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“Yeah,” I say with a scoff, shaking my head. “You know it’s not your job to fix them, right? Especially not if they don’t want to do the work themselves.”
She doesn’t say anything, but her face almost looks like she wants to. I recognize the way her eyes shift away from me for what it is. Guilt. “It is when I’m the reason they’re barely on speaking terms.”
That’s why she feels responsible. Why she’s never let Theo cut himself off from either of them for long. She wants to bring them back together because she’s the one who tore them apart to begin with.
“Theo’s a great guy. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen him so happy.” She must see the surprise on my face because she adds, “Ben drama aside, that is.”
I’m tempted to tell her that none of it is real. That the only reason we became friends was to stop him from ruining her engagement, and that we haven’t even hooked up in the way everyone thinks we have.
“I told Ben not to tell you,” she says. I glance back at her in surprise. “I was afraid you wouldn’t give him a chance if you knew, even if you guys only started as a hookup. He deserves someone great, and I thought you could be that for him. Maybe that was selfish of me.”
I can’t tell her the full truth, but I can give her this much. “He told me.” She tilts her head at me. I heave a deep breath. “He was honest with me from the beginning. I knew what I was getting into.”
“You did?” she asks curiously. She looks like she wants to say something else, but then I catch a large, shadowed silhouette over her shoulder, stepping into the light of the streetlamp. I make out Theo’s blond head, his dark eyes piercing even from feet away. His hands are in his pockets, shoulders slumped in defeat.
I’m not sure what Alice sees. He doesn’t seem very happy, hovering just a few feet away from us, like he’s too afraid to move. I say a quick goodnight to Alice before rising to cross the cobbled pathway. He looks grateful he doesn’t have to interrupt my conversation with Alice or interact with her any more than he has to. The pain is clear in his expression, in the unmasked longing in his eyes. I’m unsure how to comfort him, but I desperately want to do something.
“Hey.” He won’t look at me, even when I take his hands. I fold my arms tentatively around his neck instead, and he finally responds by wrapping his around my back.
“I’m sorry for leaving you.” He takes in a deep breath. “I just had to get out of there.”
My hands sink into his hair. He sighs into my skin. “I don’t blame you. I didn’t think it’d be that bad. How naive of me.”
When we return to the car, Theo doesn’t start the engine right away. There are too many questions buzzing between us, even though I’m sure I know some of the answers by now.
“You probably want some kind of explanation,” Theo says rather than asks. I tilt my head as I look up at him. Before now, I thought he’d told me everything I needed to know about his relationship with Alice. Or, at the very least, that he would willingly tell me what I wanted to know. But even if that’s true, I didn’t know the right questions to ask.
“Alice knows you love her,” I say. He nods, but he still won’t look at me. “And your brother knows it, too.”
“Yeah.” His voice isn’t much more than a puff of air.
“How long have they known?”
“I never made my feelings for her a secret, even if I never acted on them.” The words come steadily as he looks forward, out at the near-empty shops. “I’m not the type of person to pine in secret.”
Not like me.
I don’t know how I didn’t put two and two together sooner. He’s a terrible liar, which would make him an even worse secret-keeper. If he’s loved her his entire life, there’s no way he would’ve been able to keep that to himself. Definitely not for this long. It makes sense that Ben and Alice would already know. But what doesn’t make sense is what he tried to do the night of the engagement party.
“She always knew how I felt about her, but I never really knew how she felt,” he continues. “It never bothered me, though. We both had different goals in high school. She was still my best friend, and neither of us wanted anything to get in the way of that. But when she got with my brother…”
“What?” I prompt.
His eyes shudder closed. “He knew how I felt about her, too. Everyone did, except maybe our dad. Ben knew I’d take it as a betrayal, but it still didn’t stop him.”
There it is. Now their feud makes perfect sense.
“That was just the cherry on top of a shitty year,” he says. “From my knee injury to the NFL rejection, to finding out my little brother was dating the love of my life. And instead of talking about it like grown adults, he used you as a buffer.”
Another puzzle piece clicks firmly into place. My eyes snap up to him in realization. “That was the first night we met.”
He nods slowly. “I was a mess. We were a mess, and he never should’ve dragged you into it.”
I remember how small Ben looked that night, crowding himself into a corner as he watched his brother fall apart. I never would’ve guessed it was partly Ben’s doing in the first place.
“He knew how you felt about her, and he went after her anyway,” I repeat, almost unable to believe it. But I do, because it’s the only thing that makes sense. Even though it’s a side of Ben I’ve never seen, vindictive and undermining. Or maybe just a side of him I never wanted to see. “If Alice already knew, why were you planning to confess at her engagement party?”
“Because I wasn’t sure if she still knew,” he says. “Our friendship was never the same after I graduated. We had different obligations, even if she always made it a point to reach out to me. I wanted her to know those feelings never went away, and I wanted to know, once and for all, how she felt about me. If we could’ve changed our history, not that I can do anything about it now. Not without hurting a whole bunch of people.”
