No answer.
She knocked again, more urgently this time.
“Theo?”
When he still didn’t answer, panic took over. He’d never not responded to her before.
Audrey opened the door.
Steam poured out in swirling waves, and his outline was silhouetted behind the frosted glass of his massive, luxurious shower. He was seated in some sort of chair, his face buried in his hands, right leg extended stiffly out in front of him.
He was upright but hunched over.
He wasn’t moving.
“Theo!”
He didn’t respond. Audrey eyed the pile of his clothes on the floor and kicked off her boots.
“I’m coming in.”
She tore her clothes off before yanking the shower door open. When the steam rushed out at the sudden break in the seal, she could finally see him clearly.
And her stomach dropped.
She’d seen him before, of course, and plenty of times. She had the curves of his face memorized so well by now, she could envision them behind her eyes when she closed them at night, could trace them with her fingers if she suddenly went blind, could draw every multicolored mahogany and amber and light, spring green swirl in his irises from memory.
But she’d never seen Theo fully naked before. And somehow, witnessing all that expanse of his bare form, all that length ofhim, he looked even larger than he usually did. His skin was raw and red, and water streamed down the sides of his face, flowing along his body and across the constellation of moles she loved so much speckling the sides of his torso, intermingling with the plethora of scars and tiny freckles contrasting against his normally alabaster-pale skin. She traced them with her gaze, following them down to the last remaining unexplored part of him she hadn’t yet seen.
Her eye snagged on his right hip.
The damage there was extensive.
Far worse than she could have ever imagined.
More deep, puckered scars plunged into his flesh, twisting where they’d had to rebuild his shattered hip after his accident—the hip that caused his limp now, the source of the pain he surely never used to suffer when he was an elite college athlete. The deep scars werethick and wide, angry and red, and even more devastating than what was on his face. That one paled in comparison.
But that wasn’t what broke her heart.
It was the way he sat hunched in the chair, his face covered with trembling hands, shoulders shaking as he tried to make himself smaller.
This wasn’t the Theo she knew.HerTheo.
It was the broken man who’d first walked into her café that one summer morning.
Not the one who’d brought her home and held her while she cried in the dark, sweeping her tears away with his thumbs and banishing new ones with gentle kisses brushed against her eyes. Not the one who loved old movies, who made her coffee, who danced with her in his living room, whose crooked smile and curving dimples she adored coaxing out from the depths of his cheeks with a laugh.
No, that man didn’t sit in front of her.
Now it was the one she’d met months ago—the one who could barely string enough words together to ask for a plain black coffee out in public. The one who shied away from cameras, who flinched away from glances, who couldn’t look her in the eye. The one who hid himself behind layers of clothing and masks and silence.
Everything Audrey had been worried about up until that moment disappeared in an instant. She’d been so nervous about what staying with Theo this weekend meant, what they might do, what all that might be like, that she’d almost forgotten the most important things:
That it wasTheoshe wanted to be with.
That what happened just now had seemed to shatter every bit of confidence he’d built up over the last several weeks and months.
That in any case, despite his newfound or rediscovered self-assurance, he’d probably been worried about the same things she was.
