Theoretically Perfect (Theoretically Straight #2)

Epilogue

Saturday, July 13

Any minute, Caleb is going to walk through the front door, and I’m trying not to stare a hole into it.

“Dude, you’re going to vibrate into the fourth dimension if you don’t calm down.”

Lola sits on the couch, a neat stack of files beside her laptop on the coffee table and a legal pad in her lap. She was nice enough to let me in when I showed up an hour ago, too excited to sit at home any longer. I’ve tried to keep myself contained to a recliner, but the nervous energy got to be too much and now I’m pacing the edge of the long rug that runs through the middle of the living room.

“Sorry,” I mutter, kneeling down next to the coffee table and folding my legs under me. “I’ll try and sit still.”

“Best of luck,” Lola replies with a grin, scribbling something down on her pad before she moves on to the next file. “You know, it’s been so quiet around here without Caleb and Dad. Mom and I end up talking about work all day. It’ll be nice to get a break from all of the cutthroat, soul-eating carnage for a while.”

“That sounds… unpleasant.”

Lola shrugs. “I’m getting kind of into it, actually. I understand why Mom’s stuck it out as long as she has. There’s just something exciting about taking these two diametrically opposed forces and standing between them while they hurtle toward each other at a thousand miles an hour. Plus, you get to stick to awful rich men every now and then, which is something I could really get used to.”

“Glad to see you’re starting to enjoy your work,” I say, leaning my elbows on the table as I glance at the stack of folders. “It’s sort of hard to imagine all of these relationships coming to an end. Doesn’t it make you sad?”

“It did when I first started,” Lola says, shuffling through the next file. “But not so much anymore. People get divorced for a multitude of reasons, not all of them are sad. And to be honest, most divorces are very cut and dry. Just an agreement between two partners to go their separate ways. One could look at it as a new beginning if they were optimistic enough.”

She grabs another file, and my eye is drawn to a familiar name on the next folder. Kora Briggs. My heart skips a beat, then slams into my chest like a jackhammer. I reach for the file, Lola’s head snapping up from her work.

“Hey, you can’t?—”

“It’s my mom,” I say flatly, opening the file and scanning over the information.

“Oh, honey.” Lola sets aside her work, coming to my side and kneeling next to me. “I didn’t know that was in my stack today. I’m so sorry, Theo. This is a terrible way to find out.”

“I’m okay,” I say, setting the file down face up on the table. My mind races, linking together the evidence I’ve been ignoring over the last few months. “I had my suspicions that this would happen, but it’s still kind of wild to see it for real.”

“Are you going to talk to your mom about it?”

I shake my head. “Not till she comes to me, I think. She’ll let me know when she’s ready.”

“You’re taking this really well, Theo.”

Am I? It feels like this whole situation has been inevitable since Caleb’s birthday. Not that I blame him or anything. It’s just the day that Dad drew his line in the sand. And now the entire family has crossed over to my side. It sucks that he made us choose to begin with, but I’m not going to lie and say that I’m not happy to have Mom, Grace, and Nate supporting me.

The front door opens, Nora’s voice drifting in from the other room.

“We’re back!”

Lola takes the folder, adding it back to her stack as I scramble to my feet, skidding into the hall. Nora smiles when she sees me. “I had a feeling you’d be here.” She wraps me up in a quick hug, then turns back toward the door. “Caleb’s just grabbing his luggage. The boy came back with an extra suitcase because he bought so many souvenirs. Just something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about sharing a space with him one day.” She winks at me, then moves into the living room.

I rush out onto the porch, meeting Caleb at the top of the stairs. I don’t care that he’s carrying three suitcases and a duffle bag. I grab him, crushing him against me with enough force that his feet leave the ground for a moment.

“Theo… I need to breathe.”

I set him down but don’t let go, my body too starved of his touch to allow myself. He’s grinning at me, his nose red and his freckles darker than I remember. He sets the suitcases down, shoving the duffle behind him as he returns my hug, resting his head on my shoulder.

“Oh my god, I missed you so much.”

He smells like sunscreen and peppermint, and I can’t get enough of the relief that washes over me now that he’s back in my arms. It’s a little frightening how much I missed him. But I’ll worry about that later. Right now, I just need to soak up as much Caleb as I can.

“Watch out, Dad coming through.” Bert maneuvers around us, every spare inch of him covered in luggage. “I can’t feel my fingers, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Let me help,” I say, my body screaming at me when I release my hold on Caleb. I take two of the outermost bags from Bert, slinging them on my shoulders.

“Isn’t he the best?” Caleb asks his dad.

“I’ve always thought so, no matter what your mother says.”

I look at Caleb, but he’s laughing. “Don’t listen to him. Mom’s crazy about you, too. She complained all the way home that with me out of the house, you don’t come around, and she’s missed you, too.”

A warmth swells in my chest as we move through the front door, Bert dropping his bags in the foyer.

“Oh, it’s so good to be home,” he says, bracing his hands on his back and taking in a deep breath. “I never thought I’d miss the humidity so much. Whoever thought it was a good idea to go to Arizona in the summer should be fired. Out of a cannon, preferably.”

Caleb makes eye contact with Bert and they both say in unison, “It’s a dry heat,” then burst into laughter at their inside joke. They seem closer than ever, and that warmth in my chest twinges a bit as I realize I’m envious of that connection.

“I’ve got so many stories for you,” Caleb says, nodding his head towards the stairs to get me to follow him. We climb up to his room, and he sighs with relief as he unloads the luggage onto the floor.

“Oh my god, your bed is actually made,” I tease him.

“Mom must have done it while I was gone,” he says, sitting in his desk chair and rolling it over to the first suitcase. “Because I know for a fact I left it a mess.”

“That sounds more like it.”

He sticks his tongue out at me, unzipping the suitcase and pulling out armfuls of clothing that he tosses into the hamper beside his desk.

There’s so much I want to tell him. Too many things that happened over the summer that didn’t feel right leaving in a text thread. But for the moment, I’m content settling into the corner of the bed, watching the boy I love dart back and forth as he recounts his time away. He tells me about the strange hotel they stayed at that seemed to be carved out of the red-hued rock from the area. About the early mornings out in the desert before the sun rose over the mountains and the amazing colors that changed by the second there on the sands. About the way his dad’s job worked and the race against the clock to capture the lighting their shot required. I was enamored with a place I’d never been, listening to Caleb’s stories.

And it strikes me just how much I want to be there with him the next time he goes on an adventure. To witness the ways he interacts with the world. I want be the one with the inside jokes and be a part of the stories that he brings home.

Most of all, I just want Caleb.

“Okay,” he says, stowing the last of his clothes and collapsing on the bed next to me. “I’ve done enough talking. Tell me about your summer.”

“Work has been good,” I start, shifting till I’m parallel with him on the bed, and I take his hand in mine. “Jake’s really got the hang of it now. It’s actually fun when we’re working the same shifts.”

“How is he doing?” Caleb asks, rolling on his side to face me. “Is he still crashing at Shauna’s?”

“Yeah, he is. And for the most part, he’s okay. Or at least, as okay as he can be. I don’t really know how anyone can truly be okay with that situation. But I told him that he’s going to love Specter High and that he’s totally invited to our table for lunch.”

“Tell the rainbow sheep he’s found his flock,” Caleb says with a laugh.

“Wren’s Atlanta apartment is really cool. The group went down a few weeks ago, and it’s right off the beltline, so we walked over to Ponce City Market and ate ramen, then checked out this cool boutique artist shop, so Harrison and Elise bought matching Pokémon artwork, and Oliver bought this weird fedora because he’s Oliver, and Freddy wouldn’t stop making fun of the hat, which only made Oliver more determined to wear it, so you know, just the usual shenanigans.”

“Glad to see that things haven’t changed all that much.”

“And then there’s the stuff with my dad…”

Caleb wraps an arm around me. “We don’t have to talk about it unless you want to.”

“No, it’s okay. He met me after work one day, sort of out of the blue, and asked if we could talk. He started off apologizing, and for this split second, I really thought he was going to say that he’d had a change of heart. He told me that he was sorry for how he reacted with the whole situation on your birthday and that he wanted to move forward as a family and come back home. But something didn’t feel right, so I asked him if he still felt like me being with you was a sin. And he wasn’t able to give me a straight answer, which ended up being the answer.”

Caleb scrunches his nose. “Fuck that guy.”

I snort a laugh. “Yeah, I pretty much told him the same thing. Except, you know, he’s still my dad, so maybe I didn’t say fuck.”

“You totally should have said fuck.”

“I totally should have said fuck. But I did tell him that I can’t have a relationship with someone who thinks that who I am is literally evil. So, we left it at that.”

Caleb places a hand on the side of my face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say quickly. But that’s not true, and I’m trying to do better about putting on a ‘perfect’ face in front of Caleb, so I add, “I’m not, actually. I’m pretty messed up about it. It really hurt to walk away from him like that. And I know it’s what I should have done, and I know if I let him back into my life, it would only hurt worse, but I wanted to, Caleb. I really, really did.”

He pulls me closer. “I know, babe. I know. I am so proud of you for standing up to him like that. It took so much courage. Honestly, you’re such a badass, and I just want to make sure you’re fully aware of that.”

The sound of a camera shutter pulls me away from him.

“What was that?” I ask.

Caleb turns his phone around, showing me the picture of us, tangled up in one another.

“For the collage,” he says, tapping on the screen. The printer whirrs to life on his desk, the photo coming into existence before I can argue. He rolls onto his side, snatching it and holding it above the two of us. “Oh yeah, that’s the one.”

It’s not the perfect picture. Caleb’s eyes are closed and I have my face pressed into his side. It’s off-center, and in the corner, you can see a pair of socks on the floor that slipped out from Caleb’s suitcase.

It’s not perfect. But it is perfectly us.

“You know, I think you’re right,” I say, letting out a choked laugh as I bury my face in his chest. His words from earlier sink in as we lay in silence. I’m not brave. Not as brave as I should be. But Caleb makes me want to be. He makes me want to be the guy he’s describing, to measure up to his expectations—not out of necessity, but because I know he sees the potential in me. The perfection behind the imperfect.

And when he kisses me, it sets my skin aflame, and my brain buzzes with the electricity that followed me home all those months ago from Saint Catherine’s, this beautiful, wonderful spark that caught and burned away all of the facades I had surrounded myself in.

I’ll never be perfect. But thanks to him, I’ll always be me.