Chapter 43
Theo
The crew starts moving toward the bar, but she simply rises, still looking at me, still smiling.
That’s enough. I knock over chairs in my haste to reach her, then pull her to my chest and bury my face in her hair.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so fucking sorry. And I was never Bronwyn’s. I was yours. From the moment I saw you, I was yours.”
She smiles up at me. There was an uncertain thing in her eyes before, but it’s no longer there. She needed to hear this from me months ago. I wish I’d said it in Paris.
No, I wish I’d said it long before then.
I pull her mouth to mine for a long moment, relishing her smell, the feel of her beneath my hands, the softness of her mouth. I missed her even more than I knew. “Will you go somewhere with me?”
Her brows rise. “That’s a weird way to ask me to go to your room, but sure.”
I slide my fingers through hers and pull her toward the door. “There too. But first we need to go to the graveyard.”
“The graveyard?” she demands. “At nine at night? This is exactly the kind of bullshit reunion I’d expect from a Brit, by the way.”
I laugh. “It’s going to get worse, but bear with me.”
I’m not even sure why I’m insisting on it. But Bex is gun-shy and I suppose I’ve been too and I want to do all this the right way. Not in a hotel ballroom surrounded by the crew and not when we’re in bed.
The church where her mother is buried is only three blocks away. When I lead her through the cemetery, she sighs. “This is getting more ghoulish by the moment. I’m not having sex on my mother’s grave if that’s your kink.”
“You’d totally do it if I asked.”
“Okay probably,” she admits. “But I’d be weirded out later. I’d tell all the guys I dated after you.”
My smile fades. I never want to hear her reference guys after me or our eventual divorce again. Not for as long as I live. If this goes well, I won’t have to.
We reach her mother’s grave and I turn toward her, pushing the hair back from her face, cradling her jaw.
“I looked up the poem. ‘Bright Star’? And the more I read it, the more I got how your dad felt about your mom because it’s exactly how I feel about you.
I’m the last person your dad wanted you with, but I have to believe that at heart, what he’d have wanted most was someone who’d worship you, who’d be completely content just to have you near him even if he couldn’t fully grasp everything you are.
And that person is me.” I drop to one knee and pull out the ring I chose myself, the ring I first saw in Amsterdam when I was insisting to myself I didn’t even like her.
“I have no idea what the next years will hold, but I love you, and all I ask is that you let me stay near you, and take care of you…hopefully as your husband.”
She blinks back tears and nods. “I love you too. And I don’t care what happens with the show or the company as long as we’re still together when it’s through.”
And then I rise and kiss my wife, for whom there won’t be anyone after me.
· · ·
You can discuss a whole lot of things over the course of a twenty-six-mile run. Possibly everything, when you’re in love for the first time and most of your dreams are coming true at once.
By the tenth mile, we’ve figured out the living situation.
We want to be in the same place, and though I was willing to live in New Jersey if she preferred, she says she’s ready to move on—from the house, from the town—as long as she doesn’t have to see much of my friends.
Fortunately, I’m not all that interested in seeing them either.
Lars assures us the show will do great and the company will be fine…the network is already asking him about a second season. We’ll stay in my flat in London until the debut, to be certain, but after that…anything’s possible.
I suggest we could move to Madeira.
She suggests Primrose Hill.
By the fifteenth mile, I’ve agreed to meet my nephew, provided she does all the talking to Kieran’s wife. She believes seeing a bit of my brother in a new face will heal me somehow, and while I think it will only end in disaster, I trust her instincts with people more than my own.
Around the twenty-third mile she begins to struggle.
We didn’t train the way we should have. In an ideal world, we’d have done two runs at this length, and several more building up to it.
I assumed she was young and fit enough to pull it off and I still assume that, even though she’s groaning about the pain and telling me this is entirely my fault.
“Are you going to be like this when you’re pregnant?” I ask.
She glares at me. “I know you don’t think this is a good time to discuss producing your oversized children.”
“Fine. We should wait until after you’ve gone back to school anyway.”
She huffs. “I’m not going back to school and we’re probably going to have to amputate my legs after this race, so I’ll be spending the next year adjusting to that. So no school and kids might be out too, depending on the degree of amputation.”
I did assume there’d be a fight about school, though I did not anticipate her bringing up amputation as the excuse. I refuse to back down, however. “You can’t keep waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s time to try some things out.”
“Worried I’m going to lie on your couch all day eating donut holes?”
“If you think I’d object to the idea of you prone in my flat,” I purr, “you don’t know me as well as you soon will.”
Her gaze meets mine and there’s nothing exhausted or angry about it. Good old Bex…bring up sex and every other problem disappears.
“I had a different idea,” she says. “I’d like to plan trips.
New places. Like I did with Huacachina. Those trips we pretended to plan in Europe were ridiculous, and the company hasn’t added anything new in years.
Once the show airs, we’ll get a lot more business, and people are going to be hungry for something beyond the standard European vacation. ”
“We need that…” I begin, wincing at how ridiculous my objections are. “But it would involve a lot of travel.”
“Well, obviously. I mean…that’s sort of the fun part.”
Alas—I’ve fully turned into my brother. “Once you get to London, I’m not going to want you to leave,” I admit.
It sounds even more lame aloud than it did in my head, but she just smiles—a quiet, secretive smile, half pleased and half bashful.
Perhaps, after a lifetime spent feeling as if her presence was unwelcome, that the opposite is finally true means something.
“It’ll be nice to be missed,” she replies. “And just think about all the reunion sex we’ll have. You know what I’m like after a week without it. So just picture—”
“Rebecca,” I growl, “don’t start this shit with me just as we’re approaching the cameras. I’ll miss a lot of things about you, but I won’t miss your desire to get me worked up in public.”
“Liar,” she says. “You’ll miss that too.”
Probably, yes. But I’m not about to encourage her by admitting it.
Eventually, we reach the finish line, where we’re enfolded in a group hug by the crew. Someone pops a bottle of champagne open and pours it into plastic cups, and Katrina raises hers.
“A toast!” she shouts. “To Theo and Bex, who are incredibly bad at pretending to like each other when they don’t, and even worse at pretending they’re not in love when they are.”
I smile at Bex, and she smiles at me. Katrina’s right. After a lifetime of hiding pieces of ourselves, holding back what we wanted…together, we could only be ourselves.
Hundreds of people crossed the finish line before we did.
I’m still fairly certain we won.