I stare at the phone in Dad’s hand.
“I can explain,” I manage to get out. My heart is on fire, and my mind has taken off in about five different directions, trying to figure out what the hell’s happening.
He steps into my room. “Start explaining, then.”
Another wave of adrenaline hits as I push back from my desk. I need to go see Theo. “I can’t.”
“Noelle.” Dad lifts his hands, exasperated.
“I mean, I can’t right now. I’m going to. I was going to explain everything tonight, actually.” As I say this, I’m pulling a sweater over my head, marveling at the spectacularly shitty, ironic timing of everything. “But I—something happened and I need to go.”
Like that, his expression changes from irritation to concern. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I sigh.
A stricken look crosses his features, and I recognize it immediately: the knee-jerk catastrophizing we’ve started doing since Gram died. It’s hard to conceptualize that sudden bad news could be right around the corner until you get it yourself. Then, the reality that life can change in an instant never leaves your mind.
I hold up my hand. “It’s not me. There’s an emergency with . . . a friend.”
The fear is replaced with understanding—and curiosity. One blond eyebrow raises. “Is it your friend from this weekend?”
Friend. The word felt like a lie coming out of my mouth, and it sounds like one coming out of Dad’s. He needs the truth, and I want to say it out loud. “You know what, no, he’s not my friend. It’s Theo, who I”—I gesture to his phone—“well, I’ll tell you more later. The short story is that I’m dating him and I’m pretty sure I’m in love with him and something happened and I need to go see him in the city.”
Dad blinks at my outburst, then wipes a hand over his mouth. The frustration is still there, tightening the corners of his eyes, but I see that ever-present kindness, too. “Wow, Beans, okay. That’s a lot to process.”
“I know.” I let out a breath. “I swear when I get back, we’ll talk. I’ll lay out exactly what happened and answer any question you have. But Theo needs me, so I really have to go.”
“Take a deep breath,” Dad says. “Don’t start your car until you’re calm.”
“I’m calm.” I stuff my shaking hands in my pockets, heading toward the door.
He steps aside but touches my arm to stop me. “I love you. Okay?”
“Okay.” My eyes fill and I lean into him, placing my cheek on his chest. His heart thumps beneath his chambray button-up. “I love you. I’m sorry.”
He drops a kiss on top of my head, then pushes me gently. “Go on. I’ve got to watch all these videos anyway. I only got through the first few.”
Oh god. I compartmentalize that and run to my car, backing out of the driveway at a speed my parents’ next-door neighbor will probably post about on the neighborhood online message board. Doesn’t matter to me. Theo’s alone, processing this news, and he doesn’t have to be.
I get to the city in record time. When I park at his house, I squint up at the living room windows. There’s no movement.
My heart pounds against my ribs as I climb out of my car. I head toward the front door, but then I hear it—sad boy music, drifting out on the light breeze from the backyard.
“Shit,” I mutter.
There’s a slender alleyway between his house and the next one, so I make my way down it. The music gets louder the closer I get; it’s a really sad song, which is saying a lot considering it’s Radiohead. When I get to his gate, I reach over and unlatch it, swinging it open.
Theo is slouched in a chair at the patio table. His left hand is circled around a drink resting on his knee, and his cheek is propped on his right hand. He’s staring out at nothing. If he hears me, he doesn’t acknowledge it.
It’s an achingly solitary picture.
“Hey,” I call quietly, closing the gate behind me.
He looks over and my heart falls all the way to my feet. His hair is mussed, eyes subtly rimmed red. His expression is blank as he watches me slide into the seat next to him.
“You saw,” he says.
“Yeah, I did.” I swallow against my helplessness seeing him like this. So leached of emotion, no trace of that dimple.
“I’m surprised you’re here.”
I frown, confused. “Why wouldn’t I be? You just got horrible news.” His gaze bounces away, but he doesn’t say anything, so I press on. “You must be in shock.”
A humorless huff bursts from his mouth. “Shock isn’t the word for it.”
“What is the word?”
For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. Then he inhales sharply and starts talking, blasting past my question. “It’s like every time I think I’ve done something worthwhile, every time I think I’ve gotten to a place where it’s safe to say, okay, this is success, I’ve finally done enough, it’s still not fucking enough.”
“Enough for wh—”
He sets his drink on the table and leans forward, scrubbing both of his hands over his face with a frustrated grunt. “And I can’t even deal with the fact that I’ve been pushed out of my own company by myself. They had to put that fucking statement out right away, and my dad’s been calling me all afternoon. I’m never going to hear the end of how I wasted that first fifty K he gave us, even though we’ve grown it so exponentially I can’t do the math off the top of my head.” His laugh is humorless. “I guess it’s not we anymore. I need to stop saying that.”
I scoot closer, laying a hand on his arm. Our knees press together, and my body wants to take it further, curl up on his lap. No matter how close I get, though, there’s a distance between us, shaped like his profile as he looks away.
“Talk to me,” I say. “Tell me what happened. Are they even allowed to ambush you like this? Just tell you it’s over? Can’t you fight that, like, legally?”
Theo’s silence extends, long and tight. Finally, he says, “They didn’t ambush me, Noelle.”
“What do you mean? The article I read said it was a surprise.”
“Sure, to the general public. Not to me.”
Unease drips into my veins. “I’m not really following.”
He stares off into the distance. “This exit has been in the works for weeks, and our arguments over the direction of the business for months longer than that. Like I told you, they want to take the company in a new direction. Our investors want it, Anton and Matias want it, everyone wants it but me because I can’t let go of the idea that it’s already what it should be. And I pushed so fucking hard—” Again, he wipes at his face with his hand. “The investors wanted me gone, and Anton and Matias ultimately agreed. When I decided to come on the trip, they’d just given me paperwork to buy me out of my equity. I knew what I was coming back to. It wasn’t a surprise. I mean, Jesus, even the psychic knew.”
A finger snaps in my mind and I’m back in that room. Sitting next to Theo with that painted eye gazing down at us. Remembering what Flor said: This is going to happen no matter what. It’s happening.
I remember him calling it bullshit after, then holding me when I cried over how real it felt to me.
I remember the way I confessed everything.
“Wait, did you know what you were walking into today?” I say quietly, as a hurt I can’t properly identify winds itself around me.
“I wasn’t positive it would be today, but . . .” He trails off, shaking his head. “No. Yeah. I knew it was over.”
Memories from the previous two days stretch between us in the ensuing silence—me at his door Saturday morning, the way his hands gripped me while he whispered that he’d missed me after less than twenty-four hours apart. The ebb and flow of our conversations, and the quiet we shared, where this information would have fit perfectly. How I talked his ear off about my anxiety over my Tahoe trip this week. The way he listened and reassured me, all while holding on to his own anxiety with tight fists.
I think back to what Flor told Theo, my heart starting to beat fast: You’ve been placed with resources in your life that will help you move on, but you have to allow that resource to help you.
I was there, not just on the road with him—when he was sitting on all of this, too—but in his house, his bed, his life. His real life, and he didn’t tell me.
Something in my heart fractures. For him, and myself.
“Theo,” I breathe out. “Why didn’t you say something?”
He looks down at my hand, still curled around his arm. “I didn’t know what to say to you. I thought maybe I’d figure out how to break it to you before the statement went out, but that didn’t happen, obviously.”
How to break it to me? I shake my head, lost. “I mean before. All those times I asked if you were okay, all those times we talked about your work and what it meant to you? We spent the entire weekend together—”
He averts his eyes, setting his jaw stubbornly. “I didn’t want to mess it up with this.”
I stare at him, long enough that he finally looks at me. “It wouldn’t have messed anything up. I want to know things, including the things that hurt.”
“Even the things that show you I’m not the guy you think I am?” he says, a challenging glint in his eyes. They’re so dark I can’t make out the emotions lurking there. It makes him seem like a stranger.
I frown. “What does that mean? Who do I think you are?”
“Not the guy who got fired from his own company, that’s for fucking sure.”
There’s a beat of silence while I process exactly what he’s saying. “Hold on. You think I would judge you for that?” Theo simply appraises me, and his silence sounds like a YES screamed between us. My blood heats. “I don’t know if you remember, but I aired all of my dirty laundry to you. Now it feels like you were just patting me on the head—”
“I didn’t pat you on the head,” he snaps, straightening.
“Well, you sure didn’t share any of this in return, apparently because you thought I’d think you were a failure. So, not sure what that says about me,” I shoot back, my throat tightening. He opens his mouth, his brows flattening into that stern line, but I press on, averting my eyes. “I mean, clearly there’s no comparison between us. I lost a menial job I couldn’t stand, and you lost the company you founded and led to multimillion-dollar success, but—”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Theo bursts out, and when our eyes lock, something cracks inside my chest. “That right there. God, Noelle, can you blame me for not wanting to admit this to you? You hold me up as some paragon of success. You spent our entire trip talking about the Forbes shit, about the great work I’d done and how you looked up to it. How would you have felt if I’d been like, ‘Hey, by the way, my entire life is blowing up and I’m about to be unemployed’?”
“I’d say, ‘Yeah, me too!’ I’d feel like you were telling me something real.” I drop my hand from his arm. This conversation has shifted so quickly that I’m dizzy. “Are you kidding? You didn’t want to tell me because you think I’m some fangirl who couldn’t handle you not being perfect?”
“Our entire relationship, from the time we were fourteen, was about you thinking I was good enough based on what I’d achieved.” Theo stands up, pacing away from me. “Do you know what it was like to grow up with a dad who, every time you did something you thought would make him proud, decided that actually, he wanted more than that? Who moved the goalpost every fucking time? He made me feel like a failure, always.”
“I don’t know what that’s like, and I’m sorry,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. My dad is waiting at home for me, confused and angry, but even through his disappointment he supports me unconditionally. I hate that Theo doesn’t have that.
His mouth twists. “Then there was you, who got pissed every time I did something, and it made me feel it was enough. Like it was actually too much. You had nothing to gain from acting that way, and that’s how I knew it was real. I fed off that, Noelle. I had your voice in my head long after high school ended.”
I’m so shocked that he thought about me at all, never mind carried my voice with him, that I can only mouth words in return.
He runs his hands through his hair, blowing out a breath. “When we started on this trip, though, and you kept talking about all of my achievements, what I was doing, that damn profile—I was about to lose everything I’ve worked for these past six years. Can you understand why I wouldn’t want to tell you?”
“No,” I choke out, standing, too. “I can’t understand. Yes, I admire all of the things you’ve done, and yes, it pissed me off as much as it made me proud. But given our situations, why would I, of all people, judge you for that? I have no right to, and even if I did, I wouldn’t.”
His jaw locks. “Our situations aren’t the same.”
His words, said so stonily, hit their mark. “Right. Because my job was shitty and yours was important.”
Surprise flashes in his eyes—and panic. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?”
For a beat, he doesn’t say a word. Then he looks away, the panic receding into what looks like defeat. “You know what? It doesn’t matter.”
The frustration of him slamming down the wall again makes me want to scream.
“Of course it matters, Theo. What you say or don’t say matters to me, and you’re standing here holding back again. Why aren’t you giving me a chance to see all of you? To prove that’s enough for me?” I take a step toward him but keep the space between us. If I step any closer, I’ll want to touch him. “I laid out everything with my job—and more. I trusted you with that, and you gave me all these sweet words back about how stumbling wasn’t an indictment on my character. So was that bullshit?”
He has the audacity to look insulted. “No.”
“Are you sitting there laughing at me? Thinking that I’m not worth your time because I’m in a rough spot?”
“No.”
“Then why is it so pathetic for you to stumble? Why can’t you trust that I l—like you the way you are?” My emotions are running faster than my mouth can keep up with, and my stomach free-falls at what I nearly just admitted. “Why do you think you’re such a special case, that when something bad happens to you I’ll walk away, when you sat there and told me you wouldn’t do that to me? Do you think I’m that big of an asshole?”
“No, Noelle, I just—”
He takes a step toward me. I hold up my hand, backing into a chair. I can’t think clearly when he’s near, and suddenly I’m desperate for the boundary. As we kept getting closer, I slowly stopped protecting myself, while Theo was doing it the whole time.
The realization hurts.
“You kept me at arm’s length because you didn’t trust me, and you did it with intention every time I asked you if you were okay, every time I invited you to be real with me or when I was fully transparent with you.” My mind flashes to the times he stopped himself mid-sentence, how he circled around the full truth, those flashes of anxiety and fear he’d shut down. “I let you know me, and you didn’t do the same.”
He swallows hard, his pulse moving rapidly in his throat. I’ve kissed that exact spot so many times, when his heart raced for other reasons. But now everything feels like a lie.
“Don’t say that,” he says. “You know me.”
“How can I, if you only want me to see the Theo Spencer who has all his shit together? You kept this a secret from me, thinking I’d walk away if I knew the truth.”
He laughs humorlessly. “God, you are so obsessed with secrets.”
“What does that mean?”
“That whole trip was about that, wasn’t it?” he asks, eyes flashing. “About uncovering your gram’s secret love life, when in reality it was probably something she dealt with and moved on from and didn’t think was necessary to drag up with you. Then you started poking at mine, wanting to play that game—”
“It’s not a game. It’s me wanting to know you. Share with you, be vulnerable. You poked at me, too, don’t act like I was the only one trying to uncover secrets. When I did the same, you downplayed it or shut down completely. So, why is that?”
He sighs impatiently. “Not everything is a conspiracy to lie. Why can’t this just be me trying to get through my life before I talk about it?”
“Because I’m in your life!” I exclaim. “You can’t feed me one story, then tell me the same story doesn’t apply to you. You can’t say you want to be with me, be there for me, and not let me do the same. That’s not what I want in a relationship.”
Panic crosses his features again, but like clockwork, he shuts it down, crossing his arms.
I take several calming breaths before trying again. “I’m not your dad, Theo. I’m not anyone else in your life who expects you to be a certain way, then tells you you’re not enough when they think you can’t deliver.”
“That’s what you’re doing right now,” he says flatly.
“It’s not. I’m only asking you to let me be there for you. To be open with me. To trust that I’ll like you, not Where To Next Theo or 30 Under 30 Theo or Gold Star Son Theo. You’ve given me some of that the past few weeks, but I want it all. I’m greedy, okay? I just want you, and all of the good and bad stuff that comes with it.”
Even now, as I’m practically begging for it, he’s not giving it. He just watches me, the only sign of life that heartbeat ticking in his neck.
“These past few weeks have been everything to me, and so much of that is you.” My voice breaks on the you, and he looks away, eyes shining in the waning light. “I don’t know how to tell you any other way that I want to do this. But I showed you everything, and you were hiding things from me, and now you’re shutting down. I don’t want to fight a brick wall over and over again.”
Nothing for a beat, then he exhales my name, looking down.
“I think you’re scared, and when you’re scared, you’re frozen.” I search his face, willing him to meet my eyes. “Ask me how I know.”
There’s such relief in admitting that I was right where he is, and that I’m coming out of it. For a second, it washes away the ache in my chest. If Theo could just break through, if I could help him get there somehow, then I could reach out and touch him.
But he has to be willing to let me in, and he’s not there yet. Suddenly I’m scared he’ll never be. That we’ll lose this.
My throat closes at the thought, but I push past it. “Maybe I do care too much about secrets, but it’s just because it makes me feel close to the people I . . . care about.” Shit. I keep getting so close to the edge, and Theo isn’t going to be there to pull me back this time. It’s not just a busted knee I’ll walk away with. “I want that with you, but I’m scared to give you more until I know you’re ready to give me an equal amount in return.”
“Yeah, I got that,” he says shortly, running a hand over his jaw with a sigh. “I’m not used to—I can’t do that right now. You’re pushing too hard, okay? I’m dealing with all this other shit, and this is too much.”
I lift my hands helplessly, my eyes and throat crowding with tears. “So, should I go?”
He opens his mouth, then closes it, his lips twisting into a tight purse. Finally, he says, “It’s better if I’m alone.”
Those words are like pressing a detonator connected to my heart. I pick my phone up from the table with a shaking hand. “Right. Of course. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
I’m halfway across the yard when I hear his soft, emphatic “fuck.” My footsteps stutter, but he doesn’t follow me, so I keep going. I push through the gate, biting my lip hard so I won’t burst into tears until I’m in my car and driving away.
Tell me a secret. A whisper from somewhere, but it’s a taunt, not a request.
I’m so tired of playing this game. And now I have to face the secrets I’ve told with all of Theo’s sitting on my chest.
