Don't Let Go(32)

After “The Best of Times” knocked you on your ass is what he didn’t add on to that sentence. I was surprised he’d noticed me at all, all locked up with Shayna like he was. Or that there was the possibility he even connected the two. He might not remember that moment in the car at all.
“Of course you did,” I muttered, running a hand over my face, feeling wrung out. “Is there anywhere that you won’t be? Because I haven’t found that place yet.”
The grin left, and a cold that had nothing to do with the air emanated off him.
“Yeah, here’s one,” he growled, pushing to his feet and regret flooded through me.
“Noah, wait.” I reached out before logic could form a plan and grabbed his arm, making us both suck in a breath as it slipped to his wrist and then his hand. We both stared at the union, and his fingers wrapped around mine. That breath fell right out of me. “I’m sorry,” I said, the words barely making it out of my mouth. “I didn’t mean—”
He slowly lowered back to one knee until we were eye level again, resting an elbow on my knee and not letting go of my hand. His expression was cloudy and troubled, his jaw tight, but all I could think of was the feel of his hand around mine.
“I know,” he said, his voice gruff. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a couple of beats before they opened and burned into me. “This is harder than I thought it would be.”
The proximity of his body, his arm on my knee, his hand shooting heat through mine had me dizzy with the stupids. I needed order, structure, someone to tell me to hold the crazy in, because right at that moment we weren’t grown-up responsible people. We were back in the place where we were us and knew how to be with each other, and I wanted to let everything sensible go.
“It’s been a lot of years,” I said instead, my voice sounding hoarse and scratchy. Trying to find the logic that had to be floating around if I could just snag it. “Everything got put away—doors locked up tight.” I paused and watched his eyes go soft. “But now you fall out of the sky and knock all those doors open. And suddenly I’m not sure where I am half the time.”
It was ballsy to admit that. It put me on very uneven ground. Shaky and vulnerable and wide open for him to scoff and blow me off and leave me looking like a fool. I never put myself in such a precarious position, and I couldn’t imagine why I was being so foolish now.
I felt his thumb move across my hand and warmth shot to all kinds of places it shouldn’t. He looked down at my hand in his with something I could only describe as heaviness.
“I know the feeling,” he said softly.
I was getting light-headed, and I hadn’t had near enough alcohol to justify that. I needed normal back. I needed to not want to wrap myself around him and do things we’d regret.
“Why are you out here with me, Noah?” I asked, knowing the direction I needed to go to get us back thinking right. “You have a pregnant girlfriend—” I stopped and licked my lips, feeling the burn in my chest again and refusing to allow it. “A pregnant fiancée out there,” I corrected. “Sitting alone, not able to drink, while you come track me down. That can’t bode well for your evening.”
He let go of my hand and scrubbed at his eyes, and I immediately missed the contact.
“Probably not,” he said.
Lighten it up. “You know, those pregnant emotions are—”
“I know,” he said. “I remember the emotions, Jules. I’ve had a pregnant fiancée before.”
Everything left me. All the words of wisdom, patience, sadness, chemistry, even anger—it all left me. I had nothing to say back as my lips moved but thoughts were whisked away with the icy cold. I shivered, realizing I hadn’t even felt it since he’d come outside. But the whiplash changing from the earlier tender moment was quite palpable.
“Yes, you did,” I whispered finally. “At least up until the pregnant part was over.”
I saw the flash in his eyes, felt it as he pushed away from me and to his feet.
“Not my doing.”
“Really?” I said, rising to my feet as well. I stepped away from the chair to put some space between us. “Because I’m pretty sure I didn’t leave to go sail the ocean blue—”
He walked slowly into me, backing me to the bricks until I gasped. He braced one hand against the brick wall. “You have no—idea—what I did,” he said, just inches from my face, his voice low and raw.
“No, I don’t,” I whispered, my voice shaking. Under the circumstances, I thought that was pretty remarkable. I held my chin up, refusing to back down even when he was so close I could have licked him. “And whose fault was that? You knew how to find me. I never left.”
“You didn’t have to,” he said. “Your mother did it for you when she convinced you to bail on us—” he said, his voice clipped. “To bail on our son.”
My entire body went hot, my skin prickling with the fire from a million tiny flames. The conversation we’d never had over twenty years earlier was boring into me with what I knew to be hard blue anger, but in the dark just looked black.
I pushed against him, hoping he’d move, but it was like attempting to move a boulder. Blinded through a shimmer of tears, I pushed up so that our noses nearly touched.
“And you bailed on me,” I said through my teeth.
My heart pounding in my ears, I stepped under his raised arm and pushed past him, yanking the door open and letting the warmth and barrage of sound sensations envelope me. I swallowed tears back and made a beeline for my table, wishing for crap to eat. I nearly sang with joy to see a bowl of cashews on our table, and Ruthie walking back to join me.