Chapter 18: : Chapter 18

By now, my response to Paul reaching for a letter is practically Pavlovian, so when he pulls one out on our ride to Zion the next morning, my hand is already outstretched.

Theo’s motionless next to me, his sweatshirt hood pulled over his head. I heard him in the bathroom early, when the house was still dark. He was trying to be quiet, but it was clear he was miserable.

I knew he wouldn’t let me in if I knocked on the door. So instead, I stared out the window, tracing the blackened lines of the mountains, only closing my eyes when Theo padded back into the room, the floor creaking under his feet.

Paul lays the letter in my hand. “Here you go, my dear.”

“Come back to you with questions?”

He grins, delighted by our routine. “You got it.”

I turn in my seat—only to find Theo’s face inches from mine, his eyes open and watchful.

“Jesus,” I gasp out. “You were asleep two seconds ago.”

“I was never asleep,” he says, his voice rough. “I was trying not to die.”

I hold up the letter. “Wanna read?”

He lets out a minty sigh. “It’s literally the only reason my eyes are open.”

I decide to let him get away with being grumpy; his hangover is punishment enough. I hold the letter between us so we can read it together, but my mind won’t latch on. Theo has moved in close, his arm pressed against mine, chin dipping into the space above my shoulder.

“Can you . . .” I press my elbow into his side.

He shifts, barely, but I the minuscule smirk that twitches at his mouth. “Distracted?”

“With you mouth-breathing on me? For sure.”

A quiet huff of air escapes his nose, and I bite against a smile. Amused-at-my-expense Theo is better than comatose Theo.

“Start at the same time,” he says. “Ready?”

But I’m already reading.

“Were you in LA when she sent this letter?” I ask Paul, turning in my seat. Theo plucks the letter from my hands and continues reading.

Paul nods. “Yes, she had a girlfriend in Glenlake send it to me so her parents wouldn’t know we were talking.”

“You must’ve been so upset.”

“For her,” he says. “I knew she must’ve been a mess. I hated to read that last line in her letter, pleading with me not to give up on her. She was the one with everything to lose if she didn’t give up on me.”

It’s true. She had so much to lose if she chose him—her education, her relationship with her family, her access to Paul if they didn’t allow her back at UCLA. I sense the corner she felt backed into to tell this lie, how sick she must have been, torn between her family and the man she loved.

I think about the hope she had before that dinner, the mixture of want and fear, and my throat crowds with emotion. I know that feeling, too—the plans you make, the dreams you weave in your head, only to have them break apart under the slightest pressure. It could be a terrible dinner, a family who doesn’t approve. A mentor who makes you question yourself for years.

It could be a man who lets you lean on him, but won’t lean in return.

Plans can be made and then just as easily broken. Hope can be created and fizzle away.

I wish Gram knew how brave I think she was for trying, even in the face of almost guaranteed failure.

And god, I wish she’d tell me how to do the same.

Next to me, Theo is silent, sensing my mood shift. He leans into me, just a bit, like he heard my thoughts. It’s such a small movement, would be nearly imperceptible if I wasn’t so hungry for it. But I am, so I feel it as if he wrapped his arms around me, and though I know I should, I don’t push him away.

I leap off a slab of rock, yelping when the frigid water touches my skin. It swallows me whole, and I come up gasping. Across the way, Theo moves toward me, his naked shoulders glistening under the sun.

“Oh, holy shit,” I laugh. “It’s so cold.”

We’re spending lunchtime at a swimming hole one of Theo’s friends told him about, not far off one of the popular trails. Apparently, it’s not as well-known as several other places to swim—no one else is here.

It’s an oasis. We’re surrounded by cottonwood trees and smaller, scrappier bursts of verdant plants. Above us, the mountains tower into the sky. Voices echo everywhere, but they’re distant and then gone.

After a morning of exploring some of the more popular, easygoing paths in the park, the frigid water is a welcome shock to my skin. The morning started out chilly, but now, with the sun hanging high above us, the temperature’s creeping past eighty. The dichotomy of the heat in the air and the chill in the water is delicious.

Theo glides to a stop in front of me, his shoulders bunching with his short, treading strokes. “Always have to make an entrance, huh?”

I push my plastered hair off my forehead. “You have to admit it was splashy. Pun intended.”

“The cherry on top would’ve been you slipping and cracking your head on a rock. This trip is missing a hospital visit.”

My fingers instinctively go to the scab on my knee, my stomach twisting. “No need to make up stupid shit I could do, Spencer. I’ve already racked up a couple of actual instances.”

He moves closer, his expression smoothing out into something lighter in deference to my tight tone. If nothing else, he pays attention. “What, like that time you fell down an embankment and nearly gave me a heart attack?”

“Or the fact that you’re sleeping on the floor because I didn’t read the Airbnb details closely.” We drift to a shallow spot, my toes brushing against the rounded rocks below. Theo stands. It exposes his chest, that softly freckled skin, and he runs both hands through his wet hair, pushing it back from his impossibly handsome face. I clear my throat, blinking away. “You didn’t have to sleep on the floor, you know. The pullout is big enough.”

“Don’t think it is,” he says, his voice the same texture as the red rock I run my palm over to ground me, a velvet roughness. “I was too drunk to care about sleeping on the floor last night, but I’m paying for it now. My entire body is fucked up.”

“That could also be the—and I quote—metric ton of bourbon you drank last night.”

He groans. “Not my most brilliant moment.”

My gaze drifts to Paul, who’s across the way, propped up on a flat rock, book in hand. Though he has a clear line of sight to us, I feel alone with Theo.

I turn back to him. “Do you feel better now?”

I can’t help my curiosity—or concern, though it’ll probably be rebuffed.

His face wipes clean of its small smile, his eyebrows cinching back into the frown that’s been his constant companion today.

My heart sinks. I start turning away in anticipation of him shutting me down. I don’t want to look at his face when he does it. I don’t want him to see how much it affects me that I can’t get to him.

“Shepard,” he says just as I start to swim away.

I glance over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow. He looks nervous, but something in his gaze is fortified.

“Can we play our game?”

It’s my game with Gram, but the truth is, playing it with Theo keeps it alive. And if he’s going to hand me a secret right now, he can call it ours all he wants.

“Okay,” I murmur. “Tell me a secret.”

He wipes a hand over his mouth. Delicate water drops shift all over his skin, clinging desperately to his eyelashes and hair, collecting in the soft hollows of his collarbones and rolling down his shoulders, his chest. They touch him everywhere I want to. I resist the urge to press my finger against every one, wipe them away so all he feels is touch.

“I’m stressed because they’re—uh, Where To Next’s business model is shifting. We had investors come in last year and buy a majority stake of the company, and—” He lets out a dejected sigh. I move closer, the water lapping gently at my skin, and he watches my approach. “Any way I describe it will be a massive understatement, but to give you an example, the off-season deals will go away eventually.”

“What!” I exclaim. “That’s the best part.”

Theo’s expression twists. “I know. If the projections hold, then we’ll recoup whatever losses we suffer with VIP packages and other elevated offerings. And if they don’t hold, then the whole fucking thing goes down. I think it’ll go one way, everyone else thinks it’ll go the other.” He runs his hand just beneath the water. “Anton and Matias got on board with it quickly. Really quickly.”

“That hurt you.”

Theo’s eyes flash with surprise. “I—I mean, it could run the company into the ground, and there goes all our hard work. It also goes against the reason we came up with it in the first place. Travel should be accessible, not some series of Instagrammable moments that puts people on the outside looking in. This would make it unachievable for some of the people we’ve served for years.”

His voice drops, so quiet that the birds singing above us nearly drown him out. “My dad thinks I’m too emotional about it. He keeps demanding that I do whatever they want just to keep—the peace.” He clears his throat, squinting off into the distance. “Last night I told him he has to stop calling me. I don’t want to spend the rest of this trip miserable over shit I can’t control. It’s bad enough I let him ruin my night last night.”

Relief is as cool as the water against my skin, and pride as warm as the sun shining down on us. I get the feeling he doesn’t set boundaries with his dad often.

“I’m glad you did that. No offense, but your dad’s a dick.”

One corner of his mouth pulls up. “Told you, it runs in the family.”

Normally, I’d jump all over that, but I’m starting to see there’s very little of Theo’s dad in him. Paul’s fingerprints are everywhere; it’s just taking time to reveal itself.

“There’s nothing wrong with being emotionally invested, you know.” His expression softens with the realization that I’m not taking the bait. “It’s not close to the same thing, but for me, caring about the pictures I’m taking means I’m doing my best work. Why is it a bad thing that you’re invested? You built this business from nothing. If you’re worried about its success, of course you’ll want to fight it, whether it’s business, emotion, or a mix of both.”

His gaze moves over my face. “I do want to fight it.”

“Then don’t stop pushing,” I say. “Maybe you can change their minds.”

Theo looks down, then over at Paul, who’s lying on his back now, hands resting on his stomach. His eyes are closed, and Theo’s close, too, just for a beat.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “It’ll be fine.”

It’s hard to tell if he actually believes it, but I have no doubt it will be. If anyone can make miracles happen, it’s Theo, even backed into a corner.

He circles around me, the tightness in his shoulders loosening just a bit. “Now it’s your turn for secrets, Shepard.”

I blurt out, “I’m proud of you.”

I don’t know who’s more shocked by what comes out of my mouth: Theo or me.

“Oh god. I can’t believe I said that. Out .” I press my hand to my forehead, groaning. “Your head’s gonna get so big it’ll explode everywhere.”

He grimaces, but amusement overtakes his surprise. “Graphic.”

“It’s true, though. I’ve . . . kind of followed your career a little bit over the years.” His mouth curls in a wide grin, his dimple popping. I press my finger against it, pushing his face back. “

, don’t you dare bring up the LinkedIn thing.”

Thank god he doesn’t know about the notifications; he’s already too smug.

“We fought a lot for supremacy in high school, didn’t we?” I continue.

“Voted Most Likely to Succeed,” he says, dryly. “Our one and only tie.”

“But you won that, too, in the end.” I’m being unbearably honest. But with his admission, he’s showing me I’m strong enough to lean on. That maybe it’s safe to lean on him, too. “I’m sure you’re far too busy doing 30 Under 30 things to stalk LinkedIn, but I’m not exactly killing it.”

“You never list your titles, so I don’t actually know what you do,” he says. “You don’t like your job?”

I could just spill it all right now, but that’s too big. If I’m vulnerable in pieces, I won’t lose myself completely.

“It’s not what I want to do,” I say instead. “But I’ve been too scared to do what I actually want.”

“Your photography.”

I nod. That’s a secret, too. I’m handing them out now, but they’re manageable ones. “I tried to make it work after I graduated, but I got burned and gave up. Or failed, depending on how you want to frame it. When Gram died, I didn’t want to do anything at all.” I blink, and a drop of water falls from my eyelashes. “Especially something that she never got to see me succeed at.”

“I doubt that’s how she saw it.”

Deep down, it feels true, but it hurts too much to dwell on.

“Anyway, you’ve always been this bastion of success to me. You never second-guessed yourself. And trust me, I recognize that some of that is white man confidence.”

He laughs. “I second-guess myself all the time.”

“Well, from my perspective, to see you at the helm of this thing you built, being invested in it in every way, and fighting back . . . I don’t know, it’s impressive. You’ve always been impressive, which is your most annoying trait.”

I expect him to laugh, but instead he just stares at me, his cheeks pink, looking leveled.

“There are forty other traits I could name off the top of my head,” I say, suddenly uncomfortable.

He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Goddammit, Shepard.”

“At what point did I make a wrong turn?”

When he lowers his hands, his eyes are red from the pressure he put there. “You didn’t.”

I don’t believe him, but he moves closer, gazing down at me with an expression so tangled I could never pull the strings of it apart to identify each emotion, even if I looked for days. For years.

He reaches out, peeling a piece of hair from my cheek, his fingers lingering. “We should yell it out.”

I blink up at him. “Excuse me?”

“Yell,” he says, laughing now. “It’s a proven technique to release bullshit.”

“We can’t yell. Someone’s going to think we’re being murdered.” I look over my shoulder at Paul, who’s picked his book back up. “We’ll interrupt Paul’s chill vibes.”

“Then we’ll go underwater.”

I stare at him. “Are you okay?”

“No. Are you?”

It’s my turn to laugh. “No.”

“Then get underwater and scream, Shepard.”

But he doesn’t give me a chance to do it myself. He takes my hand and submerges his body, yanking me under with him. His yell is a dull roar in my ears, muffled but powerful, like the first seconds of an earthquake, when it’s just the low groan of the ground shifting underneath your feet. Right before it knocks you off them.

I yell too, first in surprise, then because it feels good. It’s like my first plunge into this water minutes ago—the shock of it, then the numbness that brings relief. The water rushes into my mouth, pushes back out with the force of my breath and voice. With it, I push all of the grief of the last six months, the frustration of the past however many years, the disappointment and pressure I’ve put on myself. For ?

We come up gasping, staring like we’re seeing each other for the first time. Water runs like tears down his cheeks and mine. Theo pants out, “Again.”

I duck under the water with him, leaving my eyes open this time, drifting closer while we scream in tandem, bubbles rushing from our mouths. Theo’s leg winds around mine, and he pulls me close, wrapping an arm around my waist. My heart races as I grab his forearms, as his hand cups my neck. His mouth gets closer, and for a second, I swear it brushes against mine. But it’s just the water between us.

We come up wrapped around each other, water rushing off our bodies, gasping for air. I feel exorcised and electrified. Not fixed, but better. Like maybe I’m not the sum of my mistakes, my failures, my fears. Like maybe it’s not too late to fight for what I want, if I can admit it to myself. That it’s okay to have hope, to try, even if it doesn’t turn out the way I expect.

I can feel myself at the precipice.

“Ahh,” Theo says softly with a silly grin. It’s the last vestiges of our joint tension riding out on his breath. I want to taste it on his mouth.

Instead, knowing we have an audience of one, I laugh and shake my head, reluctantly untangling my body from his. “That was the weirdest end to Tell Me a Secret ever.”

“Do you feel better?” Theo’s hand slipping from my neck is our last connection point, and the slide of his skin lifts the hairs on my body more effectively than the frigid water we’re in.

I nod, unable to break my gaze from his. Beneath the surface, his knee bumps mine. Now that we’ve achieved emotional release, I’m hyperaware of how physically close we were. How close we still are. “You?”

“Right now, yeah.”

Paul’s voice carries on a sudden soft breeze, breaking our staring contest. “Take heart, you two. Nothing lasts forever.”

Theo and I turn back to Paul, where he’s lounging on the rock, camera in hand. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

Paul smiles, a quiet one, as he brings the camera to his face and snaps a shot. “Both.”