“In what way?” he asked, still expertly massaging his thumbs below her shoulder blades.
“I changed who I was to please him. I stopped seeing my friends, stopped wearing clothes he didn’t like me in.” Chloe closed her eyes, finding it easier to say all this now that they weren’t face-to-face. “I was always thinking about keeping him happy, not upsetting him. I became one of the women you see on TV, and you’re shouting at the screen, ‘Leave, why wouldn’t you leave? Why are you being so weak?’ ” Chloe felt her eyes welling. “But I couldn’t. I loved him. We were together for two years, and it was like I didn’t know who I would be without him, without him telling me who to be.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve. “In the end, Kiko had to stage an intervention. She came to London, dragged me to the pub, said she didn’t recognize me anymore and she wasn’t going home until I told her what was going on. I should have left that night, but I stayed another week. I started noticing how much of my life he was controlling—my calls, who I saw, what time I got home. Then finally he suggested I move my paycheck to the joint bank account, the one he controlled, and I looked down at this ring.”She showed Rob the ring on her finger. “It was like my grandmother was in the room with me. I heard her voice telling me, ‘Go, go now.’ ”
“That must have been a difficult thing to do,” Rob said gently, pressing his warm palms flat against her shoulders.
“It was. I think I’ve been scared of getting into anything since then. Because everyone talks about how great love is, and how it can make you the best version of yourself, but no one talks about the bad kind of love, the kind that erodes you. I never want to lose myself like that again.” She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of a hand.
“You didn’t lose yourself because you loved someone, Chloe,” Rob said, his hands working the exact spot where she was feeling the pain. “You lost yourself because he made his love conditional on disappearing parts of who you were. That wasn’t love, that was control. Real love, healthy love, it doesn’t ask you to shrink. It meets you where you are, and then makes space for you to grow bigger, not smaller.”
She gulped a breath of air.
“You’re very wise,” Chloe said, reaching a hand back over her shoulder to pat his hand. “Is this what they teach you to say at Therapy.com?” She was being flippant, but she said it kindly.
“I know you use humor when you feel vulnerable,” Rob said, not rising to her jibe. “But talking helps, and I am here to listen. I think deep down you are a romantic, Chloe. I think you need to give yourself permission to believe in love again.” As though a chord had been struck deep inside her, Chloe went quiet. She didn’t know if it was the massage or his words, but she felt something inside her release. But she also felt unsettled, because why was the only person she’d been able to admit all that to someone who wasn’t even real?
“Thank you, that was dreamy,” she said, as Rob finished massaging her back and shoulder. She sat up and stretched like a cat as there was a knock at the door. Chloe wrapped the towel tight around her chest and called out, “Just a second!”
Opening the door, she found John standing in the corridor. He had changed his clothes. When he saw Chloe in only a towel, he quickly averted his eyes upward, his cheeks flushing pink.
“Sorry, I’m interrupting. I just came to check you were okay,” he said.
She could only imagine what he thought he had interrupted, with her ruffled hair and flushed face. “Oh no, don’t worry, I was just, um, stretching my back out. You didn’t interrupt anything.” She stepped toward him, leaving the door ajar.
“Richard wanted to give you a present, to say sorry for knocking you in,” John said, holding out a stick. “He’s not great at choosing presents.”
She laughed. “Thank you.” Their eyes met and there was that tension again, a magnetic pull outside of her control. “I enjoyed our trip down the river. Not the falling-in part, obviously, but everything else.” Her watch let out a small vibration, and she glanced down to see a pink line. Pink, attraction. Attraction to John. Rob would see.Without thinking, she whipped off the watch, wanting this feeling to be private, but the moment she did, there was a loud thud behind her.
“Oh shit. Rob just collapsed,” John said, pushing past her, through the door, running to his side. John quickly laid him in the recovery position, then gently slapped his face. “Rob? Are you okay? He’s not diabetic, is he?” Chloe shook her head. “Chloe, you need to call an ambulance, now.”
Oh shit.
Of all the situations Chloe had envisioned finding herself in, seeing hot, grown-up John Elton try to resuscitate her robot boyfriend had not been on her bingo card.
John turned to look at her, panic in his eyes. “Get your phone, he’s not breathing.” Chloe felt paralyzed as she stared back at him, unsure what to do. Time distorted; John looked to be moving in slow motion.
“Chloe! Why aren’t you doing anything?” he said, his voice agitated now, and suddenly time sped up again. The urgency of the situation landed like a punch between her eyes. She quickly pulled the device back on her wrist, pressing it down against her skin. She tapped at the screen as though she was trying to make a call as she watched John start CPR on Rob. He breathed into his mouth, then counted, “One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand.” He knitted his fingers and pumped at Rob’s chest, hard, then paused to put two fingers to his neck.
“I can’t find a pulse,” he said, his voice rising. Then he put his hands together, readying to resume chest compressions.
Chloe grabbed his arm, pulling him away. “Stop, stop,” she cried. “You’re going to break him!”
14
Pushing John away, she reachedfor Rob’s wrist, pressed his watch at the same time as hers. There was a beep, and Rob blinked open his eyes. She looked down at her wrist and saw a blue square glow on the screen, then shift into a heart.
“Hello,” Rob said, smiling at John and then sitting up as though nothing had happened.
“What the fuck?” John said, pushing himself away from Rob, scooting back across the floor, eyes wide in terror.
“Nothing, it’s fine. You revived him. Yay!” Chloe said, raising her arms like a cheerleader. Then she remembered she was only wearing a towel and had to grab it before it slipped off entirely.
“I didn’t. You asked me to stop and then…Why did you say I might break him?” John asked. His face had turned pale, hiseyes haunted, but there was sweat on his brow, and he reached a hand to wipe it away.
“You were just pressing really hard, it felt like overkill,” Chloe said, her head spinning because she did not know how to get out of this.
“Overkill?” John said, his whole face creasing up in disbelief.
Why the hell wouldn’t Avery have said that if you took the device off, he would cut out like that? Of all the information to impart, that detail felt pretty fucking critical.
