“And you were hit over the head with the realization that she was always going to ask you to be her idealized version of yourself, instead of who you really are.” Rachel didn’t sound like she was asking; she understood.
“Yeah.” His voice was wry; his throat was dry. He cleared it. “Pretty much.”
She wrapped a hand around his forearm. “Okay, I get it. And I’m sorry. Sounds tough, even if she had some reason to think you had that version in you somewhere.”
Either the breeze shifted, or he was breathing more deeply and could savor the woody tang of rosemary in the air. “Thanks. I mean, it’s not a horror story, I get that. I’m not trying to make it out to be....” He trailed off.
“Like my marriage?” Now she was the wry one. He closed his eyes.
“Sorry.”
“No need. You’re right, it was a horror story. But I don’t want to talk about it. Or anything, maybe. How about let’s skip the worst thing you did, and go to the movie?”
“Still willing to sit beside me for a whole two hours?”
“Well. You’ll have to take a gamble on that, won’t you?” But she slipped her hand down past his wrist until their fingers intertwined. Rachel would never go for cold and condemning if they disagreed. Her nature was too warm. She might cry or get snarky or even shut him out, but whatever she did, she would do it with passion.
He hoped she would stick with him long enough to find out for sure.
She was letting him off the hook left, right, and plumb up the center. Utter nonsense. But something in the fidgeting about golf, in the joking about the movie, in the warmth of his shoulder against hers in the darkness melted away her spine.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said.
“About how bad that movie was?”
“No, that’s an established fact. I mean about your worst thing.”
He sighed long and hung his head. “Okay. So I’m not hard to read when I’m avoiding something. That’s good info for you to have, anyway. Right?”
“Stop playing. Let’s go back to mine and you talk on the way and I’ll determine if you earn an invite up.”
“No pressure.”
She thought about the intimate particulars of how he used pressure, and smiled. “Don’t knock it yet.”
He slid an arm around her back, resting his hand on her hip. “You are a savvy negotiator, Rachel. I capitulate to every one of your demands.”
They’d cleared the parking lot before he blurted, “I told her if she took a job offer in Dallas, we were through.”
She took time to play over his words, making sure she understood each and every one. “Y’all lived in Houston?”
He nodded, eyes fixed on a red light. After a beat he started in again. They’d been drifting, with Theo digging in deeper to his resistance every time she attempted another makeover of his personality. Their mutual admiration society of Andres wasn’t enough to gloss over the cracks.
“And you and Ron already owned Elixir?” She’d done the math, one of those times she was thinking about him. Reconstructing his history based on a few of his comments and the ‘About Us’ section of his company’s website. Not admitting that her actions proved she was invested.
He shrugged, and looked away maybe like he was checking the intersection was clear, maybe like he was intent on not meeting her eye.
“Was she headhunted or something?”
Shaking his head as if he was clearing cobwebs. “No. Not really. I don’t know, the story changed some. And it wasn’t like we’d opened the pub, we only had partnership papers and a few meetings underway. Hadn’t secured the location. She was right we could have opened up there instead.”
She snorted. His grip on the steering wheel relaxed, and she caught the twitch of a curve to his cheek. “Okay, I’ll grant that it wasn’t impossible for you to move. But if that’s the worst thing, I think it’s not as one-sided as you’re trying to make out. Sounds like you got assigned, or maybe you took, the job of follower. Instead of leading or walking in step. Not that leading is better than following, mind you. I can tell you in my experience it’s no good to be either way. Being the leader can twist a person in ugly ways.”
He whipped the car into a fast food parking lot. “Shit.”
“Theo?”
“Sorry. Sorry, sorry. Shit. Give me a sec.”
His breathing hinted at an elevated pulse, and he’d tilted his head against the headrest. She touched his shoulder and he rolled his neck so they were eye to eye. “Theo, hey. Something I said?”
In truth, she was a tad shaken, too. Hadn’t meant to mention a word about her marriage, about the power Sergei’d held over her, about the crap he did, the crap she put up with. That was stuff she discussed in therapy, and a bit with Aunt Johnston, and over the years, through one or two allusions to her friends. What kind of nonsense impulse set her to revealing her knotted, twitchy inner core, she couldn’t name. With luck, given the way his eyes stared in thought, he was trapped in contemplations about his life and ignoring the way she signaled her own vulnerability.
“Shit.”
“You said that.”
He laughed, shortest breath of sound that could still be called a laugh. “Bears repeating, I guess. Also: sorry. That bears repeating, too. Guess I wasn’t really expecting...”
“To be hit upside the head by my armchair psychology?”
“Yeah. That. You could set yourself up with a side gig if you get tired of your job.”
“Nah, too much paperwork.”
He relaxed enough to almost tease. “Not a fan?”
She shook her head. “I’m dyslexic. I avoid it much as I can.” Clearly she wasn’t avoiding the baring of her entire soul. Theo took her revelation in stride, not that she was ashamed. Not anymore. Not since Aunt Johnston taught her to accept and adapt. A little too late on the self-esteem building train from a few perspectives, but then again, Aunt Johnston hadn’t gotten her hands on Rachel until her parents had washed her off theirs.
Theo drew a diaphragm-expanding breath and straightened up. “Well, I can’t claim to be upset you’re not about to write a bunch of notes about me. What you said—the leading and following bit—it’s ... not a way I’ve put it to myself before. Lots of times, I wondered how I missed that side of Annalisa until too late, how I let her turn me into someone I disliked. Therapy, fights, talks with my family. Never once did I consider that she and I changed each other over the course of our marriage.”
“Well, people do tend to do that. “
Raking his fingers through his hair, he released another of those wry smiles. “No, you’re right. But somehow I thought of her as unchanging. I knew stuff about me underwent a shift, but somehow failed to realize the same of her. And it hit me, you know? How all these years I’ve had this bitterness about her fooling me, or hiding her true self, or something nebulous and distasteful along those lines. I can’t think of one time I even considered that I changed her the same way she changed me. Our marriage worked on both of us, turned us into extremes of ourselves, locked in some kind of duality. Shit. You don’t need to hear all of this. Let me take you home.”
His breathing and his color were back to normal, and smoothing her hand over his shoulder showed her that his body was no longer overpowered by what was going on in his mind. And his heart. “I’ve got the time, if you want to sit a bit longer.”
“No. Let’s blow this taco stand.”
“No tacos here. Just fried chicken, it looks like. But, Theo? Thanks, actually, for pulling over. Not everyone would.”
She ought to give her tongue a sharp bite to remind it to slow down instead of blurting out all these confessional thoughts of hers. Dismal to hope he was distracted enough by his own shit to not notice every damn thing she was revealing.
Chapter Nineteen
Fuck if he didn’t feel like an ass, and an idiot. Everything it seemed like she’d been through with Sergei, and Rachel was comforting him? He was older, and had been
divorced longer, and every one of his issues boiled down to self-pity compared to what he suspected she’d recovered from.
He cranked over the engine, forgetting it was already running. She didn’t point out his futile moves, settling into her seat while he pulled back into traffic. “You spend much time in therapy yourself?”
The peripheral jerk of her recoil made him realize how gruff he sounded.
“Sorry. I don’t mean it in a bad way. Opposite, in fact. I’m impressed.” He risked a glance her way; the streetlights glowed through her curls and highlighted the angle of her head. “You don’t want to talk about him, I know, but it’s not like I can’t draw conclusions from the fact you divorced while pregnant, and the thing about not letting him know where you live.”
“I—”
“No, it’s not my business.” If his words were footsteps, they’d be tripping down too-steep stairs. “I’m not prying, I swear. My point, what I meant by saying that, is you’re so smart about everything. Insightful, you know? And I’ve had enough therapy of my own to know insight like yours is hard earned and takes work. Reflection and, I don’t know, all that crawling through dark tunnels of uncertainty towards the light of a new understanding. So you say what you said about me, about my marriage, and my brain is blown into a shifting kaleidoscope of reframing everything. It wasn’t what I expected to happen tonight. I’m trying to convince you to give me a real chance, let me persuade you to date, think about making this a relationship. Instead you show me how I don’t even know my own past, and now....”
He fell flat, his words stopped by the rough concrete wall of inescapable conclusions.
They were both silent, rolling past blocks of quiet dark streets.
“Turn here,” she said, and it was so far from where his thoughts dwelled that it didn’t even make immediate sense as driving instructions. He’d eased off the gas when she spoke, though, and managed to make the right she’d requested.
He cleared his throat. “What’s this way?”
“My place. It’s a shortcut. Take the first left after that stop sign.”
Made sense, for her to get herself away from his brain-dump ASAP. He spent a mile mulling the wisdom of asking her out again before she said goodnight. Hoping her ‘get to know each other as people’ plan was still an option. She was looking for red flags, and impossible to think he hadn’t planted plenty of crimson banners over the course of the purportedly low-key dinner-and-a-movie date.
“That gate there. Key code’s two-nine-nine-five,” she reminded him.
He followed her directions around the complex until he was near her unit. Didn’t say more than a couple of acknowledgments until she told him he could park in the space two down from hers. “Rachel?”
“Theo.”
He put the car in park. “You want me to walk you up to your door?”
It was her turn to pull the move of wrapping a hand at the back of his neck and drawing him in close. Right front and center of her personal space, so all she saw was his face. Eyes deep, lips parted with maybe surprise and maybe anticipation, nostrils flared, jaw shifting under his beard. Mouth working, silent. Eyes, soft now as she moistened her own lips. A hint of raised brow. And then she dropped her lids and they were kissing.
She unclicked his seat belt, giving them more access to each other’s mouths. Theo’s hands roved up her arms, back to her nape. Around to cradle her face. “Making a leap here, but is this an invitation upstairs?”
Everything snapped into an easy acceptance, as if all those times he called her clever and insightful and good knit into some kind of blindfold hiding her reservations from view. “You happen to bring a change of clothes or anything?”
Hard to kiss a man whose mouth was a wide grin. She pecked at his jawline instead. “Plausible deniability: it’s my gym bag anyway. So if you saw it, you might think it didn’t hold a toothbrush.”
“Well, you keep telling yourself that. So long as you bring it up with you.”
He met her around back of the car. True to form, he asked again. “I don’t mind heading back home. I mean, once you’re safely in your place. You said all those wise things about us taking it slow and getting to know each other.”
“And look how that went.” She laughed. Damn but her ego loved all the praiseful adjectives. “I guess we’re on a bit of fast-forward at the moment, but it’s not like we haven’t been here before.”
He slid back to give her room to open the apartment. “I am officially going to stop arguing now. So long as you know you can point me towards the door at any time.”
Instead, she pressed him up against it, so he dropped his gym duffle right there next to the shoe cubbies and wrapped his arms around her instead. She toed off her sandals and aimed her purse at the sofa without checking to see if she made the shot or not. “How’d you like to go straight to bed?”
“Yes. Fuck, yes.” Theo fumbled over his buttons, not in a way everyone might notice, but she was trained to observe hand tremors. She’d never made a man’s hands shake before. It sent her headlong towards the bedroom, discarding clothes as she went. Theo kept right up with her.
She giggled when he ran his fingers down her spine. Fuck if she could remember giggling since maybe when she and her sister were little and shared what they thought of as big private codes to keep their childish secrets from their parents.
Filing away the desire to ask Blythe if she remembered that code, Rachel settled her mind—and body, and overflowing emotions—in the very much right now.
On Theo.
Shirtless, crisp jeans sunk to a disreputable rumple as he unzipped and let them hang open. Olive-hued boxers that were like a shady summer day against the burnished brown of his skin. A full smile, widening as he watched her kick free of her skirt.
“You’re the fucking sexiest, Rachel.”
“Not a slouch your own self.”
They met in a rush, his hands skimming up her sides. She burrowed into his neck, to taste, to smell, to revel in his warm and solid body. All those intentions—maintaining emotional distance, approaching intimacy with care—dissolved under the sweet touch of his tongue and the heat of his embrace. She salved her conscience with a fable about sex being different from intimacy, and allowed herself to combust.
Thing was, sex with a good partner, a partner attentive and intent and kind of engineered to look like a literal Greek god naked—that qualified as very much the kind of thing she knew she deserved in life. The kind of thing she’d attended all that therapy to welcome into her life. The kind of thing any kind of cosmic justice scale-balancing would throw right into her lap.
Her extraordinarily well-satisfied lap. The general area of said lap still pulsed with pleased echoes as they flopped, side-by-side, fingers tracing each other’s wrists and palms. “If I were a cat I’d be purring.”
His laugh was gruff and shallow. A very different kind of off-kilter breathing than she’d seen him experience earlier in the night.
“You okay?” she asked, and probably she sounded too concerned about the wrong parts of him. His troubled emotions instead of his tremendous body.
“Never been better.”
She sat and scrutinized him. “Glib is not a good look on you.”
He put palms to eye sockets, scrubbing off whatever emotion had welled up to sink him down. “Sorry. I ... it’s been a while, and three quarters of me is reveling in the now, but there’s a part leaping ahead to borrow trouble, and a bigger part wanting to erase all that embarrassing car confessional shit from earlier.”
“A while since what, exactly?” It wasn’t the only question freewheeling in her brain, but it was the one she opted to voice.
He shifted up on one elbow so they were more eye level with each other. “Since I got this deep into relationship emotions. Since I settled into the fact that all the intense attraction and laughs and so forth is a side of the learning to communicate part. The knowing all sides, not just the light and sexy and talking for hours side.
”
It took her several insensible moments to realize why she was holding herself still. Not to prevent backing away from him, but to stop from edging closer. Damn and blast but she kept surprising herself. Or Theo kept surprising her. He really needed to stop saying appealing things or she’d get back to worrying it was all a calculated veneer designed to suck her in to cycles of manipulation and mistreatment. She forced out a long, slow breath. “Theo, I wouldn’t be here—well, to be correct, you wouldn’t be here—if not for the car confessional. I don’t mean it’s a pity fuck, if that’s what that face was for. I mean the experiment, if we’re calling it that, of us dating? We set it up so we can get past the light and sexy part. Right?”
His hand crept forward and traced her upper arm. It gave her goose bumps, and she slid down to intertwine their legs under the sheet. He tucked it higher around them both. “Right. I know. It’s that small fraction of me, is all. Three-sixteenths, if that.”
“You and numbers.”
He grinned back at her. “Don’t go getting all light and sexy on me again.”
Ridiculous man. “Fine. Point is, I’m no stranger to endorphins, but yeah. I get what you mean. This is ... more than the usual. And it’s scary.”
“Goddamn frightening,” he agreed. Somehow his mouth still tasted of movie theatre popcorn.
“I’m not at my best when I’m scared.”
“Duly noted.”
“And you’re always looking for the trigger that will make me run.”
When he squeezed her hand, it felt like acceptance and an intention and a sheltering space. “See how well you know me already?”
“So if we’re doing this—”
“We are doing this, Rachel. I’m not frightened off. I don’t think you are, either, no matter how paranoid I get searching for proof of that. I think we both want more.”
“Be that as it may. I’ve got a point to make. It’s that I may be on the reluctant side to talk about some of my past, and not just because you know Hannah’s father. Some of it I packed up all careful and stored off-site, you know? Not cause I am suppressing it, but cause I’ve done the work to put it there. But I think you knew that. And I know it’s not on the equitable end of the spectrum to get you to talk about things I won’t talk about for myself. But I really, really want you to know that when you do, it builds bridges for me. And I appreciate it.”
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