Chapter 18 Now #2
When we made our friendship pact, rationally, I accepted that, eventually, Alex would fall for someone, and I was going to have to smile my way through it. Or, if I couldn’t, pack up and move. Probably out of the country. Brush up on my German, push books at an indie store in Koln.
Not a viable solution anymore. Not if Fern says yes to my business proposal, if The Bookshop isn’t just hers anymore but ours, and one day, when she’s ready to sell her half of the ownership to me, mine to love and grow for a very long time.
Not when I love Alex and Mia and this life I’ve built as deeply, wildly, and fully as I do. Shock slams through me.
Even before I faced what I want—who I want, I’d already anchored myself to Pittsburgh.
In my business proposal, my book club, my promises to Mr. Fleischer about the genre for next month’s pick, my plan for this fall with Lauren to take her to Alex’s restaurant.
I want to anchor myself there. To the life I’ve built—and at the heart of that life is Alex.
What would I do if I lost him to someone else?
It’s always been theoretical—a far-off terrible one day that I pushed away, told myself I’d deal with when that day came. Otherwise, I’d make myself sick. But now, it’s horribly real.
I stand rooted beside him, watching Andi and Alex beam at each other, battling the urge to clasp his hand and yell, Mine!
“Thea.” Alex’s voice wrenches me from my spiraling thoughts. He turns toward me, and says, “This is Andi.”
“Hi,” she says warmly.
I shove down my possessive thoughts and tell her just as warmly, “Great to meet you.”
“Same!” Her smile deepens, its wattage somehow doubling. “So great to put a face to a name—I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you.”
That takes me by surprise. “Really?”
Alex says quickly, “Andi is Marlowe’s mom.”
My smile holds, but as everything slots into place, it feels like a rictus on my face.
Marlowe is Mia’s kindergarten best friend.
Mia spends a lot of time with Marlowe. For many of those playdates, Alex and Andi have probably shared conversation over drop-off and pickup; talked and gotten to know each other while the kids ran around the playground; spent time together at Marlowe’s birthday party this past winter at the ice rink, where Alex said he met a few “not totally annoying parents,” which meant he actually really liked them.
I see how it could all unfold from here. Grabbing coffee after the kids are in school, exchanging numbers, going on a no-kids-night date—
I blink, stopping myself. “Marlowe!” I say brightly, hoping I haven’t taken too long to respond. “She’s such sweetie.”
“Aw, thank you.” Andi squints a smile. Even her eye crinkles are cute.
“I love her and Mia’s friendship. They’re two peas in a pod.
Which, speaking of peas,” she says, reaching past Alex toward the shelf that holds his books.
“I’ve heard a certain someone’s first cookbook has a pasta with peas recipe that will entice even my picky I-hate-peas eaters.
I came here just for it.” She throws a guilty glance at her heaping basket of books and games, and grimaces, gorgeous even in her self-deprecation.
“Not that you can tell. Local bookstores are my Achilles’ heel! ”
Crap. I think I like her.
“You really don’t need to buy it,” Alex tells her, looking pained. “I have an obscene number of copies sitting at home. My publisher sends them to me, and I don’t know what the hell to do with them. Let me bring you one, next time Mia and Marlowe have a playdate.”
Andi hesitates, still hovering at the shelf. She drops her hand. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Alex says.
She bites her lip. “Well, only if you promise to sign it for me.”
A stripe of red creeps along Alex’s cheek. He’s standing in profile to me, but I know his other cheek is turning red, too. My stomach sinks. She made him blush. It takes a lot to make Alex blush—I’ve seen it happen twice in our entire friendship.
“Consider it done,” he says.
Andi flashes that megawatt smile his way again and clasps his wrist. “You’re the best, Alex. Thank you!”
“No problem,” he says.
Andi takes a step back, reaching for her cart. “Well, I better get out of here, before I do any more damage.”
“The struggle is real,” I concede.
She smiles my way. “It was so great to meet you, Thea, and great to see you, Alex! Text me! We should totally get the kids together while we’re here.”
“For sure,” he says.
“Bye!” she calls.
We both watch her brisk exit toward the cashier. I turn toward Alex, whose gaze has darted up to the ceiling. “Inspecting the fluorescents?” I ask.
“Yep,” he says, without missing a beat. “Trying to figure out why they make Mia have to drop a deuce every time.”
A laugh jumps out of me. “I want to ask how you came to this conclusion that the fluorescents are at fault, but I also don’t know if I want to know the answer.”
“You don’t,” he says, then glances down at me. “If you’re done giving me that smug smile, I’d like you to buy whatever book you want so we can get out of here.”
“Smug?” I blink. “Me?”
“Smug. You.” He clasps my hand again, but this time, he threads our fingers together. Pleasure and pain twist through me. I love when he does this. I don’t want to give it up. I don’t want there to be someone else whose hand he holds.
My heart’s racing. Sweat pricks my skin.
“You okay, Ted?” he asks. He knows me too well. Alex can spot my panic from a mile away.
I squeeze his hand in mine. “I’m fine. Just thinking, maybe we should swing by the sunglasses first and grab you a pair, so you can shop incognito. Seeing how much you blush you get when accosted by a fan.”
“Ha!” he says loudly. “You’re! So! Funny!”
I smile wide. “Oh, I know.”
Alex rolls his eyes. “Come on, smart-ass. Let’s get your book and get out of here.”
“No sunglasses, really?” I ask. “Not even to combat the fluorescents?”
He peers down at me with that familiar irked but delighted smile. “Unlike Mia,” he says, “the fluorescents don’t have that impact on me.” Then, after a beat, as we wander out of the cookbook aisle, “Well, at least not since I hit middle school.”
I’m looking both ways, leading us as we ease out into the bike lane, when Alex says, “So are you really okay with this weird, likely beachfront wedding for Ethan and Jen happening? Are you okay with the idea of them getting married?”
“I am,” I tell him. “Why?”
“Beyond the obvious, that it’s awkward and manipulative for them to trick us into attending and thus supporting it?” He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Because maybe it… kicked up feelings for you.”
I slam on my brakes.
Alex swerves around me. “Jesus, Ted!”
“Sorry! Come on, let’s pull over.” I walk my bike next to him, and we both walk our bikes up onto the sidewalk, then past it, to a stretch of grass on the other side, beneath the shade of a tree.
I set my hands on my hips, straddling my bike.
“Alex, are you seriously asking me if I still have feelings for Ethan?”
Alex scrubs his face with both hands. “Yes. No. I don’t know. Not like, feelings feelings, just… feelings about him, you know, getting married again.”
I scrunch up my nose. “No. I don’t have feelings for Ethan, at least, not any positive ones.
Those are long gone…” I peer out toward the water just a few blocks away, beyond the dunes, and remember the sun glinting off of it, the incessant wind curling through my hair.
I take a deep breath. “The only thing I feel is… concern. For Mia and Jen. Because nothing I’ve seen from Ethan the past two years makes me think he is any better of a man than he was when I was married to him.
Jen’s saddling herself with that. And Mia…
she’s going to grow up seeing that. Seeing her mom love someone who acts that way. You can’t be happy about that, either.”
Alex nods, eyes down on the ground, hands planted on his hips. “I’m not. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I know how deeply that has to pain Alex, how hard he’s struggled and worked to learn how to cope with the parts of life that he can’t control. I can only imagine how difficult that surrender is when it comes to his child.
I tip my face toward the wind as it picks up, a soothing juxtaposition to the hot sun beating down on us. “Maybe,” I tell Alex, “hopefully, he’s changed. Maybe he’s become somebody who deserves them both. I hope so.”
Alex’s jaw tightens. “I still want to shove my fist down his throat every time I see him, so I don’t think so.”
I laugh. “You’re always going to want to shove your fist down his throat.”
“Because he hurt you,” Alex says. “Because he didn’t even try to do better by you. And you deserved that, Ted. You deserved his very fucking best, even if it turned out to be too late.”
Alex glances out toward the ocean, silent for a moment, before he says, “Sometimes, I tell myself, I have no place to judge Ethan, to hate his guts for what he did. I fucked up in my marriage, too. It doesn’t matter that Jen and I were never going to work in the long run; I still regret that I hurt her, when I didn’t fix my shit fast enough, that I made it impossible for us to end well.
“I wish I could say I never hurt her the way Ethan hurt you, but I can’t.
What I can say, though, is that when I realized what I’d done, when I finally pulled my head out of my ass and got help and listened to Jen, I tried to make it right.
I fucking fought for us. And that, right there, is the point at which I tell myself, I have every right to judge and hate Ethan, because that’s the ground I have to stand on, that he doesn’t—you deserved to be fought for, Ted, to be brave for. And he fucking blew it.”
Tears streak down my cheeks, but I’m smiling. “I love you.”
I say it how I always have, but it doesn’t feel how it always has.
It feels the way it did just an hour ago, on the beach, strangely wild and wonderfully surreal, like there was a muzzle on my heart that’s vanished, and now, finally the truth has broken through.
A wild, untamed creature released from captivity after so long, it doesn’t quite know what to do with its freedom.
Alex leans toward me, tucking a curl behind my ear, beneath my helmet strap. “I love you, too, Ted.”
Thea gazed at Alex, lost in him. His fingertips as they grazed her throat.
His eyes locked with hers. The heat and scent of him, the familiarity of his old Buccos shirt and black basketball shorts.
The mystery of everything beneath that, hard, and firm, and warm, divots and muscles, scars, and birthmarks.
She wanted to touch them, see them, learn them.
She wanted to tear off her clothes and show him every mystery scattered across her skin and beneath it, in her heart, her mind.
She wanted to kiss him so badly, she could barely stand it.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, startling me from my reverie. I pull it out unsteadily, peering down at the screen, then smile.
Alex sighs. “What does Lawrence want.”
“How did you…” I frown up at him. “How did you know it’s Lauren.”
“You have a specific smile for her. Which, pettily, I resent.”
Mr. Fleischer’s words rattle through my brain. He’s wildly jealous of her. He’s jealous of anyone he thinks gets more of you than he does.
I’ve always told myself Alex is being playful when it comes to the way he gripes about Lauren. I know he loves that I have her friendship, because he sees how happy she makes me.
But… what if Alex gets jealous, too? What if he feels about Lauren the way I felt around Andi? If I were him, I’d have lost my mind by now.
Alex leans in, looking genuinely concerned now. “Everything okay?”
I glance down at Lauren’s text. ANY WORD FROM FERN GULLEY? If not, call her!! Tell her she’d be a schmuck not to say yes to you!
I pocket my phone and sigh. “Everything’s fine. Just Lo telling me the same thing you did, about reaching out to Fern.”
Now it’s Alex’s turn to look smug. “I like Lawrence when she agrees with me.”
“Of course you do.”
Alex grins, then suddenly steps onto his pedals and rolls out into the bike lane.
“Last one home has to make lunch!” he yells.
As un-Alex as he could ever be, he takes off into the bike lane, sending a thrill through me.