I know that hand.
That touch.
Noah.
I turn around and come face to face with him. His dark hair is an utter mess, and I wonder how many times he’s run his hands through it. He’s wearing a tuxedo and a nervous smile. His gaze drifts up and down my body appreciatively before finding my eyes, but when he does, what I see there causes hope to spark in my chest, which I quickly push away because I’ve already accepted that we can’t be together. I won’t be my mother. I will put Nova and Noah first. I’ll just use this chance to have the closure I need.
It’s possible that’s why he’s here anyway. For closure.
Truly, why is he here? He’s wanted nothing to do with me.
There’s something different about him tonight, and I’m not talking about the exquisite cut of his tux—which looks damn good on him—I’m talking about the look in his eyes.
“Are you okay?” his smooth voice rolls over me, wrapping me in its warm southern drawl and waking up parts of my body and soul I thought were lost forever. For the first time since coming back to New York, I feel like I’m actually home.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
Noah looks around at the lush courtyard outside of the ballroom, and my eyes follow his. There’s a fountain the size of a small house in the middle, and it’s surrounded by rows upon rows of lush bushes and brightly colored flowers, all separated by stone walking paths. The beauty of the garden is something out of a magazine, and one of the main reasons I chose this particular venue for the ball.
“I’m actually lost,” he says, turning back toward me.
“I don’t mean here in the courtyard,” I say, reaching out to touch his cheek, needing to feel him one last time and assure myself that I’m not dreaming. “What are you doing in New York?” Unable to help myself, I run his hair through my fingers. I jerk my hand back, only to have Noah catch it on the way down.
“Keep touching me,” he whispers, cupping my hand in his.
He tugs me closer, his scent—clean and woodsy—washing over me. It’s intoxicating, and oh, how I’ve missed it.
“I’ve missed you so much, Lennon. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. I’m sorry for not coming after you sooner, and I’m even more sorry for not believing you.”
This can’t be real.
Noah and I broke up. He didn’t believe me. He’s in Heaven, and I’m in New York, I remind myself. This has to be a mistake. I’m dreaming, or maybe someone spiked my drink. Yes, that must be it, and now I’m hallucinating. I look down, and there are his big, callused hands wrapped snugly around mine. Emotion creeps up my throat, and I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to push his face from my head and pull my hands from his grip, and it works.
The warm touch of his hands is gone, leaving mine cold, but suddenly that warm touch is on my face. Then his soft lips find mine, and my eyes fly open because this is real.
Noah’s brown eyes stare down at me with so much love and affection, and more than a little determination—it’s an image I’ll remember as long as I live.
“I understand what you were trying to tell me. I believe you. If I’m not too late, I’d like to hear your side of the story,” he says, slowly lowering his hands. “All of it.”
This is what I had been hoping for, the chance to explain everything with his trust in me allowing him to believe it. But now that I seem to have that, I’m not sure what to do with it. Suddenly all my plans are unclear. Will this change anything?
Swallowing, I decide just to take it from the beginning. “Mathis and I had been apart for nearly a year when he called me one night. He was drunk, trying to apologize for cheating on me, and threatening to kill himself. He said he missed me and he couldn’t live without me.”
I shake my head, remembering my panic. “I didn’t really think he’d kill himself, but it wasn’t something I could take a chance with. Foolishly, I went to him, found him at a club with our friends, and stayed by his side all night, trying to talk him down. It was pointless, because he wasn’t himself. He was in a very altered state. On our way out of the club, it was all I could do to keep him upright, and a few feet from the car, he went down and took me with him.
“Of course the paparazzi were there to capture every glorious moment, including the part where my skirt flew up around my face. As you’ve seen, pictures from that night were splattered across the internet in a matter of hours. It was the single most embarrassing moment of my life, and I had no idea it was about to get worse.”
I pause, wondering if any of this matters.
“Please, keep going,” Noah says, his face calm, his eyes warm.
Reliving this is the last thing I want to do, but I will, for him. “The next day, Mathis apologized. He swore he’d just been drunk and would never really hurt himself. He begged me to forgive him. I wasn’t in love with him anymore—probably never had been—so I reminded him that we couldn’t get back together, but I forgave him, thinking it would be good closure for us both.
“So when he made a similar call to me a few nights later, once again threatening to kill himself, I got pissed. Now I could
see he was doing it to jerk me around, playing with my emotions. So I hunted him down, and I screamed and yelled at him, and he screamed and yelled back. At one point he got mad, threw me up against a wall, and then instantly backed down, pleading with me to forgive him.
“I just wanted to be done, Noah. Done with Mathis. Done with the games. Done with that part of my life. I knew we had to sit down and have a serious talk so I could get through to him, so we agreed to go back to my parents’. Only we didn’t even make it three blocks down the road. I was driving us, and we got pulled over. The cops found cocaine and heroin in Mathis’s car.”