“Yeah. You?” I pant.
“Why did you think I’d be mad at you?”
It takes a hot minute for me to understand the question, and when I realize he’s talking about me freaking out over not warning him fast enough about the pig, I flinch and realize I need to move.
I need to get off him.
We’rein the middle of the roadwith the light fading rapidly. We could get hit by a passing car. Or a wild goat could decide it wants to crash the party too, and goatscanjump.
But Theo grips me by the waist and holds me tight when I start to squirm off. “It is not your fault I hit a pig. I know you were trying to warn me the best way you could.”
If you’d told me two days ago that Theo Monroe would hit a tender spot inside of me that needed to be toldthis mistake is not your fault, I would’ve laughed until I choked and then choked until I passed out from a lack of oxygen.
Yet here we are, with him soothing a wound I didn’t even know I had.
“Stop talking,” I whisper.
“We’re not so different, are we? Both of us living in the direction of the world’s expectations of us.”
My whole world stops spinning. Gravity ceases to work, and my entire existence floats out of my body, spiraling and spinning out of control to compensate for the fact that the world as I thought it was is not the world that actually is.
Theo’s trapped.
He’s trapped bylowexpectations just as much as I’m trapped byhighexpectations.
He’s right.
We’re basically the same.
And that changeseverything.
I will never—ever—see him as a simple troublemaker again.
15
Theo
I believeI’ve mentioned that there’s not a lot that embarrasses me.
I’d happily be a nudist if I lived in a place where my dick wouldn’t be at risk of frostbite over half the year. I’ve spent time in jail and won’t hide it. Never had any hesitation in telling a buddy they’d have to pick up the tab for my beer if they wanted me to go out with them when my bank account was low. I knew I’d make it up to them in other ways later.
How the world works.
Everything evens out if you do your best.
It’s something my mom told me a long time ago that’s held true throughout my life.
But there is no evening out the fact that Laney Kingston and a feral pig made me blow my load in my pants.
Take Laney out of the equation, and I’d be less embarrassed.
I don’t know if she knows.
But if I knowanythingabout Laney, it’s that it won’t be long before she has regrets. And regrets will mean that she keepsbabysittingme while pretending nothing happened and nothing’s changed when for me, nothing will ever be the same again.
So I don’t wait for the regrets.
Instead, as soon as Laney throws herself at Emma and Sabrina when we arrive at the karaoke bar down the street from the resort where the dinner after-party is happening after the luau dancers apparently didn’t show up for the lessons after dinner like they were supposed to, I bail and head out into the night.
