Page 31 of What Comes After

My lips parted in shock. “Holy crap. Are you serious?”

Theo nodded.

I burst into tears and threw my arms around him. “Oh my God, I’m so happy for you. Congratulations.”

He hugged me back, his embrace so warm and comforting.

When I pulled back to look at him, I couldn’t stop smiling. “I’m so proud of you. This is great news, Theo.”

“Devyn, there’s something I have to tell you.”

I tipped my head to the side and assessed him. “What’s wrong?”

“I have to go out to Hollywood,” he said.

“Of course, you do. You’re filming a movie!”

He nodded. “This is my chance. I have to put everything I’ve got into this, and that means I’m not going to just be going out west for this film, Devyn. I’m moving there permanently.”

In an instant, my heart sank. It felt like my entire world had imploded.

Theo was leaving.

He was leaving permanently.

“Oh,” I murmured. “Right, well, I mean, that’s to be expected, right?”

I was blinking my eyes rapidly, doing whatever I could not to break down into full-fledged sobs.

“Come with me,” he blurted.

My head jerked back. “What?”

Theo looked around my living room at all the boxes. Then he repeated, “Come with me. You’re selling this house, and you don’t know where you’re going to go yet. We can get a place together out there.”

He wasn’t serious.

He couldn’t be serious.

“Theo, I have a job.”

“They have those in California, too,” he reasoned.

Of course, they did.

They also had a much higher cost of living in Los Angeles than they did in Iris. If I was barely surviving now, how would I ever do it out there?

Nothing would have made me happier than to move in with Theo and be able to spend every day with him, but I knew that’s not how it would be.

I’d be job hunting, and he’d be on set filming for days on end.

Plus, I loved it here. I could never live in a big city like that.

“Theo, that’s not the place for me. It’ll never be the place for me.”

“You don’t know unless you try,” he stressed.

I let out an awkward laugh, mostly because I still hadn’t quite come to grips with the fact that the man I’d loved for so many years was asking me to move across the country with him when we weren’t even a couple.

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