The Wedding Party (The Wedding Date, #3)(81)

Maybe whatever food Alexa brought would distract Ben enough he wouldn’t say anything about that, either.

Ben looked him over.

“Go change. Alexa can’t see you looking like this.”

Theo looked down at himself. He was in the sweatpants he’d had on since Sunday, a food-stained T-shirt, and socks with holes in them. Ben had a point.

Just as he walked back into the living room, after a fast shower and with clean sweatpants on, Theo heard the doorbell rang.

“Come on in,” he said as he opened the door. She had multiple packages in her arms. Ben jumped to grab them from her.

“You look better, but you still look terrible,” she said as she walked in the door. “Hey, Ben, how’s he doing?”

“Thanks, Lex, good to see you, too,” Theo said. “He is doing much better, thanks for asking.”

She grinned at him and followed Ben down the hallway to the kitchen.

“The mayor told me to say hi. He wanted to come and check on you himself, but I managed to talk him out of that. He said he wanted to see with his own eyes that you were better, since the last time he saw you, you were on the ground being worked over by the paramedics. I said I’d drop this off for you.”

Theo winced as he opened the box she pushed toward him. Great, a bouquet of fruit, just what he needed.

The whole reason he’d wanted the rally in Berkeley in the first place was to show all of California the great things they were doing there, that his boss deserved a statewide stage, and okay, fine, that he, Theo Stephens, was an asset to any politician or campaign. Now when anyone thought of him, they’d just think of him getting worked over by paramedics in the back of his own rally.

He sighed.

“Lex, I need to talk to you about something.”

Alexa patted his arm and nodded.

“I’ve been waiting for this.”

Ben grabbed a take-out container.

“Talk some sense into him, please, Alexa,” Ben said. “He’s been freaking out for days.” Ben picked up some chopsticks and melted out of the room. The jerk had probably taken all the potstickers.

Theo sighed and looked at Alexa.

“I don’t know how I’m going to face the mayor. Or anyone else in the office, for that matter, after the disaster I made of the rally. I don’t know if my job can survive this.”

Alexa opened another take-out container and pushed it toward him. Ahh, the potstickers. He picked one up and bit into it.

“Of course your job can survive this. What are you even talking about? I wasn’t at the rally, so refresh me on this: did you hit yourself over the head?”

He should have known Alexa would make light of this to try to make him feel better.

“No, of course I didn’t, but I should have known this was going to happen. I should have planned for this. And I didn’t, so it’s all my fault.”

Alexa picked up a potsticker.

“Theo, I adore you, but you always have had a hero complex. In the same way you can’t save the world single-handedly, you can’t destroy the world single-handedly, either. This self-flagellation has got to end. You’re taking way more responsibility for this than you need to—this wasn’t all about you, Theo, and you know it.”

He dropped his half-eaten potsticker on the counter. He’d thought he could depend on Alexa to know the deal here. Had she not listened to him all summer when he kept talking about all the conference calls about this very topic, and how he’d single-handedly gotten the campaign to have the rally in Berkeley, despite all the worries about protests?

No, of course she hadn’t. Because Maddie had been the one he’d told all that to.

“It’s not self-flagellation; it’s reality. This is on me. Everyone told me they were worried about protests, but I blew them all off. I barely even talked to the police chief about the rally, other than to make sure he knew it was going on. I could have prepared for this. I could have prevented it! If I’d taken any of their worries seriously, we could have kept the rally from being disturbed in the first place.”

Alexa reached for a potsticker.

“Hey, do you know whose job it is to plan for things like this? The chief of police! Who, by the way, is also mortified about what happened and has sent his apologies to you.”

Okay, she had a point there, but it was still his job, too.

Alexa took a can of sparkling water out of his fridge. One of the ones he kept around for Maddie.

“But most important,” she said, “you’ve been doing this for a long time. Everyone knows you and trusts you. One bad judgment call isn’t going to destroy your reputation forever. Especially since this was a group effort. You always freak out like this.”

He sighed. She was determined to try to make him feel better, wasn’t she?

The problem was, Alexa cared about him too much. She was too worried about him recovering well from his injury, and had probably listened to Drew talk about how he needed peace and relaxation and a calm mind or something like that.

Damn it, where was his no-bullshit friend? The one who would tell him the truth, damn his feelings?

Maddie. That friend was Maddie.

Alexa patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s not that I’m telling you to get over yourself, but also, get over yourself. Bad things happen; we all fuck up sometimes. We get up and move on. Get better, come back to work, apologize to everyone you need to apologize to, don’t make this a bigger deal than it needs to be, and move on to the next thing.” She took another potsticker. “Okay?”