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Chapter Twenty-Two

Theo

Theo didn’t have many outfits appropriate for the country club Christmas Kick-Off, but he did have two button-down shirts and one suit that would suffice. Avery had assured him they didn’t actually expect black tie, just “nice” outfits, and that the only problem would be if he showed up in jeans. He considered wearing them anyway, since he hated the whole country club set, but he also knew they wouldn’t think twice about refusing to let him in unless he was dressed properly. That was the whole reason he fucking hated them, but it was a fight he knew he would lose. Theo liked picking fights well enough, but he didn’t like picking ones he would immediately lose.

Theo rifled through his closet, searching for the collared shirts, but found only the checked one he bought his sophomore year of high school. That one would be too small now, and besides, it had a hole in the elbow. “Jake, did you take some of my clothes?” he yelled out the door.

There was no response, so Theo rolled his eyes and walked down the hall to Jake’s room. “Jake?” Theo asked loudly, opening the door without knocking.

Jake was fiddling with his composing software, headphones on. “What?” Jake yelled.

Theo motioned for him to take his headphones off. “Did you take some of my clothes?”

“Yeah, why?” Jake said, like that was a perfectly normal thing. And it probably was, but Theo was still significantly taller than Jake, so there wasn’t really a way for them to share clothes, at least not yet.

“Uh, why?”

“Why what?”

Theo sighed. Usually, he didn’t get too annoyed with Jake, but there were times when it was hard not to. “Why did you take my clothes?”

“I was wearing them?” Jake said, sounding puzzled.

“Did they fit?”

“No. That was the point,” Jake said mysteriously, and turned back to his computer.

Theo stood there, wondering if he should try to get to the bottom of it, and then decided he didn’t care. “Then where are they?”

“Shirts are in my closet, pants . . . somewhere.”

Fortunately, Jake’s closet wasn’t too messy. He dug through it, found what he was looking for, and left while his brother was still absorbed enough in his composing that he didn’t even notice Theo leaving.

Theo frowned at the shirt and decided it needed to be ironed (it smelled fine, thankfully, so it had been washed since Jake had worn it). That meant going down into the dingy basement, where the washing machine was, so he wove through the house, into the kitchen, and down the rickety, cobwebby basement stairs. Jake used to get scared of those stairs back when they first moved in, and Theo’s heart twinged thinking about the way Jake used to clutch his hand when they had to go down and move the laundry to the dryer for Karl and Tiffany. Jake wasn’t scared of the basement anymore, and had been borrowing Theo’s clothes for unexplained purposes.

Karl was working in his shop, judging by the noise of the table saw, as Theo set up the ironing board and plugged in the iron. It was dim down there even at noon in the summer, and mid-afternoon in November meant the only real light coming in was from the lone, dangling bulb above the center of the room.

Theo got to work just as the table saw stopped whirring and Karl emerged. “Going out tonight?” he said, nodding to the shirt stretched out on the ironing board.

“Avery invited me to a thing at her parents’ country club.”

“The Christmas Kick-Off thing?” Karl said with a low whistle. “I used to do valet for them when I was about your age. Tips that night were always insane.” He paused, then made an awkward face. “But it was also insanely dangerous to drive home after that, with all those rich people feeling drunk and invincible in their cars.”

Theo tried to figure out where Karl was going with that story. “Think I should skip it?”

“Nah, they set up a checkpoint on the road out of the club for a couple years in a row, and that more or less sorted it out. Mostly I’m just surprised, since, you know, that’s not really your scene.”

“There’s an understatement,” Theo muttered. “I’d rather get a fucking root canal.”

Karl considered him for a minute, then picked up the spray bottle of water from the rough shelving unit he had built their first week in the house. “Here, let me help,” he said. He spritzed water on the shirt and took the iron from Theo’s hands. “If you’d rather get a root canal, you must really care about Avery.”

“She’s been my best friend for a long time,” Theo said with a shrug.

Karl stole a glance at him. “Right, but now . . . she’s more?”

Theo couldn’t quite tell what Karl was getting at, but he nodded. Unbidden, Theo’s mind flashed back to his car last night, but that was not something he wanted to think about with Karl in the room. With great effort, he wrenched his mind away from the exact shape of Avery’s breasts under his palms. “I mean, we’re dating, so . . . yeah.”

“I don’t mean to cross any lines here, but that’s—that’s been a long time coming for you, hasn’t it?”