Tessa shakes her head, seemingly clearing away her train of thought. “Did you really not know he had feelings for you?”
“There were times I wondered. Times I hoped.” I grab a grape and twirl it between my fingers. “But he insisted he didn’t trust himself in relationships. He has a lot of leftover trauma from his dad, and I didn’t know how to convince him they are nothing alike.”
Millie hums. “Poor Theo.”
“I want to give him a hug,” Tessa agrees.
“But it’s not your job to convince him of that,” Millie says. “You can be a piece of that puzzle, but not the whole thing. There are a lot of other parts that need to come into play.”
“Do you have real feelings for him?” Tessa asks. “Because the pictures I’ve seen in the group chat make it pretty clear that—”
“What group chat?” I interrupt.
My sisters have a silent conversation with their eyes. “The one you’re not part of?” Millie says with a wince.
“Who’s in it?”
Tessa gives me a look that says,Oh, sweet summer child. “Everyone else.”
“The two of us, Finn, Mom, Dad, Eva, Mia, Bree.” Millie ticks them off on her fingers.
“And Logan,” Tessa adds.
I gape at them. “My boss too?!”
“Really, it’s just us gossiping about how to make you two realize you have feelings for each other. And sometimes we share pictures,” Millie supplies. At my frown, she adds, “How else are we supposed to know how adorable you two are when we don’t get to see it in person all the time?”
Tessa’s expression goes dreamy. “Remember the photo Logan sent?” She pulls out her phone and swipes until she finds it.
PROJECT THABLE is entered across the top as the group chat’s name.
“Thable?” I glare down at the screen. “That’s awful, actually.”
Tessa waves a hand in the air. “It was between Thable and Fabeo.”
“Fair enough.” I take in the photo Logan sent last week. It seems he snuck the picture when Theo came to visit on hislunch break and ended up following me around the store while I changed price tags for some items Logan was putting on sale.
In the image, my focus is on the sticker gun in my grip, but Theo’s is all on me. He’s leaning a shoulder against the shelves, one ankle crossed over the other, and even in the grainy quality, I can tell he’s giving methe lookI keep teasing him about. Like he finds me adorable and wants to scoop me up and take me home. Like there isn’t a damn thing in the world that could pull his attention away.
Logan’s text says,the boy is quite smitten.
Tessa reaches over and swipes down to a photo from Mom. In this one, Theo and I are in our Unicorns shirts after our first soccer game. The girls convinced me to help them dump their water bottles over his head, and even though he’s tall enough for it to not work, he pretended not to see us coming and let us pull him to the ground. His mouth is wide open with faux shock, water darkening his hair and shirt. Our soccer team is all around him, laughing their butts off, and I’m looking at him with hearts in my eyes, smiling so big I almost don’t recognize myself.
Mom’s message below the image says,she’s smitten too. Followed by a text from Mia:this is totes working.
I fold my lips together to suppress a grin. “I can’t believe there’s a secret group chat.”
Tessa makes an amused sound. “We’ve had to witness the tension between you for years. Of course we’re going to celebrate when you two idiots come to your senses.” She grabs the phone and zooms in on my smiling face. “You can’t look at this and tell me you don’t have very real feelings for that man.”
Millie leans her head on my shoulder, looking at the image with me. “You’ve fallen so hard that you’re silly and giddy around him.”
There’s a soft, glowy feeling tucked in the middle of my chest, and her words make it flare brighter. It’s almost too easy to remember the other giddy moments I’ve had over the last few weeks. The day I made a show of getting the soccer ball past him and got tackled to the ground by the Unicorns. Last week, when we were laughing so hard at his attempt to make a cat and dog pancake that there were tears in my eyes. When we were lying in bed one morning, Theo’s arms wrapped securely around me like always, and I gave into the urge to finally take a bite of his forearm.
He has brought out a side of me that’s been dormant for so long—that comfortable, childlike joy I’ve been missing.
I think about laughing into the warmth of his chest. About hazelnut spread on crackers in a dark kitchen. Toes touching under a blanket, red Starburst saved for me, a bookshelf to help me heal. His hands on my skin and his sighs in my ears. The way he supports me, cheers for me, pushes me to believe in myself.
Judging by the way my heart is simultaneously aching and cheering, I might’ve also failed at the whole casual arrangement.
