Chapter 55 ALEX #2
“Please just try to remember that I loved you, okay?” Panic and concern race through me at the quiet, hollow sound of his voice.
I think about the thick letter perched on the bag of my things, the envelopes on his desk, the fridge with no food.
I’m almost positive he was planning on killing himself if I didn’t give him a second chance, and he’s probably much more suicidal right now than he was then.
Oh, Theo.
“What do you think is real right now?” I ask gently. He blinks once, slowly, looking a little lost.
“Alex, I’m not delusional anymore. I know what’s real. I know I fucked everything up, I know you hate me, and I know this is the last time I’ll ever see you.” I can hear the unspoken I love you hanging in the air between us, and it breaks my heart that he doesn’t say it.
He’s still in deep shit with me, but I think he needs a lot of reassurance before he can handle my anger.
God, he’s so fucking fragile.
I don’t know why that’s so endearing, but it is.
“You’re still delusional,” I tease softly, but he just blinks at me in confusion.
Theo can’t hide any of the emotions flashing across his face as I thank him, and I watch his face transform from despair to confusion to despair again the longer I speak.
He seems baffled when I forgive him, and I can almost see the moment he starts wondering if what’s happening is real.
“I don’t hate you, Teddy,” I say softly, my heart pounding in my chest. “I love you.” Theo stares at my mouth with a look of intense confusion, and I know for a fact he doesn’t believe me.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure he never doubts that again.
“This is real,” I whisper, and he looks desperate and unsure as he reaches for me.
Our lips barely meet, but something intangible starts passing between us over and over on an endless loop, solidifying more and more each time, linking us tighter and tighter together until all I can feel is the unbreakable, invisible thread connecting us to each other.
Time seems to stretch and distort, and I spend a lifetime in that moment with him, back where we belong, where everything makes sense, where we’re two halves of one inextricable whole.
***
I hardly make it out of the visitation room before I break down, trying and failing to keep myself from sobbing as I check out and hurry back to Bailey’s car in the parking lot.
She looks deeply concerned the second I open the car door. “Babe, are you okay? What happened? Do I need to kill him?” I wipe my face and choke out a laugh as I shake my head, catching my breath.
“Please don’t,” I say, my voice watery and faint as I start crying again. “It’s…we’re good. Everything’s okay.” Bailey smiles at me and squeezes my knee.
“He really loves you, you know that?” I nod, wiping away my tears.
“Yeah, he does,” I say quietly as we pull out of the parking lot. “More than I realized.”
***
Elise’s firm is located on the seventeenth floor of a large glass and steel building in downtown Portland, and she greets me warmly and ushers me back to her large corner office.
It’s stylishly decorated in cream and rose colors, full of large, lush houseplants, and has an expansive view looking east over the river.
I sit in a plush chair as Elise makes coffee with a small espresso maker in the corner, and I slip a bottle of Xanax out of my bag and take one quickly while her back is turned. She hands me my coffee and sits in the chair across from me, crossing her legs and looking at me, obviously intrigued.
“So,” she says slowly, “do I get to ask why you’re sitting here instead of in the district attorney’s office? Your phone call Saturday afternoon was a surprise.” I look down at my coffee, smiling a little.
“Yeah, well, Theo surprised me. Um, how much has he told you about our relationship?”
“Essentially nothing.” I laugh nervously and look out the window, taking in the view of Mount Hood as I take a deep breath, trying to push down my anxiety.
“How much do you need to know to get Theo out of prison?”
“You’re his entire case, so pretty much everything.” I turn back to Elise and stare at her apprehensively for a moment.
“Is this all confidential?” She nods once.
“Well, you’re either going to think I’m a fucking idiot, or you’re going to understand why I’m sitting here.
Maybe both.” Elise leans forward, resting her elbow on the arm of her chair and cupping her chin in her hand in a way that reminds me of Jessica when she listens to gossip.
I laugh and look back out the window, taking a shaky breath.
“Um, so Theo’s not just my boyfriend, he’s my stalker.
He, um, he kind of forced me into a relationship because he was delusional and thought we were together, or that we belonged together, anyway.
” I flick my eyes back to her, and she’s seemingly unfazed.
“And then I fell in love with him.” Elise doesn’t even blink.
“Please don’t judge me.” She shakes her head.
“I’m not judging you, Alex,” she says softly, smiling at me, “but now I have a lot more questions for you.” I laugh and shake my head before I take a long sip of my coffee and answer every question she asks.
***
Elise tells us she can give us three weeks to talk before she initiates trial preparations, so the first thing I do is spend an entire phone call yelling at Theo for everything he’s done wrong, keeping my language vague enough that no one listening in would know what I’m talking about.
I don’t give a shit if we’re connected, or if he saved me, or if he’s the love of my life – he’s still a fucking asshole who betrayed me and broke my heart.
He apologizes for hurting me and for not protecting me, but refuses to apologize for anything else.
I can tell from his voice that he’s smiling every time he speaks, so I yell at him for that, too.
I let him talk the entire next phone call, and he instantly starts in on a rapid litany of questions about how I’m doing, and I get increasingly irritated with how often he asks if I’ve spoken to a therapist yet.
When I tell him to drop it, he’s quiet for a long moment and then lets out a long sigh.
“Sweetheart, can you please tell me why you still love me?” he asks in a soft, desperate voice.
“Because you put me first and finally gave me the option to choose you,” I say, my chest filling with warmth. “As much as you hate her, I think your therapist probably helped you get to a place where you could do that.” Theo lets out an aggravated sigh.
“You seriously think the therapy you emotionally blackmailed me into worked?”
“Yeah, I do, actually.”
“Well, if you think therapy works, you should see a therapist.”
I snort. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“You need to talk to someone about it, Alexandria,” he snaps, his tone commanding.
“No,” I snap back at him, “I need it to go away.”
“Honey, it won’t go away, and you know that,” he says, his voice softening, and a wave of dread washes over me. I know he’s right, but I can’t talk about it. I can barely think about it.
“How’s Dr. Mills? Don’t you see her today?” He groans, and I hear the phone ping, letting us know we only have one minute left.
“Don’t think I’m dropping this,” he warns, talking quickly. “I think I have to thank her for something, but I don’t want to.”
“You definitely have to thank her for making you a better person,” I tease, and he makes a choked, disgusted sound.
“Oh, fuck off, she had nothing to do with that.”
I let out a soft laugh. “Whatever you say, baby. What do you have to thank her for?”
“I’ll tell you in person. Listen, I need you to do me a favor before I see you again.”
“The people at the jail said I can’t bring you food.”
“That’s not – wait, you asked? God, I fucking love you. No, I want you to move into our house.” My heart skips a beat. “If you want to, I guess. Your choice,” he says almost shyly.
“Theo, I –” I hear the line go dead as the call disconnects automatically. I stare at my phone, still stunned by how casually he called it our house. I look around my shitty, tiny little apartment, the first place I’ve ever had that was mine.
Now I want something to call ours.
I have a moving company pack up my few belongings and move them to Theo’s, texting Roger that I’ve moved out and slipping my keys and my last month’s rent underneath his door.
It takes me a few days to move all my clothes into our closet, to put my things away in our room and our bathroom, to make it our house instead of his house.
I want to make it our home, but he’s not there.
***
Theo looks better the next time I see him, like he’s slept and eaten something.
I ask him why he had to thank Dr. Mills, and he gets quiet for a minute, his jaw tensing up.
His legs reach for mine under the table, and he explains what she said to him, why he left early, why he didn’t check the tracker, and everything that happened up to him getting to the cabin.
I start to hyperventilate when he talks about it, and Theo’s leg rubs against mine soothingly as he talks me through breathing, helping me calm down.
“Honey, do you…do you remember me…being there?” I wrap my arms tightly around my waist and look up at him warily.
He seems extremely nervous, his eyes darting from my eyes to my mouth quickly.
“You don’t have to talk about it, but I just..
.you were barely conscious, so I don’t know if…
” He trails off, his voice tight with anxiety.
I’ll have to tell him eventually, so I might as well do it now.
“Um, kind of,” I say, holding myself tighter.
“I don’t…it’s sort of fuzzy, and I don’t remember all of it, but I, um, I heard you screaming and I…
I wasn’t there, but then I…was? Um, I, uh.
..I saw it. I watched you do it,” I say, whispering the last part.
I feel the table start to shake as his knee starts bouncing, and when I look up at him, he looks genuinely terrified.