“Okay, well. At least he didn’t lie to you.” Corey let out a long breath. “I swore I’d never tell you this but I think it’s in Theo’s best interest if I do, and fortunately for him, I really did love him. Do, I think. Some part of me always will.”
My shoulders stiffened at that. People who loved other peopledidn’tleave them in the state Theo had been in post-breakup. He’d been shuffling around like a zombie for weeks after. I’d had to check in on him every day and sit with him to be sure he ate at least once a day.
“So, Theo and I broke up because I proposed to him and he turned me down,” Corey said. “Because he was in love with you. I knew, that, obviously, I’m not stupid?—”
Corey kept talking, but I couldn’t hear him over the sudden ringing in my ears, so loud it made me feel like my skull might explode.
He’d proposed? Theo said no.
Theo said no, because…
“What?”
“What which part?” Corey asked. “The turning me down, in love with you, crying on my shoulder for hours while I tried to tell him totell you, the two bottles of Prosecco…?”
I’d missed more than I thought I had, obviously.
“The… in love… with me,” I said, voice tiny even to my own ears.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Had that been too quiet for him to hear?
“Yeah,” Corey said just as I took a breath to repeat myself. “Since forever. Again: I knew this. I knew it the moment I saw the two of you in the same place. Sorry for resenting you for it.”
“Apology accepted,” I responded automatically, before the rest of what he was saying could catch up to me.
When it did, I fell silent. So did Corey, and my world narrowed down to the sound of his breathing, the distant music, and the crowd in the background.
“Since forever?” I asked after what could have been hours.
“Yep,” Corey said, popping theP. “What was the line? Something about your souls being the same?”
“Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” I quoted. “It’s from?—”
“Wuthering Heights, yeah. Isn’t that the one where she’s screwing her brother?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah, close enough. You didn’t read it? It’s one of Theo’s favorites.”
“I read…someof his recommendations,” Corey said. “But I guess you read them all.”
I had. Anytime Theo mentioned a book, if I hadn’t read it—and I usually hadn’t—I made a point of doing so.
He read all my recommendations, too. Any book I mentioned. At this point, the only time we hadn’t both read a book that mattered at all to us was because Theo had read it for work.
Because he loved me.
“Why didn’t he evertellme?”
“You have met him,” Corey said, his shrug audible in his voice.
The sigh that escaped me was wholly involuntary. Yeah. Yeah, I had met Theo.
I’d met Theo, and I knew how he communicated. Words were, ironically, not really his thing.
But he’d shown me a hundred thousand times that he loved me. That waswhyI would’ve done anything for him. Only I’d never thought he could possibly mean it the way I wanted him to.
He’d shown me now that he did. But...
“He made it pretty clear he thought...we... were going to be temporary.”
