I groaned, burrowing into the space between his face and the pillows. “Stop being right. You’d better not have that smug look on your face.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Shelly.”
“You sound smug.”
“When have I ever been smug?”
I pushed a fist into his chest weakly, not pulling my face out of the pillow yet. Noah kissed the little bit of the side of my face he could reach.
“What time is he leaving?”
“He said something about leaving at seven.” I felt him stretch over me, heard the quiet sounds of his thumb tapping at my phone.
“There. Alarm set for six-thirty. Now, you think you can stop tossing and turning and get to sleep? Some of us don’t have to work tomorrow.”
I told Noah I loved him and fell asleep easily in his arms after that.
At six-thirty the next morning, I jumped out of bed as soon as the alarm went off, instead of snoozing it for a while to buy myself another two minutes under the covers the way I always did. I all but skipped across the hallway to tell Lee I’d be coming with him, but—
His and Rachel’s bed was empty. It was made, the covers pulled up neatly.
I ran to the kitchen, but there was no sign of them.
I flung myself out the front door.
His car was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lee, it turned out, had gone to Berkeley for the day with Rachel. Ashton and his girlfriend met them up there. They had a great day, if Lee’s Instagram story was anything to go by. They did everything Lee and I had talked about.
The worst part was, I wasn’t even jealous. I didn’t resent Lee that day in Berkeley. And I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I knew I should’ve felt like that. Hadn’t I been set on going there for college practically my whole life?
So why did I suddenly feel like Lee was the only reason I wanted to be there?
Noah did his best to cheer me up. I was so mad at myself for feeling so shitty about letting Lee down and missing the trip to Berkeley, it kept me distracted all day. Noah didn’t seem to mind, though, which I really appreciated. We spent most of the day together on the beach, and he’d made reservations for us at some fancy restaurant, so we got all dressed up to go and eat five exorbitantly priced and too-small-to-be-really-filling courses.
Eating at some fancy restaurant with Noah made me feel so grown up. I could picture us doing stuff like this at Harvard. I could picture us in some apartment together, cooking. I could picture us walking hand-in-hand around the city like we did over spring break, getting coffees and studying.
I wasn’t so distracted by the end of dinner. I was even less distracted by the time we got back to the empty beach house. Having the day to just the two of us had made us both giddy. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom before ripping each other’s clothes off.
“We should probably go to bed,” I told Noah afterward, lying across him on the couch with my legs tucked between his, my fingers lightly drawing circles on his chest. “Before anybody gets home.”
“They’re not coming home,” he told me. “Lee said yesterday he was planning to stay over at Rachel’s tonight. They’ve got plans tomorrow. Which means,” he added, nipping at my earlobe with his teeth, “you’re going nowhere.”
We fell asleep on the sagging old couch, a faded throw tossed over us.
I woke up with a crick in my neck and Noah’s elbow sticking into my stomach and to the sound of the front door slamming shut. A sigh tinkled through the room as someone started pottering around in the kitchen.
“I know, I know, I said I was spending a few days with my parents, but it’s driving me crazy. I can’t stand it. Every other minute it’s ‘I’m keeping the wedding china’ and ‘Good, I never liked that crap anyway; I want the air miles’ and ‘You wouldn’t have those air miles if not for me’ and ‘Amanda, tell your mother I’m keeping the air miles’ and ‘Amanda, tell your father he can have the air miles when he stops sleeping with that tart from the wine club’ and ‘Amanda, tell your mother I’m not sleeping with her and she’s not a tart.’ I swear to God, I’m going to kill them both, and then I’ll get the air miles and the wedding china and all the other bullshit they’re arguing over in my inheritance. See how they like it then.”
I froze against Noah, who was stirring at all the noise, as Amanda slammed down a mug and the box of tea June kept on the kitchen counter.
“Uh,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.
“Oh, don’t worry, sweetie.” She waved a hand at me. “I’ve walked in on my roommate having sex with a whole bunch of people. Not all at once, obviously. She always forgets to put a sock on the door or whatever. Plus, I’ve seen that moron running butt naked across a football field after losing a bet. This is nothing.”
“Uh,” I said again.
“Wha’s going on?” Noah mumbled, wriggling his arm. “My arm’s dead.” He tried the other one, shifting the elbow out of my stomach to rub his hand over his face and look over at the kitchen. “Oh, thank God. I thought it was my mom.”
“Nope, just me.” Amanda grinned and waggled her fingers before her scowl reappeared and she went back to slamming things around in the kitchen. “Normally I wouldn’t barge in, but, hey, if you give me a key and my parents are driving me up the wall with this whole divorce thing, I’m going to barge in. You guys want coffee? I’ll make you coffee.”
“I thought this was, like…a last-ditch family holiday?” I said, recalling my previous conversation with her about her parents.
“It was supposed to be, but neither of them seem to be able to remember that. Pair of tossers.”
“Hey, Amanda, you think you could pass us that blanket?”
She kept ranting, launching into this whole thing about how her mom was mad at her dad for a supposed affair, but how she’d been having an affair, too, and they were both as bad as each other—but she did take pity on us and passed me the blanket I’d pointed to, turning her back to give us a little privacy while Noah and I wrapped the blankets around ourselves and gathered up our clothes from across the room.
I got the impression that Amanda wasn’t looking for sympathy so much as someone to vent to. I liked her—but not enough to hang around with her wearing only a blanket. I figured Noah could take the lead on this one.
“I’m gonna go take a shower,” I said. “I have to be at work in a few hours anyway.”