24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
Then
“These are two for six dollars,” I told Mrs. Wilson, nodding to the martini-patterned socks she had placed on the counter. “If you want to grab another pair.”
“Hmm.” She shuffled back over to the display stand and spun it with so force, I didn’t know how she could see any of the choices. “Maybe.”
“I think we have some with—”
“Ooh, corgis!” Mrs. Wilson squealed. She grabbed a pair and tossed them on top of the others. “You know, Dale told me no more dogs. But I did see a listing for some corgi puppies up for adoption in Wilmington, and we’re down to five since Gertrude passed on last year. I was thinking about taking a trip down there next weekend and bringing one back. Better to ask forgiveness, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s how I approach everything with my parents.”
She laughed, and I smiled, knowing that she wouldn’t rat me out. After grabbing two more pairs—one with dachshunds, the other with tabby cats—she sidled back up to the counter. “Okay, no more!”
There were now three shoeboxes and four pairs of novelty socks in front of me. “You sure?” I asked.
“Child,” Mrs. Wilson chided teasingly. She smoothed down her stick-straight white hair, which had somehow become tousled from her enthusiastic perusal of the sock display. “Don’t go getting me in trouble with Dale. I need to keep him nice and buttered up for when I bring that dog home, you know.”
“Right, right.”
I pulled her items toward me and started keying in the prices. Mrs. Wilson took the opportunity to look around, then leaned conspiratorially toward me. “Your mama and daddy around?”
“No,” I said. “They already left. Theo and I are closing."
Technically, Theo wasn't supposed to be closing with me—after the dumpster incident, my mom had changed our shifts around to keep us from working alone together—but she didn't need to know that.
“Where’s he at?”
“Cleaning the bathroom, I think.”
Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Oh, you sure got the better end of the stick.”
“Yeah.” I giggled. “Well, he wants to keep me happy now that we’re—"
Too late, I realized my mistake and stopped just short of spilling the beans. Mrs. Wilson was perceptive, though, and one look at the grin on her face told me that I wasn’t fooling her any more than I was fooling my mother.
“Um.” Flustered, I hit a key on the register. “Your total is eighty-seven twelve.”
She handed me her card with a sympathetic look. I avoided her eyes as I swiped it, handed her the receipt to sign, and busied myself with bagging up her purchases.
“Well,” I said, wanting nothing more than for this conversation to be over, “have a good—”
“Hold on a minute, honey.” She pushed the signed receipt over to me and then shoved her bags to the edge of the counter so there was nothing blocking our view of each other. When she spoke again, her voice was hushed. “I won’t tell your mama that you and Theo have a thing going on. I know she can be difficult.”
My shoulders sagged in relief. I didn’t even bother denying it; Mrs. Wilson had always been kind to me and cordial—but distant—to my mother. I trusted her. “Thank you. She already suspects, and she’s not happy about it.”
“Well, I was about to say,” she continued, and something about her tone raised my hackles again. “It’s gotten around that he punched the Redding kid for hitting on you.”
“That’s not really what happened. Vince was being a jerk,” I said defensively.
Mrs. Wilson made a gesture as if she were swatting away a fly. “Oh, I don’t doubt that. I’ve never cared much for him. But then some other kids saw you and Theo leaving together, and, well, you know how rumors get going.”
Theo and I had arrived and left hundreds of places together hundreds of times, and until recently, it didn’t mean a thing. Was I the literal last person to pick up on the fact that something had shifted between us?
“It’s been all anyone can talk about at our small business meetings,” she continued. “That, and the Reddings raising your rent. That’s how your mama caught wind of it, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure,” I said hollowly.
“All I’m saying is, be careful if you want to keep it under wraps.” Mrs. Wilson grabbed her shopping bags. “Those meetings are better than a reality show, I swear.”
I laughed because I didn’t know what to say, and Mrs. Wilson gave me a wave over her shoulder as she strode out the door. I put her receipt away and then looked at the clock, which showed that we only had ten minutes until closing time.
I doubted there would be any more customers, so I went ahead and pulled the cash drawer from the register. “Theo,” I called as I headed for the back of the store.
“Yeah.”
“Where are you?”
“Right here.”
I came around the corner and found him slouched against the wall by the men’s dress shoes, scrolling on his phone. “Did you clean the bathroom?”
“Yep. It’s all done. You could eat off the floor in there.” He looked up with an expression that was equal parts mischievous and sultry. “Go count your drawer. I wanna get you out of here.”
“In a minute,” I said curtly. The heat slid off his face like melted butter. “Mrs. Wilson was just in here—”
“I know,” he groaned. “She talks so loud.”
With the cash drawer propped under one arm, I planted the opposite fist on my hip as I glared down at him. “So did you hear her saying that the whole town knows we’re together?”
“I heard her say there are rumors. Not the same thing.”
“It might as well be the same thing, as far as my mom’s concerned.” Frustrated, I stalked past him and headed into the backroom. Theo’s footsteps sounded behind me, and by the time I was plunking my drawer down on a table in the office, he was in the doorway.
“Sass.”
I gathered the day’s credit card receipts and began stacking them, making sure that they lay flat and faced the same way.
“Nina,” Theo said, and then he was there, gently but firmly taking the receipts out of my hand. He put them down carefully before returning his attention to me. “I’ve been doing my best to keep things under wraps, like you wanted. But I don't really get why it has to be this big secret.”
“Are you joking?” I snapped. “Have you met my mother?”
He sighed. “Look. I get that you and your mom have issues. And she pisses me off plenty, too. But she’s not a movie villain, Nina. She’s your mom."
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered bitterly. “Your mom is proud of everything you do. All mine ever talks about is how I can change to become the dream daughter she never had.”
Theo put his hands on my shoulders, leveling with me. “I’m not saying she’s not flawed, okay? But what if we sat her down—Frank too—and we explained that our feelings are real, that this is a long-term thing, and we’re not just hooking up or messing around. Would that help?”
I doubted he would be defending my mom if I told him all the terrible things she had said about him—how he would never be successful, how being with him would ruin my life—but I didn't have it in me.
Still, there was no way we could go ahead with this plan—if Theo and I went to my parents and used phrases like “our feelings are real” and “long-term” to describe our relationship, I was pretty sure that I would never be allowed out of the house again.
“Let me think about it,” I told him. I slid my arms around his waist and leaned into him. And then, as penance for lying, I offered up a nugget of truth: “I think it’s kind of fun to sneak around, anyway.”
“It is,” Theo agreed, stroking along the waistband of my jean shorts, “but not if it’s stressing you out.”
I hummed in acknowledgement, if not agreement, and let him sway me back and forth. “I think we've done a good job of being sneaky,” I mused aloud after a minute. “Mrs. Wilson said the rumors started when we left that party together. Which I thought was weird—it’s not like we haven’t left places together before.”
“Well,” he sighed, “maybe I wasn’t so pathetically obvious until now.”
I pulled back. “Obvious?”
His eyebrows hiked up his forehead, and he looked almost as surprised as I felt. Uncertainty—so out of place on him—marred his features. “About being in love with you?”
My breath caught in my throat, completely caught off guard by that particular string of words. “What? You’re in love with me?”
Theo ducked his chin to his chest, looking down at me. Before he got his yearly buzzcut, there would have been a lock of hair falling over his left eye; now, nothing. I wished, not for the first time, for his longer hair. I had never had the opportunity to run my fingers through it—except when I was fourteen and checked him for lice when he kept scratching his head, but that ceased to be a pleasant experience when one of them got lodged under my fingernail.
“Nina,” he sighed. “You’re ridiculous.”
I let go of him and crossed my arms. “How?”
His smirk came out, just teasing the edges of his lips. “Didn’t I say ‘love you so much’ the other day?”
“You’ve always said that.”
“And I literally told you that you’re the other half of my heart. What did you think that meant, exactly?”
“I don’t know.” I gnawed on my lower lip. I heard the air kick on, a cold blast washing over us. “My mind didn’t really go there.”
“Clearly,” he said, sounding amused now. He reached out and gently pried my arms apart. “Come here, honey.”
The endearment was new, but I spared it only a passing thought as I fell back into his familiar embrace. His hand curled around the back of my head, pressing it into his chest, and I hooked my fingers through the belt loops of his jeans.
I had always thought of falling in love as being some inevitable, but distant, part of my life. There were girls in my class who swore they’d marry their boyfriends right after graduation. A few already wore rings on their left hands. I figured they’d just happened to find their love young and that someday I’d understand that big, sweeping feeling that makes somebody know for certain who they want to spend their life with.
But that day, at seventeen, standing in Theo’s arms in the middle of our parents’ office, I realized the truth: I had never fallen because there was nowhere to fall. There was only the same steady ground I’d always stood on.
He had always been there, and he had always been mine.
I had always been his.
“I love you,” I said on an exhale, my breath rippling his t-shirt. “I’m so dumb. I love you.”
Theo held me tighter, ducked his head, laughed quietly into my neck. “I love you, Nina,” he murmured.
“Love you so much?” I felt a little jolt—the good kind—as I used our childhood refrain in this new way.
He dropped a kiss just below my ear. “Love you so much.”