Claire tsks, pressing a hand to where her pearls used to sit. “Theodore!”
“Only Jacks can call me that. You phonedmeup. Don’t get shy now.”
Claire’s stomach flips. She did call Theo up. She dialed his number to ask an absolutely ridiculous question, and the absurdity of it makes her stomach lurch.
What is shedoing?
“You’re right. I don’t know why I did this,” Claire says. She’s pressing the phone so hard against her ear that it’s starting to hurt. “Cripes. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—please don’t tell Jackie. Don’t tell her I called.”
Claire has almost hung the phone up when she hears Theo’s voice, loud and clear.
“Wait.”
Claire’s hand hovers over the cradle. She wavers for a moment, the receiver hovering over the cradle, but curiosity gets the better of her—she puts it to her ear again. “Yes?”
Theo sucks at his teeth. “Why do you ask?”
Claire’s breathing has gone heavy. Her palms are sweaty, slipping on the plastic phone. Her line is private, but it feels like anyone could be listening.
“Because,” Claire says, her voice thin and warbly, “I have been having some…doubts.”
“About?”
“Everything,” Claire says. “My marriage, my—my whole life. All of it. I’m lost, Theo.”
Theo takes a long pause. He says nothing for so long that Claire wonders if maybe he’s hung up on her.
“Why do you feel the need to have this conversation withme?” he finally says, with none of the snark she’s come to associate with every word that comes out of his mouth.
Claire clings to the phone cord. Her fingers are all twisted up in it, wound into the tight coils until they get snarled with little tangles. “Who else could I ask? Who would even hear me out without sending me to the psychiatrist? Jackie trusts you, and I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought.”
Theo sighs. “I really did not want to get caught up in Jackie’s little burst of temporary mania.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to turn.”
For a few beats, there’s nothing but the crackle of the phone line. Fingers drum on a surface, and then he lets out a long sigh.
“It’s simple, really. I always felt different,” Theo finally says. “I didn’t want to do the things boys were supposed to. I never measured up. My father liked to point it out, before he left my saint of a mother to start his little white family.”
“Your father is white?” Claire blurts. “That’s—”
“That’s all you need to know about it,” Theo says, cutting clear through Claire’s pity. “Don’t trip over yourself again. Do you want to know how I fell in love, or not?”
Claire’s stomach is still flipping. She wants to know about that more than anything. It’s as if she’s filling with helium and floating away, as something complicated happens in the larger part of her brain. Her body is the front in a war between two feelings. “I do. You fell in love with a man?”
“I was seventeen,” Theo says. “We ran away together. I found community. I never looked back. That’s when I met Jacks. She dug me out of my hole when that relationship ended.”
“How did you know you were in love?”
Theo sighs. “It was obvious. Just looking at him set my heart off. Every song felt written for him. I didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like, but he taught me. And touching him, it was—it was like his skin was magic. I wanted to be closer to him, no matter where we were. No matter who was watching.”
“Right,” Claire says, needlessly. It’s hard to say anything more meaningful when her thoughts are all of Jackie. How it feels to look at her. How it feels to be touched by her, whether it’s a simple squeeze of the arm or Jackie’s fingers brushing against her chest as she unbuttons Clare’s shirt in a changing room.
Magic might be just the right word.
“I’d make up excuse after excuse to be near him. Eventually they got so flimsy that I couldn’t deny it anymore,” Theo says, his voice softer now. “I kissed him. And it was incredible. He just felt…right.”
Claire could count the number of times she’s feltjust righton one hand. She’s lived a life ofjust fine. A life ofnot quite. The only moment that might have risen above it was that afternoon in the pool, when she had the thought of kissing Jackie. When the very idea of it had set something in her ringing like a bell.
