21. Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Then
Tap. Tap.
The sound made me lose count of the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, and I huffed in annoyance. After tossing and turning for an hour, I’d flopped onto my back and started counting the stars that had been stuck above my bed since kindergarten. I knew from past sleepless nights that there were one hundred twenty-seven of them. Most of the time, I fell asleep before I got to fifty.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I rolled onto my side and stared at the window. In the dark, I couldn’t make out the face of the person outside, but I knew it was Theo. I’d sent him a text earlier, telling him not to come over. Even then, I had a feeling he wouldn’t listen.
He jiggled the window. It was locked from the inside and didn’t budge. “Sass,” came his muffled voice. “Sass, come on.”
I sighed, and, with a glance at my bedroom door to confirm that it was locked, crossed over to the window. I flipped the lock and shoved it up. There was no screen; it had fallen out years ago and never been replaced. I leaned my elbows on the windowsill and stuck my head out. “I’m not going anywhere," I hissed, keeping my voice down. "Queen Kelly’s on the warpath.”
He slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. With me in the house and him standing in the grass outside, we were exactly the same height. “I know. Figured I’d come in.”
“No!” I hissed. “I’m serious, Theo. I can’t do this tonight.”
Theo sighed. “If I just stand here, will you talk to me?”
I glanced nervously over my shoulder, but no sound came from the hallway. Our house was only about a thousand square feet; if anyone was still awake, I would know it. “Sure,” I conceded, turning back to him.
He leaned in to smooth a flyaway off my forehead. “What happened?” he asked softly. “Does she know?”
I licked my lips as I mentally replayed the conversation I’d had with my mother that day. Even though I didn’t technically tell her anything, it was clear by the time she sent me to my room that I had unwittingly shown her my hand. “I think so.”
“I’m sorry, Sass.” He gripped the top of the window frame and leaned in toward me. The movement accentuated his arms, his neck, the jut of his collarbone. “I shouldn’t have been touching you like that at the store.”
“It wasn’t just you,” I said.
Theo nodded slowly. The dim light of the streetlamp was all I had to see him by, but even with his face cloaked in shadows, I could tell that he looked troubled. “What do you think she’ll do now?”
My fingers twisted together. “I don’t know.”
“That makes me nervous.”
“Me too.”
Theo gently pried my hands apart, to entwine them with his own. Our tangled fingers rested between us on the windowsill. “I wish they would just yell at us and move on.”
“She didn’t yell at me, but she was pissed.” I hesitated, grounded myself by running my thumb over a callus on his palm. “Has your mom ever said anything to you? About me?”
His mouth twisted to the side. “Yeah,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.
“Recently? Or when we were kids?”
“Both.”
I waited, but Theo was uncharacteristically reticent. Finally, I asked, “Do you think we’re codependent?”
His eyebrows hiked halfway up his forehead. “Is that what Kelly said?”
“Yes. She said she told your mom that they needed to do something about it, but Randi didn’t care.”
Theo ducked his head to let out a chuckle. “'Course,” he muttered, then looked back at me. “Do you think we’ re codependent? Need to take a little break from each other, find ourselves?”
I let out a light laugh. It was genuine, but a nagging thought kept it subdued. “Sometimes,” I admitted, “I feel like I don’t know who I am without you. It’s like…I’m not just Nina. I’m half of Nina and Theo.”
“Do you like being half of Nina and Theo?” he asked carefully, fingers pulsing in mine.
“I do. Especially now.” I paused to study him. “Do you?”
Theo lifted one hand to my face, gently cradling. Fingertips pressed into my hair; his thumb stroked my birthmark. “Do you remember when you were in fourth grade and you were hospitalized with the flu?”
My brow furrowed in confusion. “Yeah.”
“That’s the longest you and I have ever been apart,” he said. “Five days. Five days, and I could hardly stand it. Every night before bed, I would ask my parents if you were going to be at school or the store the next day, and every time they said no, I cried. Which was very embarrassing, by the way. I was almost in middle school."
He edged a little closer. My hands drifted to his chest, lightly gripping the fabric of his t-shirt. “On the fourth night,” he continued, looking down at me, “my mom came to my room and told me that you were home from the hospital. I jumped up and said I wanted to go see you. She told me that you needed one more day to rest, and I absolutely lost it. Just crumpled up in a ball and started sobbing. "
“Theo,” I whispered, taken aback. I remembered reuniting with him: we usually met at the bus stop before school, but that day, he showed up at our house so he could walk me there. He gave me a hug and a declaration of “love you so much”, insisted on carrying my backpack, and when we got to school, he followed me to my classroom and excitedly told my teacher, “Look who’s here!” The rest of this, however, was news to me.
“I told Mom that my chest hurt, and it had for days. She said, ‘that’s because half of your heart is missing.’ She said that it would stop hurting once I saw you again.”
“Did it?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “I didn’t believe her, but yeah. It did.”
I closed the short distance between us and kissed him. He immediately tilted his head to deepen the kiss, and between us, he grasped one of my wrists and moved my hand slightly up to cover his heart. I pressed my palm there, relishing in the proof of what he just told me, choosing to believe that this heart really did beat for me.
We broke for air. Theo covered my hand with both of his, keeping it firmly against his chest. “Ever since then, I don’t really think of us as Nina and Theo, like two separate people,” he said. “I think of us as two pieces of the same heart.”
“And that’s not codependent?” I tried to circle back to my original question, even as my voice shook.
“What if it is?” Theo challenged. “Would that be so awful?”
It was the same thing I’d asked my mother earlier in the evening. I answered the way I wished she had.
“No,” I said. “No. I suppose it wouldn’t.”