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“Okay, sure, we can do that.”
We walked to the store where Theo bought stuff for drinks, and some groceries I didn’t pay much attention to, while smiling shyly at the people who recognized him and stopping to take a selfie with a girl who begged him in the frozen foods aisle. When we got back to Rhys’s and he unpacked the bag, though, I saw that he’d gotten chips and salsa, an oven-bake pizza, bags of frozen tater tots, a pie, and a handful of candy bars.
“Wow, this is the kind of grocery shopping I can get behind.”
“Caleb said you have a sweet tooth.” He smiled at me and started opening cabinet doors as I turned over the evidence that Rhys talked about me to Caleb. I let Theo make himself at home as I realized that I hadn’t eaten since a makeshift dinner the night before and I was actually really hungry. “Here, open this, and I’ll make drinks.” He handed me the salsa and turned on the oven.
We carried chips and salsa, tater tots and ketchup, and drinks out back and settled back in the chairs. I shoved a few tater tots in my mouth as soon as they weren’t molten, but I still felt tipsy after a couple sips of whatever Theo had made. It was vodka and some kind of juice I didn’t recognize, and it streaked through me like fire, relaxing me from the inside out.
“Oh man,” Theo said a few minutes later. “I’m such a lightweight now. I’m already tipsy.”
“Me too,” I said. “’S nice.”
Later, after more drinks and more chips, Theo, now sprawled on the grass, asked, “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Yeah.”
“When I realized how close Caleb and Rhys’s relationship was, I was really glad to find out Rhys was married.”
A familiar sick feeling took up residence in my stomach. It was how I always felt when I thought about Caleb, and how he’d been Rhys’s partner all those years.
“It’s not that I doubted Caleb’s feelings, really. It just . . . felt like a lot to compete with. You know?”
I nodded. And I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol, how comfortable I was suddenly feeling with Theo, or the fact that he’d brought it up first, but I found myself telling him the truth.
“I looked up Rhys’s music online once, and all this stuff that he and Caleb co-wrote popped up. Then I looked at songs he’d written for other people. Love songs. And I knew they were probably about Caleb. Years and years of love songs.”
I shook my head, remembering how I’d found those songs the week after we’d gotten married, and puked, realizing that he’d been with me for two and a half months, and he’d been with Caleb on and off for the better part of a decade.
I must’ve been drunk because I heard myself say, “I still can’t believe he chose me. Mostly I think it’s because when I met him Caleb wasn’t really an option, since he was holed up in Stormville. Honestly, if Caleb hadn’t met you . . . every time Rhys would come home from visiting Caleb, I braced myself for him to tell me that he and Caleb had gotten back together.”
“But you were already married before Caleb met me,” Theo said, sounding confused.
“Yeah.”
Theo was looking at me strangely. “You don’t still think that, do you?”
“No way. No way Caleb would ever leave you. He worships you.”
“Rhys worships you too. You do know that, right?”
A shiver went through me at the way Rhys looked at me sometimes. The way he’d cup my chin in his hand and lean in to kiss me so slowly I could see his eyelashes flutter as his eyes drifted closed.
“I don’t want anyone to worship me,” I breathed.
Theo rolled his eyes. “Fine, pick a different word. Love. He loves you.”
“Yeah. He does.”
Rhys loves you! He married you! He chose you! Things are great between you!
Theo got up and for a minute I thought I’d offended him, but he just came back out with the pie and two forks.
“Shit, that’s really good,” I said. It was a peach pie with a streusel topping drizzled with caramel.
When I’d first left St. Jerome’s and been in charge of my own meals, I’d eaten apple pies from McDonald’s every day for a month. I’d wished I could live on nothing but dessert. Somehow, everything that wasn’t sweet ended up turning to dry meatloaf, mealy peas, snotty oatmeal, and chalky spaghetti on my tongue. It had eventually worn off, helped by the habit I developed of dousing everything I ate in hot sauce.
Then I’d discovered that I could eat other kinds of food and avoid the associations. Rich curries and flavorful stir-fries and fresh herbs—everything that had never crossed the threshold of St. Jerome’s.
