Chapter 45 Theo
She's wearing grey.
Not for any reason that means anything. It's just a sweater. It's just a color.
She looks like Sunday morning.
"You got coffee without me," she says, looking at the cup in my hand.
"I don't know your order."
She looks at me sideways. "You've never asked."
She's doing this again. "Okay. What's your order?"
"Oat milk latte. One sugar. No vanilla, even though everyone assumes vanilla.
" She's already moving toward the café counter.
"And before you say anything, yes, I only just started working at the coffee shop, so my order might change over the next few days because I'll need to taste test the practice orders. "
I follow and watch her order. She pulls her card out before I can and taps it against the reader.
She looks at me over her shoulder as if to see if I'm still here.
I am.
Her face softens like she's relieved.
Her coffee comes. She wraps both hands around it and smiles at the first sip.
I lead her to a table and pull out her chair.
She sits and pulls her knees up onto the seat. I've never seen her do that — fold herself into a chair like she's comfortable. Like she's somewhere she doesn't have to perform posture.
She looks at the bookshelves around us.
"I love bookstores," she says.
"Libraries are better."
She looks at me while turning her cup slowly in her hands. "We should have met at the Central Library downtown instead." She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
"We came here for a reason," I say.
She sips her coffee to hide her blush. It doesn't work. "And what is that?"
"Finish your coffee, and you'll see."
She tries to hide her excitement. I can see it in her eyes anyway.
She finishes her coffee in comfortable silence.
I stand. "Come on."
I take her to the dark romance section.
She doesn't think anything of it at first — she's looking at all the books. Then I pick up a book with a skull on the cover and hold it out.
"Have you read this?"
She looks at it and shakes her head. "Have you?"
I smirk. "No."
A pause.
"So we have something in common."
She plucks it from my hands, opens it somewhere in the middle, and reads for a moment. Her eyes move down the page, and something crosses her face that she quickly controls.
"You brought me to a bookstore to buy me a romance novel?"
"Not entirely."
She puts it back. "I would never read that in a million years."
I reach for the one beside it.
She shakes her head before I've fully lifted it.
I move to the next table. Fantasy. Something with a map on the inside cover and a title in embossed gold letters.
She shrugs, drifting back to the dark romance table, running her fingers along the spines.
I come up behind her and cover her eyes with my hands.
She goes still. "What are you doing?"
I lean down and speak close to her ear. "Choose one blindly. Whatever you land on, that's the one."
"That's—" She laughs slightly. "That's not how you choose a book."
"It is today."
She reaches forward, both hands out, navigating by touch. Her fingers tap along the spines — one, the next, the one after. She pulls one out and holds it for a moment.
"Too thick," she says, and puts it back.
She moves her hands to the opposite side and picks one up.
"Is that the one?" I whisper.
I feel her smile under my palm. "Yes."
I take it before she can look at the cover and tuck it under my arm. Then I take her hand.
The philosophy section is a few aisles down.
She looks at the shelves; her eyes moving across the spines the way they move across annotated margins — slowly, reading everything.
"Are you going to show me the book?" she asks, looking at it tucked under my arm.
"Not yet." I point at the shelf in front of us. "Do you know philosophy?"
"I love philosophy." She runs her finger along a row of spines and stops on one and tilts her head slightly and says, "The life of wisdom must be a life of enquiry." She glances at me. "Plato. I wrote it on my wall freshman year of high school, and my mother made me paint over it."
"Why?"
"She said it implied the answers weren't already decided." She almost smiles. "Which, in our house, they were."
I pull a book from the shelf and hold it out.
"No." She looks at me with that look — the one that is trying to figure out what I'm doing and enjoying not knowing. Then her eyes move to my shoulder. The front of my shirt. Back up to my face. "You're really tall," she says, like she's just noticed.
"So they say."
Her eyes trace my shoulders again with an expression she doesn't fully close off in time. Then her gaze snaps back to mine.
“Is it a problem for you?”
"It's not that," she says quickly.
I hold up the two books — the philosophy one and the dark romance she chose blindly, still unlooked-at. "I'm buying these."
"And then will you tell me what we're doing?"
I lean in slightly. "Our date doesn't end here."
The word lands between us. She doesn't correct it.
"What if I have plans after this?" she says.
"Cancel them. I'm taking you somewhere."
She looks at me for a moment, weighing it. Then she nods.
I have her.
I pay for the books and hold out my hand for her phone. She unlocks it and gives it to me without asking why. I type in the address for Gas Works Park and hand it back.
"I'll meet you there," I say.
She looks at the location and nods.
"Okay," she says.
The park is mostly empty on a Sunday morning in November.
Good.
I find a grassy slope above the water with a sightline to the parking lot and enough distance from the walking path that we won't be part of anyone's morning.
I spread the blanket before she arrives.
The fruit I bought on the way goes in the center — strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries.
I sit, open the philosophy book, and wait.
She appears at the top of the slope in her grey sweater and her good coat. She shades her eyes against the flat winter light and looks around. I raise my hand, and she walks down to me.
She looks at the blanket, the fruit, and the book already open in my hands. "What's this?"
"Fruit?"
She sits beside me and reaches for a strawberry. She bites into it and looks out at the water.
I start reading to her.
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are…”
She's eating the fruit slowly, looking at the clouds, listening.
I keep going — Kierkegaard, the passages I marked at the red lights on the drive over, the ones that have been sitting with me since I first read them at seventeen and felt for the first time that a dead man understood something about being alive that nobody around me had bothered to say out loud.
She doesn't interrupt.
She just listens.
I reach the end of a passage and stop.
She's lying down now on her back, looking up at the gray sky with one arm behind her head and a strawberry stem between her fingers. The city moves behind us. The water moves in front of us. The clouds move above her.
"Do you think that's true?" she says.
"Which part?"
"That despair comes from not being who you are." She turns her head to look at me without sitting up. "Because I think sometimes you don't know who you are until something takes away who you were."
I look at her.
"Like it has to be removed first," she continues.
"The version you built. The one that other people decided for you before you had the vocabulary to argue.
" She looks back at the clouds. "And then something happens and the version breaks and underneath it there's just—" She exhales.
"A person who hasn't been consulted in a very long time. "
The park sits around us.
"Kierkegaard would say that's the beginning," I say. "Not the crisis. The beginning of existing." I look at the water. "Most people never get there. They just rebuild the same version faster."
She's quiet for a moment. "Is that what you do?"
I consider this honestly. "I’m not sure if it's more me or just a better constructed version of the same problem."
She sits up, close enough that I can see the gray light in her eyes.
"What was the thing that broke it for you?" she asks.
The true answer is long and dark, and it involves a sister, a man who deserved what he got, and a decision I made that I would make again. Somehow, that has led me to a park blanket in November with a girl I have no business being this honest with.
"Someone I love got hurt," I admit.
She holds my gaze. Her eyes softening like it would if I lifted a veil and showed her a scar. She doesn't ask who, how, or what. Just receives it and accepts it for what it is.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"Don't be."
I look at her mouth.
She looks at mine.
"Theo," she says, wetting her lips.
And then she closes the distance, touching her nose with mine. I don’t move, letting her be in control. Her restraint only lasts a fraction of a second, and then her soft strawberry lips are on mine.
I cup her face, and then I kiss her back.
Her mouth is warm where the air is cold. Her fingers curl into my jacket, tugging me closer and lower.
She pulls back a fraction and looks at me.
Fuck, I love how she looks at me with those bright eyes.
"The book," she says, slightly breathless. "You never let me see the cover."
I reach beside me without looking away from her face and pick up the dark romance novel and turn it toward her.
She looks at it and reads the title.
She throws her head back and laughs.
I look at the cover and almost smile.
I open to the first page and read the dedication.
“For the girls who like their men tall and mysterious –– I dare you to kiss him.”
She stares at me with a growing smile. “It does not say that.”
I toss the book to the side and confess, “No, it doesn’t. Now come over here and kiss me again.”