Chapter Fourteen #3
But she’d never seen Theo fully naked before.
And somehow, witnessing all that expanse of his bare form, all that length of him, he looked even larger than he usually did.
His skin was raw and red, and water streamed down the sides of his face, flowing along his body and across the constellation of moles she loved so much speckling the sides of his torso, intermingling with the plethora of scars and tiny freckles contrasting against his normally alabaster-pale skin.
She traced them with her gaze, following them down to the last remaining unexplored part of him she hadn’t yet seen.
Her eye snagged on his right hip.
The damage there was extensive.
Far worse than she could have ever imagined.
More deep, puckered scars plunged into his flesh, twisting where they’d had to rebuild his shattered hip after his accident—the hip that caused his limp now, the source of the pain he surely never used to suffer when he was an elite college athlete.
The deep scars were thick and wide, angry and red, and even more devastating than what was on his face. That one paled in comparison.
But that wasn’t what broke her heart.
It was the way he sat hunched in the chair, his face covered with trembling hands, shoulders shaking as he tried to make himself smaller.
This wasn’t the Theo she knew. Her Theo.
It was the broken man who’d first walked into her café that one summer morning.
Not the one who’d brought her home and held her while she cried in the dark, sweeping her tears away with his thumbs and banishing new ones with gentle kisses brushed against her eyes.
Not the one who loved old movies, who made her coffee, who danced with her in his living room, whose crooked smile and curving dimples she adored coaxing out from the depths of his cheeks with a laugh.
No, that man didn’t sit in front of her.
Now it was the one she’d met months ago—the one who could barely string enough words together to ask for a plain black coffee out in public.
The one who shied away from cameras, who flinched away from glances, who couldn’t look her in the eye.
The one who hid himself behind layers of clothing and masks and silence.
Everything Audrey had been worried about up until that moment disappeared in an instant. She’d been so nervous about what staying with Theo this weekend meant, what they might do, what all that might be like, that she’d almost forgotten the most important things:
That it was Theo she wanted to be with.
That what happened just now had seemed to shatter every bit of confidence he’d built up over the last several weeks and months.
That in any case, despite his newfound or rediscovered self-assurance, he’d probably been worried about the same things she was.
That he was certainly just as anxious.
Just as nervous.
Just as human.
That he was still grieving.
Still in pain.
Still broken, despite trying so hard to put himself back together again.
And suddenly, absolutely nothing mattered anymore.
Nothing but one thing.
“Theo.”
Audrey took a step into the shower and closed the door after her.
But as soon as she leaned under the stream of water, she drew back, sucking a hiss through her teeth.
It was so hot it had nearly scalded her, which explained why Theo’s skin was so raw and red, battered by the unrelenting high-pressure jets streaming from both shower heads.
She turned the temperature down to a more tolerable level and stepped up to him, dipping her head beneath the water and bending to try to get a look at his face.
She took one of his hands in hers and peeled it away.
When he finally looked at her, his eyes were red and swollen, his chest heaving with tired, labored breaths.
He pressed his lips together, rolling them while he tried to get them to stop quivering, but he gave up as soon as his gaze met hers.
A single tear slipped out of his scarred right eye and drowned in the water from the shower soaking them both.
“My mom’s wrong, Audrey. It is my fault,” he croaked before swallowing thickly and closing his eyes again, his voice ragged and hoarse.
His right hand sought hers out, but it was trembling too hard to catch her fingers.
“It’s my fault my dad died.” He clutched at his heart with his left hand. “It’s my fault.”
“Oh, Theo, no. No.” She shook her head. “It was an accident—you’ve told me that much. If that’s true, it can’t be your fault. An accident’s no one’s fault.”
His face broke.
And when he sobbed again, Audrey couldn’t take it anymore.
She needed to hold him.
If the large medical shower chair he was sitting in could take his weight, it could take hers too.
She lifted one leg and slid it around his waist, slipping it through the wide gap between the back of the chair and the seat before following it with the other, using the armrests to balance.
When she settled carefully into his lap, she wrapped her arms around his neck and tucked his head under her chin, pulling him close and holding him tight.
Nothing separated them now.
He melted into her.
Theo encircled her in his arms and buried his face in the crook of her neck, his shoulders shaking while he cried.
His tears mixed with the water coursing down her bare skin, and it was all Audrey could do to hold him steady, gently combing through his hair with her nails and pressing her lips softly to the top of his head.
She wasn’t entirely sure what exactly had possessed her to wrap herself around him like she did.
But her instincts told her that he needed to have her skin against his, that he needed to know she understood how raw and vulnerable he was—and how sacred his trust in her was now that he’d finally shown her this part of himself. A part he’d tried so hard not to.
Audrey had never been so close with someone before; she’d never allowed herself to be.
It was so much easier to keep people at arm’s length, to hold others at bay.
If you didn’t let them in, they couldn’t hurt you.
If they held a knife, they couldn’t cut deep.
Even her past experiences had only been shallow slices of the blade, surface wounds that healed quickly or only left the lightest of scars that rapidly faded to white, mere memories of transitory trauma.
She’d been stabbed once before, and it had been a near-fatal wound to her heart.
She’d learned an important lesson that day, and she’d learned it young. Far too young.
If you kept that distance, you could keep yourself intact, whole, safe. You could survive. It was the one lesson she’d learned clearly over the years:
If you didn’t let anyone in, they couldn’t throw you away.
But Theo was different.
As his trembling hands drew her closer to him, one of them wide enough to span the entire width between her shoulder blades, Audrey knew.
She knew with absolute certainty that she’d let him keep burying himself into her so deep, he’d burrow straight into her heart.
He’d already found his way there long ago, right where she’d once been wounded so gravely.
Her scar ran as deep as the one on his face, only hers was in her soul.
Theo understood that.
She wanted to feel him against her, inside her, all of him, forever and always, and all the hairs on her neck stood on end when he tilted his head up and pressed his lips softly to hers.
His eyes were closed, but his mouth had sought hers automatically, that desperate need for connection innate and instinctive.
It was as natural, as easy, as a reflex.
It was as though they’d been crafted for each other, made specifically to slot into the places where there were cracks, each one’s pieces fitting precisely into the grooves of the breaks.
She could feel it now, knew it now, clearly and fully.
When he breathed in, so did she.
When her heart beat, so did his.
Something changed between them beneath the hot water as she held Theo and kept him safe and sound in her arms, safe and sound in her heart, all of him finally bared to all of her. There were no more walls, no more barriers, no more secrets. Neither of them could hide anymore.
Everything deepened in that moment.
When Theo finally calmed enough to unbury his face from her neck, pulling back and looking her in the eyes, he drew in a deep breath and searched her face, tiny droplets tumbling gently from his long lashes onto her cheeks.
He cradled her face in his hands, softly smoothing her soaked hair behind her ears.
He didn’t say anything—he only looked at her.
And the longer he stared into her eyes, the more she felt it:
The moment their souls entwined.
Or perhaps they’d always been that way, and now was only the moment of knowing. She’d been drawn to him the second he walked through the door of the coffeehouse, almost as though he was so large, his gravity couldn’t help but pull her into his orbit.
Or perhaps it was simply that their atoms had always been enmeshed, entangled at the quantum level, drawn inexorably closer until they’d crashed together to form something new, something stronger, their electrons dancing near enough and fast enough to create an unbreakable covalent bond.
It had always been magnetic.
She could feel his heart beat through his chest, thundering in time with her own, their electrostatic pulses synced.
He lit her up like one of his sculptures.
Like one of his stars.
And that light was reflected back in his eyes now when he finally found what he’d been searching for in her own.
“I love you.”
When he uttered the words, her heart nearly stopped.
It was the surest thing he’d ever said to her.