She crinkles her face into an expression that would be hilarious if I weren’t so irritated.
“Oh, how romantic. ‘Circling each other warily.’ You make it sound like you’re a pair of feral cats!”
“I don’t know what we are. We’re nothing.” I close my eyes, remembering Theo out on the beach in the darkness, moving one step closer to me each time I called his name. “But there’s something there. A connection. I can’t explain it, Suzanne. All I know is that we’re drawn to each other, and that drives him crazy. Every time I’m near him, it’s like he’s going to jump out of his skin.”
She says smugly, “I told you he had the hots for you.”
“I wish it were that simple.” Then I tell her the whole story, start to finish, beginning with the first time I saw Theo at Cal’s Diner all the way up to the encounter at the restaurant with Craig.
When I’m finished, she’s silent for a while, her brows drawn together in thought. “So what I’m hearing you say is that there’s incredible chemistry between you, which makes you both uncomfortable.”
I think about that. It’s a vast oversimplification of the situation, but it’s not wrong. “I guess so. Yes.”
“And you came right out and told Theo to stay away from you because you were so uncomfortable with it.”
“No, I told him to stay away from me if he wouldn’t tell me why he was so uncomfortable with it.”
She looks at me with her brows raised. “Did it ever occur to you that he’s uncomfortable because he can’t speak, and he hasn’t been in a relationship in years?”
When I don’t say anything, she continues.
“He was in a bad accident, Megan. The man went through a severe trauma. And from what I understand, he was pretty badly burned—”
“Burned?” I repeat, horrified.
“Yes, burned. He was trapped in the car for a while before they got him out. You can see some of the scarring on his neck, but who knows what kind of scars he has under his clothes? The simplest explanation for all his strange behavior is that he’s insecure. He’s got all these physical and mental scars, he knows he’s not the same man he once was, and here comes this girl who rocks his world…”
Her voice gentles. “A girl who’s had some trauma of her own. Maybe he’s thinking of your best interests by trying to stay away from you.”
Could that be it? He’s being protective of me? I think of how he acted at the restaurant when he saw Craig upset me and feel ashamed. “I told him he made me feel like I was losing my mind.”
“What would you do if he told you the same thing?”
I have to swallow around the sudden lump in my throat. “Leave him alone.”
Suzanne says briskly, “The operative word being ‘leave.’ Which he did. Apparently, now we know why.”
I turn to her with wide eyes. “I can’t be the reason he left! We’ve never even kissed! We’ve had a few strange conversations, some random weird emails and texts, an awkward encounter or two! No one in his right mind would walk out on his business, his home, his friends—”
“You’re right. No one in his right mind would do that. But we’re talking about Theo Valentine, sweetie. The man hasn’t been in his right mind for years.”
I groan and drop my face into my hands.
“Moving on—how was the date with Craig?”
“He listens to polka music. He takes manscaping too seriously. He has iceberg hands, an ego the size of the continental United States, and, I suspect, thinks when a woman says no, it really means yes.”
Suzanne mutters, “Geez, you’re tough.”
“Can we get back to Theo for a minute? What else did you have to tell me about what you heard?”
We pull into a parking lot, and Suzanne parks the car. She turns to me with a bright smile. “Nothing. I just wanted you to come to church with me.”
She opens her door, ignoring my growl of anger. “C’mon, heartbreaker, let’s get you under the shadow of the cross and see if your mother was on to something.”
She slams the door and sashays away, leaving me no choice but to follow.
* * *
I was expecting a church with a steeple like the one I attended every Sunday as a kid, but what I get instead is a building that resembles a big box store. Squat and unattractive, it’s painted a sickly beige and doesn’t have any windows. It sits alone in the middle of a large grassy lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence.
“It looks like some kind of detention center for the criminal justice system.”
Walking beside me through the parking lot, Suzanne laughs. “I admit it doesn’t have much in the way of visual appeal, but I promise what it lacks in beauty, it more than makes up for in awesomeness.”