Chapter 33: CHAPTER 32 NICK

I didn't follow her after she slammed the door of the meeting room. It wasn't the right moment. I knew I'd thrown her for a loop. I'd been an asshole, but Noah just doing whatever she wanted with some other guy was something I couldn't take. It made me so mad, I started to question my judgment. I knew I had pushed her to get over me, and I knew that meant I needed to let her rebuild her life with someone else. But ever since I'd seen her with Simon, I wondered constantly if I'd been wrong. I spent all night thinking it over, and the next day, I waited impatiently for the moment when I could talk to her. But to my surprise, she was the one who showed up in my office. She didn't even knock, and that boldness made me want to kiss her more. I didn't bother to conceal my interest. Her pants hugged her in all the right places, and her T-shirt, even if it was nice, was a little revealing of those sexy curves I knew so well. Her cheeks were pink, her lips thick, a little swollen. With one look, I knew she'd been crying all night. She had a piece of paper in her hand. She laid it on my desk. "My letter of resignation. I'm not bothering with the two weeks. I'm just an intern; you can find someone right away. Simon will manage until you get someone in, if you even need anyone," she said without looking at me. Shit! I got up before she could run out, catching her wrist and pulling her around to face me. "Wait, goddammit!" I ordered her. I leaned back, tried not to look her in the eyes, but noticed her lips pursing as she jerked away and crossed her arms. "Don't quit, Noah. That wasn't my intention." "I want to quit, I need to quit…" she said, her eyes desperate. "Why? Why would you leave a job that's paying you more than any other could? Do you honestly prefer losing that over a dipshit like Simon? I thought you were smarter than that." "It's because of you, Nicholas. I don't want to see you anymore. That's why I'm leaving." "Wait a second," I said, again trying to grab her hand to stop her. As I looked into her honey-colored eyes, my mind started counting the freckles on her nose, but I already knew how many there were: twenty- eight, twenty-eight on her nose alone… I didn't want to not see them again. I didn't want to not see her. "We haven't been dealing with this especially well, have we?" Noah looked at the ground, and then back at me. "We only know how to hurt each other, and I…" Her eyes were moist, and she bit her lip. She didn't want to cry in front of me, but I knew her too well, and it would only be a matter of seconds before she lost control. "I need to get over this." Her voice was soft as a whisper. I could barely even hear her. Instinctively, I wrapped her in my arms, burying my face in her neck and breathing in the scent of strawberry on her skin… "I miss you so much," she admitted, and those words cut straight through my soul.I clutched her hair, pulled her head back, and stole a kiss, a kiss I needed just then, a kiss I had to give her before I told her what I had to say. It wasn't a deep kiss; I wasn't looking for anything but affection, love, longing. Our lips, pressing together, were sealing a sort of promise. "There's nothing we can do to change what's happened," I said, admiring her face, pausing over every detail. "And I want to think that the rage I'm carrying inside will disappear someday, Noah. I hope it will, I really do, but right now, it just doesn't feel possible." She listened attentively. "You're never going to forgive me for what I did, are you?" she asked, trembling. "Of all the things you could have done…cheating on me was the one thing that could have ruined us." Even that day, after so long, the mere thought of it was unbearably painful. "I know…" she said, wiping her cheeks. We stayed there in that strange silence, a silence that wasn't uncomfortable, but that felt like the prelude to an important decision. There was something I needed to say, something that had been stuck in my head for a while and that I couldn't forget. "Noah, the thing that happened at Dad's—" She cut me off. "You regret it, I know. You don't have to tell me." "I don't regret it. To the contrary, I think it was the right ending for us, don't you think? I wanted to talk to you and ask if you were all right, but you vanished, and you wouldn't pick up when I called…and finally I realized it was better that way." The light coming through the window shone in her eyes as she looked up at me. I wished I could see something besides that pain that looked just as powerful as mine. How could we suffer so much together when being apart made us agonize so?"I'm leaving this afternoon…and I don't really know when I'll be back. Don't worry, Noah, I won't touch you again." She took a deep breath, as though she could somehow steel herself and flee from her sadness. "The worst thing of all is that even with all that's happened, I don't want you to go," she said, trying to control herself. On its own, my hand moved again and stroked her cheek. Her eyes closed, then opened again, glancing at it. Before I could react, she grabbed it and turned it around, revealing the tattoo I'd gotten a year and a half ago. She looked at it for a second, and we were transported back to that special night…the night when Noah had sat atop me and scrawled messages of love on my skin. You're mine, she had written, and I'd run off to get it tattooed there so her words would become reality in my flesh. Without warning, Noah pressed her lips onto my skin, and I quivered as if from an electric shock. I could feel it, I could feel the way the wall started to crumble, and worst of all, I was scared… I was scared to fall again, scared to make the same mistake, scared to be exposed again, to feel stripped of that sense of power I'd worked so hard to establish. You're going to regret getting it. I know you are… You'll regret it, and you'll hate me because it will remind you of me even when you don't want it to… Noah's words after she saw I'd gotten the tattoo leaped into my mind as if she'd only just uttered them. And it seemed that even then, she'd known that what she was saying would turn out to be true. "I need to go." I tried to walk past her and go out; I was going out that door and wouldn't come back until I absolutely had to, but Noah panicked and grabbed me tight around the arm. "No, no, no, no…" she repeated as the tears shrouded her eyes, so swollen as their glassy brown irises begged to stop the inevitable. "Please…please… Let's try again. Let's try again, Nicholas…" she begged, her fingernails digging in. I clenched my jaw. Dammit! Why did she have to make everything so hard? "It's not a question of trying, Noah. What we had is gone." "I know you can love me again… I know you don't love Sophia. I know you love me, only me, remember? You said you'd always love me, no matter what happened. I never asked you to come back because I was waiting for time to heal us, but it hasn't, and that can only mean one thing. Now I'm doing it. I'm asking you to give us another chance." "Don't ask me for something I can't give you," I growled, pushing her out of the way. But that touch made me freeze again. I looked at her to be sure she understood me. "I can't love anyone. That ship has sailed, okay…? I opened up to you once, despite all my instincts. I've tried, I swear I've tried, but I'm not made to love, I'm not a person who can be loved—that's a lesson I learned from you." "I do love you," she declared softly. I hated to think of what a stranger would see in us: two people with bad pasts, bad relationships… We didn't know what love was, neither of us did. We'd suffered too much at an early age and had wound up making the people who tried to get close to us suffer, too. "You don't love me, Noah. You grabbed the one weapon that could take me down and pulled the trigger." "I'm here! I'm still here, and so are you! You can barely stay away from me, and that means something; it has to mean something! After a year, we can't stop coming after each other… Do you honestly want to end up with someone else? Think about it, Nicholas, because if you leave, if you leave and abandon me again, I might not be here when you come back!" "Is that supposed to be a threat?" Just imagining that she might be with someone else horrified me."I've waited for you. I've been waiting for you ever since we broke up. A year and a half has passed, and I'm still waiting for you to come back to me, and you are doing it, but you can't commit. I can't bear it. It's now or never, Nicholas, because if you leave, if you leave me again, you and I are done forever." Silence overtook the room, and her eyes were filled with disappointment and incredulity. I took a breath, preparing to talk again. "Goodbye, Noah," I said with a terrible ache in my chest. Noah stepped back as if the words had burned her. I knew what I was giving up if I walked out that door, but I couldn't give her what she needed from me. I watched as her sorrow became something else, something darker and harder to decipher. "Goodbye, Nicholas." She left without looking back. And soon, I was walking out as well.