”
“You can stay in the truck,” he says, fishing his keys from his pocket. “Come on.”
It's been nearly a week since I called off my wedding, and I haven’t left Theo’s house since. But I know I’ll have to emerge from hiding at some point; there’s no reason to put it off any longer.
I make Theo wait while I change out of my slouchy loungewear, replacing it with cropped pants and a chiffon tank. On my way out to the truck, I grab my Red Vines off the kitchen counter. Theo automatically holds out his hand as I settle into his passenger seat. “Give me one.”
“I guess I did destroy your kitchen,” I acknowledge. I place a piece in his open palm and take a bite out of my own. “Maybe I’ll try pasta tomorrow. I know I can boil water.”
Theo backs out of the garage and heads down the long driveway. “Yeah,” he says, holding his licorice in a fist and taking a bite. “About that. You don’t have to earn your keep.”
“Well, it’s not like there’s much else to do around here,” I say, defensive. This feels unsettlingly like the conversation where Daniel asked me to ‘stay out of the way’ of his housekeeper. It’s not that I particularly wanted to cook and clean—then or now—but in the absence of any real direction in my life, it was at least something purposeful to do.
And here, I don’t even have the streets of New York to distract myself with.
“If you want to cook, cook,” Theo clarifies. “Ruin every pan I have. I’m good with that. Just don’t feel like you have to do anything.”
“I’m not going to ruin all your pans,” I snap.
“That wasn't my point.”
I cross my arms and stare out the windshield, letting out a huffy sigh that even I recognize as bitchy. Immense frustration comes over me suddenly, and I can’t pinpoint the source. “Okay.”
We continue the drive toward town. Theo’s window is open, his elbow hanging out the side, and there’s a warm breeze blowing through the cab of the truck. Leafy canopies bow over the road, creating a kaleioscope of sunlight around us. It’s the kind of night that brought me back to North Carolina for my wedding. There were lots of things I liked about New York, but on what was supposed to be the most important day of my life, I wanted to be surrounded by this . Not concrete and asphalt.
When Theo breaks the silence, he speaks slowly, each syllable falling on eggshells. “When the police picked you up, where did you go?”
“What?”
“You didn’t come back to Amity,” he says patiently. “Where did you go?”
I have never liked revisiting these memories, but as I do it now, I notice that the pang isn’t quite so sharp. I wonder if our earlier conversation helped with that. “Raleigh. By the time my parents picked me up from the police station, my dad had already called a guy he knew there, gotten a job—I’m not even entirely sure what he was doing; he was definitely being paid under the table—and found a house to rent.”
“Raleigh,” he says just under his breath, like a revelation not meant for me. “You were in Raleigh, and I was in Chapel Hill. We were so fucking close.”
There’s a lump in my throat. I can’t get emotional twice in one day, so I swallow it down and continue. “Dad and Brock only lived with us for a year before my parents separated.”
“What happened?”
I give him an incredulous look. “What do you mean? Without the business, they weren’t obligated to stay together anymore.”
Theo tilts his head in understanding.
“They moved out west together,” I continue, “and Mom started working for this catering company. That’s how she met Travis—at an event she was working.”
“What about you?”
“I thought I told you. I met Daniel in—”
“No,” he interrupts. “What did you do in Raleigh? Before that?”
“I worked in a department store until Mom and Travis got engaged, and when she moved in with Travis, I went too.” I snort sardonically. “I was twenty-one, making minimum wage and living off my mom’s boyfriend at the same time you were finishing college. At least one of us did something worthwhile.”
“You were figuring things out,” he supplies, always ready to defend me, even from myself. “What high school did you graduate from up there?”
The question lingers as we reach the edge of town and stop at a red light. Theo looks both ways, sees that nobody else is around, and casually rolls through the intersection.
“I didn’t finish high school,” I admit.
"What?" Theo asks. "Really?”
I nod, staring into my lap. Although I’ve always carried a little shame about being a dropout, it multiplied when I was going out with Daniel. He did not want his friends and acquaintances to know that he was dating someone without a high school diploma. Keeping it out of the conversation with his circle meant that I also stopped talking about it with anyone else. “I was too depressed to go to school,” I tell him. “Nobody forced me. It wasn’t like I was going to get to go back to my school, with my friends and teachers. So I just...never went.”
He looks flabbergasted. Horrified. “Nina. That’s not fair to you at all.”
I shrug. “It’s not like I needed a diploma to work in the mall.”
“It’s not about that,” he says, indignation creeping into his voice. “Your parents should have helped you. They should have gotten you enrolled so you could finish. Even if—even if just to make some new friends.”
“Yeah,” I murmur. “Well. We don’t all have parents like you.”
Theo runs a hand through his hair and looks at me sadly. I can sense him wanting to say something else, even argue with me—except that he grew up with my parents, too. He knows the difference between his and mine.
"I'm sorry," he says, and I nod, even though there's nothing for him to be sorry about.