Chapter 29
Chloe
The moment I’d stepped into the bathroom after nearly four hours of the best sex of my life, I could tell something was wrong.
I’d known the other shoe would drop eventually, but I’d expected it to be Teddy retreating like she had so many times before.
Surely the whiplash would be worse for the real deal, right?
Except now, I was the one freaking out.
This was way too messy for my liking. I’d sworn off toxic relationships after Lauren, but here I was sleeping with my boss – or my co-worker, or nemesis, or friend, or whatever she was to me.
I had real feelings for Teddy. No matter who she was to me, she was somebody to me. And that made this messy, which was the opposite of what I wanted.
I strode back out to the bedroom, holding my tired, naked body straight and tall, ready to try to pretend everything was fine. Instead, I found Teddy already snoozing away on my side of the bed. So I exhaled the false confidence I’d mustered, and I crawled into bed next to her.
* * *
I didn’t get much sleep, and I got out of bed first in the morning, which was rare for me, especially sleeping next to an early-rising farmer. I started getting dressed, my brain on autopilot, accidentally picking up Teddy’s trousers in the process.
As I lifted them and shook them out, her wallet fell out of the back pocket.
I picked it up, intending to just set it on the nightstand, but it had fallen open.
I couldn’t help but see the contents – her debit and credit cards, her California driving license that very unpoetically listed Theodora Nicole Cooper’s eyes as just “brown”.
There was some cash, both in dollars and pounds, a Costco membership card, and, tucked behind everything else, a folded piece of paper.
I took it out, curiosity getting the better of me, and ran my finger over the familiar corner torn off something larger.
It was my phone number, which I’d scribbled on that festival map at the Renaissance Faire months ago.
It was clear she’d looked at it many times over the months since we’d first met in California, the paper worn soft from handling.
I knew we were long past that first meet not-so-cute, and I’d seen so many different sides of her since then, but it was still a revelation to see that she’d held onto this.
Past Chloe had fully expected her to chuck it out as soon as she’d found a bin, but Present Chloe wasn’t surprised.
Teddy would have felt bad for what she’d said as soon as it had left her mouth, even if she’d had every right to be angry with me.
Underneath the composed, unimpressed exterior was a soft, sweet, attentive person.
One who was currently still naked in my bed, making me feel all kinds of panicked.
Because, like I’d told her, I caught feelings like other people caught colds.
And I’d caught every good feeling for Teddy.
But she was leaving soon, and I was essentially taking what she wanted away from her.
Jen hadn’t exactly offered me the job permanently, but she’d all but confirmed that she planned to.
I still wasn’t quite convinced that the event would go well – there was so much that could go wrong, especially with me at the helm – but either way, in a month’s time, Teddy would be forced to go back into waiting mode, thousands of miles away, and I’d have what she’d wanted for herself for so long.
If the tables were turned, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel.
I eventually found my own clothes and went downstairs to get coffees for both of us from the hotel’s breakfast service.
When I came back up, Teddy was sitting up in bed, and my breath caught despite all my angsty feelings.
She was beautiful in the morning light, all rumpled hair and sleepy eyes and bare skin that I wanted badly to touch again, even as my brain was screaming warnings.
I sat down next to her on the bed, and she immediately leaned in for a kiss. I didn’t pull away, but my heart wasn’t in it – or, at least, my brain wasn’t – and she sensed the difference immediately.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, studying my face with those perceptive caramel-coloured eyes. Psh, brown. The American licensing people had no idea what they were talking about. In the face of those eyes, I couldn’t put on a front. Not anymore.
I took a breath, trying to find the words. “I think last night was a mistake.”
I watched her face change; saw her expression go carefully blank. “What? Why?”
“Because we want the same thing, Teddy.”
She frowned. “Well, yeah. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, we both want the same thing for ourselves; something that, for now at least, can only belong to one of us.”
Teddy’s face uncreased from confusion to realisation. “To you,” she said. “I understand now.”
I nodded. “You’re leaving in just a few weeks. And, yeah, you’re coming back, but can you honestly tell me you don’t resent at all that I get to stay and you don’t?”
I watched her eyes as they processed what I was asking. They started out soft and open, but I could practically see her walls slam back into place. The open expression from moments before disappeared behind the familiar mask.
“We didn’t think enough about it,” I said. It was a lie; I’d been thinking of little else for months. But last night had hardly been a well-considered moment. “I don’t want one chaotic decision to ruin things for both of us.”
“Right,” she said quietly. “Of course. You’re absolutely right.”
Part of me had been hoping she’d argue; that she’d tell me I was wrong, and that we could figure it out somehow. That she wouldn’t resent me, and that maybe we could be together anyway.
But she didn’t. Of course she didn’t; her feelings for me, assuming she had any to begin with, would pale in comparison to how badly she wanted a life at Gwenynen. So instead, she just pressed her mouth into a thin line and hugged the sheets closer around her.
I turned my back to her whilst she dressed, the easy intimacy we’d shared just hours before replaced by careful politeness.
She disappeared through the door separating our rooms, and I realised she’d left her side unlocked, causing a stabbing sensation in my gut.
Maybe she had wanted things, even before she’d gotten all drunk and adorable.
But that didn’t change the outcome, did it?
* * *
The drive back was excruciating – hours of silence that felt like smoke pooling around us, sucking the air out of the van. I actually had to roll the window down to feel like I could breathe.
When we pulled up outside my building, I hesitated with my hand on the door handle.
“Do you want to come in for tea?” I asked, but I didn’t expect for a second that she’d say yes.
“I should get back,” Teddy said without looking at me. “Jen will be wondering how it went.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything else.
I didn’t look back as I walked to my front door, but I could hear her idling for a long moment before she finally drove away.
Inside my flat, I looked at the pile of work I knew I should tackle for the festival; various notebooks lay stacked on top of my laptop, and a rainbow of sticky notes littered the general area around my workspace.
There were emails to respond to, promotional materials to design, and an obscene number of unread emails in my inbox.
I was genuinely worried about getting it all done in time.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do any of it. Because as much as I knew I’d done the right thing, it didn’t feel good. In fact, it felt wrong.
So, instead of making myself lunch and getting started on my pile of work, I hopped in the shower to wash off the regret of last night, hoping to steam the raw feeling away.
* * *
An hour later, Jack, Phil, and I were shouting at the screen as I failed to land a jump in Fall Guys.
We weren’t much for couch co-ops, preferring to shout over one another’s shoulders and backseat drive.
And as infuriating as it was, my brain was much further from Teddy than it would have been had we been playing Mario Kart – or anything, really, that didn’t take my entire brain space.
I’d messaged them as soon as I’d gotten out of the shower and realised it hadn’t actually fixed anything, desperate for some brain-off time.
Adding to the distraction were Patricia and Alan, Jack’s parents, who were bickering over something in the corner.
“Jackie, come here, please,” Patricia called, and I felt rather than saw Jack move away from my shoulder. “Tell your father that we can’t build the bay that close to the pond. It’ll destroy the loosestrife you’ve got there.”
“He’s not wrong, Mum,” Jack said, just as, in the game, I pulled ahead from the pack. “If you go over any further, you’d have to centre it on that side, otherwise it would look weird, and it would interfere with the chimney. And I can move the loosestrife.”
“Are you renovating?” I asked over my shoulder without looking away from the screen.
“Yeah, just some small stuff,” Jack said. “A few changes here and there.”
I dashed across the finish line, then turned to look at Jack whilst I waited for the next stage to start; renovating his house wasn’t small stuff.
He’d built it with his own two hands years ago, and it hadn’t changed one bit since then, other than adding an extra chair when Morgan had joined film nights.
It had been modern and minimalist when he’d built it, and he’d only made the tiniest of adjustments – new cushions here, new artwork there – to make it cosier.
Nothing even close to this magnitude, though.
No, something was up.
I passed the controller to Phil to take over, then stood up and moved around the sofa to where the Evanses stood.
“What kinds of changes?” I asked, and I saw Jack attempt to summon a suitably dismissive response, but Alan answered for him instead.