You, With a View(44)

“Have you recovered from the excitement of today’s letter?” he asks.

My chest warms at the question. Maybe he’s simply moving us into neutral territory, but at the very least he cares enough to want to hear my answer. “Mostly. Is this boring for you, since you know their story?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t really. Like I said, Kathleen wasn’t a secret, but my granddad didn’t go around dropping tons of details.” His gaze moves up to the TV. “I like learning about it like this. On the road, I mean, with him.”

His eyes move to me. He doesn’t say it out loud, but I can read it on his face anyway: with you.

Another little pebble. My heart shimmies nervously. “When you say she wasn’t a secret, what do you mean?”

“She was a point of contention between Granddad and my biological grandma, apparently. He met her right after he graduated.” One side of his mouth quirks up. “It was supposed to be a one-night thing, but she got pregnant.”

My eyes widen. “With your uncle?”

He nods. “They had to get married. I don’t think Granddad was over Kathleen by that point, even though it’d been a couple years.”

“I’m pretty sure Gram had met Grandpa Joe by that point.” They got married New Year’s Eve in 1959. If she’d stayed at UCLA, she would have graduated the previous spring. “So, not the best start for Paul and . . .”

“Anne,” Theo says. “Not the best start and it never got better. They tried. Back then you did your best to stay in a marriage, but eventually it was too toxic.”

“Paul told you all this?”

Theo pauses, taking a sip of his bourbon, a long, slow one. When he sets his glass back down, his eyes stay focused there. “My granddad told me some of it, and my dad . . .” He trails off, his jaw going tight.

I let my knee fall against his, just to watch the tension briefly flow out of him.

With a smoky-scented exhale, he shakes his head. “My dad grew up with parents who never loved each other. He held a lot of shit against my granddad, his feelings for Kathleen included, and aired all his grievances to me. He knew how much I idolized Granddad and he wanted to punish him. After a while the punishment wasn’t very distinguishable between Granddad and me.”

I rub a hand over my chest, wishing I could rub it over his instead. Is it the alcohol making him so willing to share right now, or is it me?

“He seemed hard on you,” I venture. “The times I saw him.”

Theo’s laugh is humorless. “Still is. If I fuck up, it goes in his told ya so file. I remind him too much of his dad, I guess.”

“What about your mom?” Theo’s dad has always loomed so large that she’s an underexposed image in the family portrait stored in my mind.

“She intervened sometimes, but my dad can argue a person into exhaustion, and she never had the stamina for that.” His thumb arcs slowly across his glass. I can see the memories playing behind his eyes. “Now that I’m an adult, she lets us work it out ourselves.”

I try to imagine how lonely that must be, to not have a reliable parent for comfort or support. It’s not something I’ve ever had to deal with, and it leaves me scrambling for a response.

But he’s clearly done with the subject. With a hard swallow, he pushes his glass away and runs a hand over his mouth, as if wiping away the words. “Anyway, that’s my secret for today. If we’re still playing the game.”

“Always.” Somehow, I don’t think we’d ever run out of things to confess. It scares me as much as it thrills me. We have ten days left; how much could we fit in if we really cracked ourselves open?

His gaze sharpens at the sadness in my voice. “Tell me one of yours.”

“I thought your life was perfect,” I admit. “You drove me batshit with your perfect grades and that nasty serve—” He laughs, his eyes crinkling. That amusement breaks a wave of relief over my heart. “The spread in Forbes.”

“You’ve got that page bookmarked, don’t you?” The cockiness is back in his voice, in the upward curve of his mouth. His lips are so perfectly shaped for kissing, biting, sucking on.

“You wish I did.”

Theo shakes his head, his smile quieting as the moment between us extends, then shifts. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the more perfect it looks on the outside, the messier that shit is on the inside.”

I let him see the understanding in my eyes, even if I can’t reveal my secret entirely. Then I lift my glass. “Cheers to that.”



* * *





I’m not buzzed, but by the time Theo closes our tab sometime after midnight, I’m soft around the edges. We moved on from the heavy stuff, pivoted back around to the tension that was brewing between us earlier.

Theo kept his hands to himself, but not his shoulder or thigh or knee, all of which pressed against me when he’d lean in to murmur some quip in my ear. When I swept my hair over my shoulder, his eyes zeroed in on that spot he claimed. I don’t know why I never noticed him looking before; it was so hungry I felt it in my stomach.

Now, as he leads me out to the lobby, his palm curves into the small of my back.

When we step into the elevator a minute later, he presses the button for my floor, but not his. I slide him a look.