I’m losing track of my objective.
Destroy Noah? Or was it something else? Something better. Sweeter. Hotter.
My hand grips his hair and he feeds me a moan.
His lips tempt me toward insanity. An innocent kiss turns into something more.
His hands have moved lower. One is tight on my waist, keeping me flush against him. The other toys with the bottom of my dress. His knuckle brushes against the bare skin of my upper thigh and my entire body clenches with want. This is indecent, even for a crowded bar. Someone should pry us apart and scold us, but either nobody notices or nobody cares.
As the kiss deepens and Noah’s tongue touches mine, I’m drawn more and more into him. It feels a little like I’m sinking into quicksand. I feel totally helpless. Defenseless. At his mercy. If he wanted to back me up, haul me on top of the bar counter, and continue this madness, I’d let him. I’d surrender, totally.
And that’s when clarity stabs through me like a sharp knife.
I break the kiss and shove him away.
I’ve made such a huge mistake. I wasn’t really going to kiss him. I was going to toy with him and then be done with it. But Noah didn’t let it end there. He played dirty. He dug down to the very root of me and took a little nugget of truth he can tuck into the front pocket of his shirt and draw out whenever he feels like taunting me.
“God. You’re a jerk,” I hiss.
He looks like I just slapped him. “What?”
“How dare you…do that! Do you honestly have no moral compass at all?”
I’m already trying to shoulder my way through the crowd, but he tugs me back.
“What the hell are you talking about? You came on to me.”
We’re both spitting venom, and when I try to yank my arm free of his hold, he releases it like he just got burned.
“Yeah, and then you crossed the line,” I accuse. “I wasn’t really going to kiss you!”
I’ve never seen him look like this before. Furious, yes, but it’s more complicated than that. If I didn’t know better, I’d misread his crestfallen expression for real hurt.
But that’s all part of it too, isn’t it? He can’t laugh and admit his wrongdoing now.
He’s still in the game.
He just kissed me like I was his lifeblood. He made me believe it in my soul, just for that one perfect second.
I can imagine him breaking character and coming clean. Sinister glee twisting his features into something wicked. But those eyes don’t change. That hurt, however fleeting, doesn’t turn into triumph. It turns into exhaustion.
“Tell the others I’m heading back to the school,” he says before turning and weaving his way through the crowd toward the front door, never once looking back.
I’m mad at him for leaving before I could. I don’t want the task of returning to our table to mop up the mess we’ve just created.
My stomach growls as if to say, Hi! Crap timing, I know, ha ha, but you do remember that you still need to feed me, right?
But I’m not ordering anything here.
I have a mission, and once I complete it, I’m gone.
I figure there are two scenarios I’ll find when I make it back to the table. Either Lorenzo and Gabriella saw Noah and me kissing and are deeply confused and possibly upset with us, or they just want some food and they’ll be deeply confused and possibly upset with us once they find out we didn’t actually order anything in all that time we were away.
Oddly enough, when I spot them in the crowd, they aren’t drumming their fingers on the table, making awkward conversation in our absence. Gabriella scooted into my seat on the bench and has her head tilted toward Lorenzo. He’s talking and she’s laughing and from the looks of it, they’re really hitting it off. She says something he must like because he reaches out and touches her hand. Then he doesn’t take it away.
Right.
Well.
That’s convenient.
“Hey guys.”
They both jerk in surprise then look up at me with guilt in their eyes. Gabriella scoots away from Lorenzo, trying to put some space between them.
I wave to let her know not to bother. “I don’t…whatever is or isn’t happening here, that’s…listen, Noah just left because…well, I don’t know exactly, but I’m gonna leave too.”
Wow, so this is what it would sound like if I lost half my brain cells.
They both have the decency to look worried.
“Is he all right?” Gabriella asks, her gaze flitting toward the door. “Should I go check on him?”
She doesn’t sound too enthusiastic about it. I can tell she’s only offering because she knows it’s the right thing to do.
“No. You two stay. Please. Enjoy, um…I was going to say the food, but we didn’t actually order. Sorry about that.” I’m starting to back away as if hoping to vanish into thin air, but then I pause and lean back in, gesturing between them. “I don’t know how to put this in a way that doesn’t seem awkward, so I’m just going to flat-out say it. You two seem to have a lot in common, and if you’re interested in each other, go for it. Lorenzo, I’m not…in a good place, apparently. I realize that now and I’m sorry. And Gabriella, I can’t speak for Noah, but…”
I decide that’s as good a place as any to stop talking. They meet each other’s eyes, and I just know the second I walk away from this weird interaction, they’re going to have a lot to say.
Her cheeks looked flushed. Do you think her cheeks looked flushed?
Noah just up and left?
And COME ON—they didn’t even order us food?
I offer a pathetic little wave then turn and have tunnel vision on the exit until I reach it, push through the door, and escape out into the night.
Chapter Twelve
My head is a mess of confusing thoughts. Outside the bar, I’m trying to think so hard and so fast—to make sense of the last few minutes—that I actually get a headache from it. Or maybe that’s just the aftereffects of the sun, and the shot, and the zero calories I’ve put into my body since lunch time.
For the last few years, Noah has been a constant in my life. Through hard breakups and moves, my dad’s cancer scare, and a bad set of bangs, he’s been my counterpart. My other half. My dependable nemesis.
Tonight might have changed that, and I only have myself to blame.
Like someone teeing up the perfect joke, I delivered myself to Noah on a silver platter. He couldn’t resist taking things as far as he did. I behaved poorly, and he one-upped me. This…this was the worst thing he’s ever done.
There have been a few times in my life when I’ve felt soul-crushingly sad or lonely. When I didn’t get invited to Lauren Valentine’s birthday party in the fifth grade, which included a limo ride to a Jonas Brothers concert and produced a bevy of inside jokes I was forced to endure for the next year of my life. Sorry, Audrey. You had to be there. When I didn’t get into my top-choice college that all my friends were going to, I thought it was the end of the world. When I didn’t land that job at a publishing house in my early twenties, I thought I was a loser and a failure, especially when I had to move back in with my parents for a few months (okay, a year) because I couldn’t make rent in the city. When I walk through the streets of Rome tonight and pass a couple sitting on a stoop, sharing a bottle of wine and leaning into each other, laughing, silly, in love, it hurts to look at them. It hurts to realize how far I am from being part of something like that.