The Real Deal

He glances around behind me, hunting for someone. “Where’s Theo?” Cory seems eager for a glimpse of my plus-one.

I wave a hand through the air. “He had to take a phone call,” I say, making something up on the spot. “Work thing.”

“Got it. Want anything from the bakery? Does Theo want something? We’ve got some badass seven-layer bars. I bet he’d like one.”

I crack a smile. Oh my. My brother-in-law must think Theo is the cool guy he wants to be if he’s trying to impress him through baked goods.

“That sounds great, and I’ll take a cake the size of my head.” To drown my idiotic misplaced sorrows in. I hear your chocolate frosting is the new therapy.

“Hey, cupcake. My work thing’s over. I can get you a cake like that if you want. And a badass seven-layer bar sounds awesome, Cory.”

I turn to the voice that sends shivers up my spine. But I’m still pissed at him. And I’m even angrier at myself.





Chapter Twenty-two

Theo

With a happy salute and a promise to bring me a badass seven-layer bar, Cory leaves and it’s just the two of us at the end of the last block in downtown Wistful.

Now I need to man up and say what I should have said before. “You’re still mad at me.”

She shrugs. “Not really.”

“Liar,” I tease. “You are.”

She sighs, but shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. I have no right to be mad at you.”

“You do,” I say emphatically. “You have every right.”

“Do you want me to be mad at you?” She resumes her pace to the inn.

Watching her walk away earlier this morning was a slap in the face. That was a dumbass move on my part to dance circles around her questions and to let her think stuff that wasn’t true. It was a dumbass move to lie to her the other night. I rip off the Band-Aid: “My parents didn’t die in a car crash,” I say, the words spilling out, jagged and raw.

That stops April and she pivots around, standing in front of me, the bright light of the sun haloing her face, illuminating her wild green eyes and those freckles that occasionally make her look even younger. “What do you mean?”

A ball of steel lodges in my chest. I hate talking about this. I hate that it happened. I hate how it was twisted and turned and used to define my future.

“It was easier than the truth,” I scratch out.

“What happened, then?”

I bite off the bitter truth. “My mom had pancreatic cancer when I was thirteen. It was fast-moving and awful. She had very little time. Nine months from diagnosis to death.”

“Oh, Theo,” April says, her voice thick with emotion. “I’m so sorry.”

“We had no idea why she had it. There was no family history, no indicators. She had a regular life. She was an English teacher, and so was my father. We were so ordinary. We had these ordinary, regular lives in Boston.”

“There’s nothing wrong with an ordinary life. Sometimes normal is good.”

“All my parents wanted was for my brother and me to go to college. Even when my mom got sick. College was everything, and they’d just started saving for it, but they had very little. What they had they used for my mom’s treatments.”

She is crestfallen, those wide eyes brimming with sadness. “That’s so sad about your mom.”

I draw a deep breath. This is where the shit gets real. “I was fourteen when she died. Two weeks later, my father killed himself.”

Her jaw unhinges, and she blinks. She clasps her hand to her mouth. Richelle reacted the same way when I told her. I brace myself because Richelle left me soon after she learned that Heath and I turned into con artists to survive.

Richelle wanted a boyfriend who fit her neat, orderly design for life, and she didn’t handle it well when I told her what happened to my parents. When she found out I had a past and it wasn’t pretty, she tensed. She tightened. She retreated.

April’s the opposite.

The sweet, sarcastic goofball of a girl puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “Theo,” she says softly. Where Richelle recoiled, April moves closer. “I can’t even imagine what you went through.”

And because of that, right there, telling her feels different. I hope I’m not wrong.

“I’m sorry I pressured you to tell me by asking the first night,” she says.

I close my eyes and shake my head. When I open them, I take the hand she’s offering me. “I’m sorry I lied.”

“Don’t apologize. I understand. That’s all just so hard to say. Infinitely harder to have gone through.”

I swallow past the lump as she squeezes my fingers. “He was supposed to be there for us. Take care of us. But he couldn’t live without her. He put a bullet in a gun and a gun in his mouth.”

She winces. “That’s terrible.”

“That’s why it’s easier to say they died in a car crash.”

With her free hand, she reaches for my hair, brushes a few strands off my forehead. I catalog that response, too. Also different. I like April’s differences. “Thank you for telling me the truth, even when it’s so hard to say. And especially when we hardly know each other. Is that why you told me? Because it’s easier to tell someone you don’t really know?”

I pause, considering her question. I shake my head. “I feel like I do know you.”

She smiles softly. “I guess I feel that way, too. It’s been only a few days, but I do feel like I know you—or at least, that I want to.”

With my fingers threaded through hers, I tug her closer and give her another true answer. “I don’t want to mess with your head. I told you about my parents because when I say I don’t get involved on a job, and when I say I’ve never kissed a client, I want you to know all those things are true.” My eyes lock with hers, and what I say next is laced with import—it’s important to me, to who I want to be. “I want you to know I’m not a liar. And it’s the truth when I say I’ve never wanted to kiss someone as much as I wanted to kiss you. It’s true, too, when I say I’m incredibly attracted to you.”

Maybe I’m just testing gradations of truth. To see what works. I want to be free of who I was before. I want to move on. I want to head into whatever the future is beyond debts and payments and trouble that chases me around. Trying sections of honesty, like they’re pieces of fruit served on a platter, seems to be the way to go.

“You might have figured out that I’m kind of attracted to you, too,” she says with a little glint in her eyes as she tugs my hand and guides me to a nearby bench.

“Kind of?” I ask, toying with her.

“Hey, don’t go fishing,” she chides.

“I’ll take ‘kind of.’”

“What happened after they died?” she asks, returning to the topic at hand. “Where did you live? Where did you go?”

“I was fourteen. Heath was sixteen. We grew up in Boston, but after my dad killed himself, we were sent to my aunt in Jersey.”

“Are you close with her?”

I shake my head. “If by ‘close,’ you mean she gave me a ride to my own high school graduation, then took off to see her friends, yes. Also, that was the first event she ever took us to.”

“Wow,” April says under her breath. “So, not close at all.”

“Let’s put it this way: I haven’t seen her since she knocked on my door a few years ago and asked me for money for pills.”

“She was that direct? She didn’t even try to cover it up?”

“She’s far gone. Desperate now. And it was the most ironic request, since I could barely rub two sticks together,” I say, and brace myself for her response. She might not be a country club gal, but she’s surrounded by a hell of a lot more than two sticks. She has logs for roaring fires. “Some days it’s still that way.”

Tension zooms through me. I’ve just confessed one of the basic truths of my existence. That every day can be a scramble. “I’m saying that as the guy who’s attracted to you, not as the guy you hired,” I add.

“I’m glad that’s why you told me. And you do work hard. You juggle so many jobs now.”

“I try.”