Twenty-Six
Yes. I do. Of course, I do. But also… no. No.
We can’t.
None of this was supposed to happen.
“How…” I start, shaking my head. “How can this possibly work when we’re still getting over other people?”
“I don’t have all the answers. All I know is that I never expected to feel the way that I do about you,” he tells me. “And I meant what I said the other day. I’m walking away from Alice—for good. I should’ve done it a long time ago, but until now, I never had a real reason to. Marcela, I—”
“Theo, we can’t.” His face falls until his eyes shut closed. His shoulders slump in disappointment, but when he opens his eyes again, his expression becomes resolute. I hate how my mind is already spinning with ways to beat him down again, but we can’t do this. “I can’t be the reason you walk away from Alice. What happens if—or when, really—this doesn’t work out? Are you gonna go running back to her?”
“No,” he says, his voice firm as he shakes his head. “No, I—”
“Are you sure?” I press. “You said it the other day… you think their engagement is a huge mistake. Do you still believe that? Even though you’re walking away from her?”
“That’s different.” He reaches for my hands across the table, but I hold them out of reach. “I don’t think she’s making a mistake because she should be with me. How I feel for her has nothing to do with that.” Present tense. How he feels, not how he felt. This is part of the problem. If this continues for much longer, he’s going to turn me into a jealous, paranoid fool. I’ll lose him, and I won’t be surprised by it.
“How can you be sure?” I ask him. “That your feelings for her aren’t clouding your judgment? I mean, isn’t she the reason you and Ben hate each other now?”
He lets out a frustrated breath. “She’s only part of the reason, but she’s not the reason. Ben is the reason. If he wasn’t such a jackass, maybe we wouldn’t be fighting for as long as we have.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything!” I don’t mean for it to come out as a yell, and he startles at my tone. “You’ve been in love with her for your entire life and your own brother stole her away from you. Of course you think he’s a jackass. How is Alice only part of the problem when to me, it’s clear that she’s the source?”
I can’t be his second choice. I refuse to be anyone’s second choice ever again. Maybe I’d feel different if he were over Alice, but I can’t expect him to have changed his mind that quickly. Even if mine did about Ben.
He blows out a breath, looking away from me. Then he says, “You’re right. I’m an idiot to ask you for anything. But you should know that there’s more than just Alice that came between me and my brother.”
“What else is there?”
His mouth opens and closes, until the moment passes, and he hasn’t uttered a single word. I’m not sure I believe him, that there’s anything other than Alice.
“But don’t you see where I’m coming from?” I ask him instead. “There’s too much baggage between the two of us to give this a fair shot. Because—”
Because even though you might hate him, Ben is your brother and he’s not going anywhere, and I don’t trust myself not to fall into old patterns.
Because I don’t trust you not to fall into old patterns, either.
Because you almost walked away from this once, and I don’t trust you not to try to again.
But it isn’t fair of me to put that on him. Any of it. I knew what this was when we started. We both did. Maybe the issue is we weren’t supposed to last this long. It was only meant to be temporary, and our rebound is long overdue to end.
“Because what, Marcela?” His voice is soft, coaxing in a way that makes me want to dig deeper. Get to the root of all my fears and lay them bare for him to parse through. Unburden myself by burdening him. But I don’t want him to change my mind. And maybe a small part of me isn’t ready for his mind to change, either.
Instead, I don’t say a thing. Because I’m good at that.
“How do we know if we don’t try? Marcela—” He bursts up from his seat, coming around the table to kneel beside me. “Forget about Ben and Alice for a second. Pretend they don’t exist,” he implores me. “How do you feel about me?”
My eyes shut. If I meet his eyes now, he just might convince me, and that’s the last thing I want. “Theo, I can’t just forget—”
“Answer the question, please.” He cups my cheeks with his big hands. “Marcela, look at me. How do you feel?”
“I care about you.” The words come automatically, despite the voice in my head screaming at me to run. “Of course I care about you. How could I not? How could I not have fallen for you after—” I cut myself off, mash my lips together to keep from telling him everything.
I have to shut my eyes at his joyous expression, because he won’t be feeling that way for very long. We can’t do this.
“I promised to be honest with you, but I don’t think you want me to be this honest.” I shake my head, at him, at myself, at this wildly romantic date I’m about to burn to the ground.
His hands fall to mine, intertwining our fingers. “Tell me.” His voice is low, bracing. “Tell me everything you’re feeling, Marce. Please.”
I suck in a deep breath. He’s going to hate me for this.
“I meant it when I said it was probably a stupid idea for us to trust each other. We’ve openly admitted to being in love with other people and using each other to get over them. There are no expectations between us, not really. Real relationships don’t work like this.”
Not that either of us would know. But what I do know is the second we put a different set of expectations on our shoulders, the more likely we are to disappoint each other. To hurt each other in even worse ways.
“No expectations. That’s why I could agree to a physical relationship with you when I knew how you felt about Alice. It’s why I could justify hiding my feelings for Ben from you, and it’s why you didn’t feel the need to tell me Ben and Alice already knew about yours. It’s why I held back my anger at you for disappearing without a trace. We leaned on each other the way friends do, lost ourselves in each other to forget about the people we had no business loving. But we don’t have any business thinking we can love each other instead. That’s not how this works.”
“No expectations,” he repeats, his voice as hard and derisive as I’ve ever heard it. “Is that really what we’ve been to you this entire time?”
“What else could we have been?” I counter instead. “These were your terms from the very beginning. Casual. Nothing more.”
“Maybe I changed my mind. Are you telling me you haven’t? That you never once considered the possibility of something more with me?”
Of course I have. I let myself pretend we were something real to each other more than I acknowledged the truth. He made it so easy to.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We can’t do this, Theo. We don’t know how.”
But more than that, I’m so tired of being the one left behind. Physically, emotionally, mentally. There are lots of ways to walk away from someone. I wonder if it was an easy choice for my father to make, to put his wants before my mother’s. Before mine. If it was easy for Ben to put me on the back burner when someone better came along, knowing on some unconscious level that I’d take any scrap he offered me as gold.
I don’t want to hurt Theo the same way I’ve been hurt. But I want to save myself from the pain of loving and losing him more than I want to protect him from the pain of losing me now.
“This is what you meant the other day.” He’s looking at me with a sudden, horrifying realization. “When you said trust had nothing to do with this. You didn’t mean that you don’t trust me. You don’t trust us.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell him. “You’ve been everything to me, Theo. So much more than I deserve. I just can’t give you what you want.”
“You’re what I want,” he says, steadfast, breaking me all over again. “I trust you. I have real feelings for you. I’m not expecting anything more from you than what you’ve already given me. Despite how we started and everything you might think now, what we have has been more than just sex, more than casual, more than ‘no expectations’ for a long time now. It has been for me at least. And you can’t convince me you don’t feel the same.”
We’re at an impasse, because while he might be right, I know in my bones we can’t have a real relationship. I rise from my seat and race into the dark, searching for the exit through muscle memory. Theo calls my name from behind me, but I don’t turn around. I find the side entrance and push open the glass, running out into the empty parking lot.
I stop once I reach Theo’s car. A moment later, the library door crashes open. Theo’s long legs eat up the space as his eyes spot me across the lot. He slows his pace, but his chest is rising and falling fast.
“I thought you were running,” he says as he approaches, shoulders slumped in relief.
“I was.” He bypasses the driver’s side and comes straight to me. I take a step back from him, and he halts immediately.
Those blue eyes turn keen as he searches my face, assessing. He takes a careful step forward, and when I don’t move he takes another. I’m prevented from turning away when his hands cup my cheeks, locking me in place. My stomach flips, heart racing so fast I start to feel faint.
“What are you so scared of?” he asks finally, voice so low I barely hear it.
I close my eyes with a sigh. My hands come up to his wrists, gently prying his from my face. “I’m sorry, Theo,” I finally say, because it’s all I can. “Can you take me home?”
He doesn’t respond for the longest time. Finally, he lets out a shaky breath and says, “This isn’t how I saw the night going.”
I look away from him, guilt burning through me for all sorts of reasons.
“Marcela—”
“Can we just go home, please?” I turn away, place my hand on the door handle. The last thing I want to do is talk. I know I’ll have to face him eventually, but not now. Not when my emotions are churning a million different ways.
The car ride is tense with our silence—in his stubborn desire to break it, and my stubborn attempt to keep it. His eyes shift from me to the windshield every few seconds, assessing my mood for any changes. I force my attention away from him, out the passenger window. When we arrive at my apartment, I resist immediately running out of the car like I want to.
That proves to be a mistake when I raise my hand to open the door and Theo locks the doors with a whoosh. I glance over at him, stunned. His face is unreadable, as if he locked a part of himself away in addition to the car doors.
“We can’t end the night like this,” he tells me, scrubbing his face with a large hand. “Talk to me. What is it that’s really holding you back?” He reaches for my hand but hesitates to take it. Just hovers in the space between us, as if testing the air.
“We don’t have half a chance if we still have feelings for other people,” I say, and even though it’s true, it’s not quite the right answer to his question.
“I know.” He nods slowly. “We also don’t have a chance if we can’t trust each other.”
“I don’t know how to get there.” My voice is a whisper, an admission of failure. “And I don’t expect you to get over Alice completely, and especially not this quickly. Not when you’ve spent most of your life in love with her. And I… I’m still confused. About everything.” I shake my head. I’m admitting more of the truth than I want to. “It was different when it was just about sex and stopping each other from breaking up an impending marriage. When there weren’t all these… emotions between us.”
“What emotions, exactly?” he asks, expression opening just enough to let hope through again. I keep my mouth shut, and he blows out a frustrated breath. “You know, I almost ended this.” My head snaps up to look at him. “Before the double date. I didn’t want to lie about how we started anymore, and I definitely didn’t want to sit through an entire dinner with Ben and Alice. I wanted to end it the moment I’d made up my mind, but you didn’t answer your phone. I even passed by your apartment before I came to your work. I thought I might lose my nerve if I waited any longer.”
I knew it.
All week, he’d been dodging my messages and I knew it had to be for a reason. I was right that he’d almost walked away from this. When that cryptic message lit up my lock screen, can we talk, I’d sensed it.
“Maybe you should’ve,” I say. “That’s what I thought you were there for. I tried so hard not to be mad at you for ignoring me, and then you showed up out of the blue to dump me on a night I worked so hard to plan.” That’s when I caught myself falling for him, despite knowing better. I almost let myself believe we could be something real before he reminded me how dangerous thoughts like that were. Told myself that trusting him would only lead to more heartache, more abandonment issues on top of the ones I already live with.
“Instead, you strong-armed me into acting out a scene in front of all those teenagers.” His mouth turns up at the corner, lips forming a sad smile.
“It was the only punishment I could think of on the spot.” I shrug. “Except, I think you enjoyed it too much.”
“I did.” He chuckles softly. “Enough to completely change my mind.”
I glance up at him, stunned. “What?”
“One look at you, and I couldn’t do it. Maybe this is cheesy, but I felt this tug at my chest just from looking at you.” He puts a hand over his heart, as if indicating the sensation. “It was shitty and cowardly of me to ignore you for as long as I did, but I knew meeting you face-to-face would test all my resolve. Not just test.” He shakes his head. “Obliterate. And it did.”
My eyes sting. I blink the tears back furiously, but they spill over anyway.
“I’m sorry I hurt you.” His hands are clenched on the steering wheel, like it’s taking everything he has not to comfort me with his touch. “And I’m sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t show it. I want the expectation, dammit. I want you to demand more from me, and I want you to believe I can give it to you.”
“Theo, don’t—”
“I used to think Alice was the only person for me, or that I wasn’t a relationship kind of guy. I thought I knew what real love was, and that no one else could measure up to how I felt about Alice.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t know a goddamn thing. Not before you. And all I had to do was be open to taking a chance.”
He unlocks the passenger door from his side, turning forward in his seat without another word. It’s the dismissal I’ve been waiting for, but I don’t like anything about it. Finally, I get out of his car. When I watch him drive away, I’m more confused than ever.