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“It will happen,” she says. “Reese will get his shot. Your dad will heal. And you were never a fuckup, Sully.”
Theo knows what I was.
Aggressive. Angry. Even before my mom died.
There was always a devil inside me to balance the angel on my brother’s shoulder. In my teenage years, the devil took hold.
I’m ashamed of how I behaved then. I had poor self-control.
I take Theo’s hand, gently this time.
“I am sorry. For how I treated you.”
She looks at me, her eyes huge and luminescent. She lifts our linked hands and presses her lips against my palm, closing my hand like she’s closing away the kiss.
“Thank you,” she says. “That was so long ago, and it doesn’t matter at all, but it makes me feel good anyway. Is that silly?”
“No.” I shake my head, smiling at her.
“Isn’t it funny…,” Theo says softly, her skin glowing in the silvery light glimmering off the water, her eyes deep and shadowy. “I was scared of you. But even then, all I wanted was for you to talk to me…”
Her hand strokes playfully up and down my thigh.
In the twilight, with her hair pulled back, she looks young and dewy and more than ever like the Theo I knew, shy and delicate and oh, so tempting…
I can’t help but feel a bit like the old Sully.
Low and husky I say, “When you used to wear that one sundress, the blue one with the straps, I’d stare at your back for an hour in Trigonometry.”
Theo shifts in her seat, knees pressing together. “That one time you bumped into me in the hallway?—“
“Excuse me,” I interrupt. “But you bumped intome.”
“Whoever it was…,” Theo says, smiling. “Do you remember what you said to me?”
I remember like it was yesterday. The smell of sweat, sneakers, and Abercrombie cologne interrupted suddenly by something else—sweet, warm, and delicious. I collided with her, and while she was a fumble of books and papers, blushing and shaking in my arms, I realized I was holding the soft and surprisingly sensual body of Theo Mahoney.
She’s like a doll,I thought, startled by the porcelain clarity of her skin up close, the thick, dark lashes, the pink tint that flushed her cheeks. Some people startle you from across aroom—Theo shocked me with how beautiful she looked at the distance of a magnifying glass.
I let her go with some snarling line?—
“Careful, Mahoney—that was second base.”
It comes out sounding exactly the same, like no time at all has passed.
Theo shivers, her eyes glowing in the last of the light.
“That’s right,” she says. “That’s exactly what you said.”
“Why was I such an ass?”
There was no need to be aggressive. But I hear it again now, edging my tone…Careful, Mahoney…that craving she pulls out of me…
“Can I tell you something?” Theo says.
Her fingertips dance up and down my thigh.
“Later that night, in bed…that was the first time I ever…you know.”
