Chapter 24
Emma
“Okay,”I said, sitting cross-legged on the chaise on Noah’s back deck an hour later, eating dinner under the stars. “Tell me about basketball.”
Noah took a bite of bread. “It’s a sport,” he said. “The idea is to take the ball and dribble it down the court, and then you?—”
“Very funny, jerkwad. I didn’t know you played it. Are you in a league?”
“No.” Noah poked at his grilled chicken, which he’d made with ease while also tossing together a green salad. He was a man who cooked, apparently. He was also—aside from the bread, which was fresh and delicious—a bit of a health nut, judging by the food in his fridge. Two things I hadn’t known about him before. “Every Monday I play four-on-four with a few friends of mine. We’ve been doing it for years. Except for the fact that we trash talk each other relentlessly, it isn’t very competitive. It’s mostly an excuse to hang out.” He took a bite of the chicken. “I play soccer on Thursday nights. That’s in a league.”
“Hmm.” I took a sip of my drink, which was some kind of sparkling fruit thing, non-alcoholic. “Basketball and soccer. What else do you do?”
“I run. Four days a week, usually in the park. I swim occasionally, though it isn’t my favorite thing. When I get bored, I surf.”
I took a bite of my chicken. “I’m exhausted just listening to that.”
He smiled. “I take it you don’t play sports?”
“Have you met me?” I shook my head. “No sports, no gym membership. There’s a treadmill in my apartment building. I use it sometimes.” The reason I picked the treadmill was because I could put my phone on it and answer emails while I jogged, but I didn’t tell him that part. It sounded too pathetic. “Aside from the fact that I have no time, I’m far too competitive for sports. No one would want to play with me. In New York, I stay slim by yelling at people and forgetting to eat lunch.”
Noah laughed at that, because he never did what I expected him to. Most people hated how driven I was, and lately, even I had been questioning it. Noah just shrugged it off like it was an easy problem to solve. “You should try surfing,” he said. “I know an amazing place. I’d teach you.”
I twirled a lock of my red hair around my finger. “This does not touch salt water, you lunatic. It’s very expensive.”
He made a shocked face, put a hand to his heart. “I’m sorry? You’re saying the red isn’t natural?”
“Have I disappointed you?”
“My entire worldview is shattered.”
I felt myself smiling at him. “Seeing me naked should have tipped you off.”
“As a gentleman, I make no comment on that.”
God, this was nice. And easy. I pushed away memories of the shower, how close he’d felt to me in those moments. How close I’d been, to my own surprise, to crying. Apparently it was me who was the lunatic, because I had no control over my emotions anymore.
I was sitting on a deck in a cool California night, eating a meal cooked by the man sitting across from me, a man who was gorgeous and funny and was somehow rearranging me in ways I didn’t understand. And suddenly I wanted to call my sister, tell her everything. Samantha would get it.
But Samantha didn’t know I was staying with Noah. She didn’t even know I’d seen him past dinner on that first night. Because I hadn’t told her what was happening with me. How screwed up was that?
“What is it?” Noah asked, reading my expression.
I shook my head, trying to get rid of my gloomy thoughts. “It’s nothing.”
He knew it wasn’t nothing, but he didn’t push. “Fine, then. Tell me about your day.”
I did. I told him about working for Catharine, the challenges and the rewards. The ins and outs I was learning about the movie business. Noah nodded, filling me in on some of the things I needed to know and giving me advice. He was way more knowledgeable about this business than I was, but he didn’t talk over me.
Before I knew it, I had talked for half an hour. I finally wound down, wondering when the last time was that I had talked that much to anyone about my life. I usually kept my inner thoughts to myself. It was old habit.
If Noah noticed I had talked his ear off, he didn’t let on. He poured us another drink. On the side table, his phone rang. He picked it up, glanced at it, swiped to ignore the call, then put the phone down again.
“Who was that?” I asked.
He seemed to hesitate, looking at me, and then he said, “My mother.”
“Oh.” I sipped my drink, not wanting to admit that part of me had wondered if the call was from another woman. Maybe those Instagram models were trying to get his attention while he was with me; I had no idea. I brushed the thought away. “You don’t want to talk to your mother?”
Noah laughed, low in his throat, a sound that was complicated with humor and bitterness. “No, I do not want to talk to my mother. And actually, she doesn’t want to talk to me. She only wants to berate me because yet again, I’ve disobeyed her expectations.”
I put my drink down. “That sounds terrible. Why is she so mad?”
He hesitated again. But something about the quiet, or the dark, must have motivated him, or perhaps it was the fact that I’d just talked to him like I’d never talked to anyone else. He chose his words carefully and said, “I come from a rich family, and I’m the only child. My parents set up a trust fund for me when I was born, and they put a ton of expectations on me. I was going to be the golden son to continue the family line.” He cleared his throat. “The next part doesn’t make me look like a very good person.”
Now I was dying of curiosity. “Try me,” I said.
Noah looked away from me, gazing off toward the rolling hills. “When I was fifteen, my parents went out to a gala one evening. While they were out the neighbor girl came over and rang the doorbell. I wasn’t expecting her to visit, but I let her in. She was nineteen. My parents came home early and found us, ah, mid-act on the living room sofa. She was the daughter of my father’s business associate and golf buddy. My parents were so angry they threw me out of the house.”
“My God,” I said. It sounded sordid and nasty. “Were you and the neighbor girl seeing each other?”
“No.” He turned back to me and gave me a self-deprecating smile. “That was actually the night I lost my virginity, though I never told her that. I never told my parents that, either, obviously. They just assumed I was a sex addict at fifteen who was determined to embarrass them.” He shrugged. “The whole thing would have blown over, but I went to stay with Dane, and he talked to Aidan and Alex, and pretty soon we all decided to get out of our respective homes and live together. Which we did. I suppose I could have apologized and gone crawling back to my parents, but I never did. And that only made them angrier.”
I had heard this story several times, about the four teenagers who ran away from home—each for different reasons—and lived together instead. Eventually they started Tower VC. “All of you were broke when you lived together, so I assume your parents cut you off,” I said.
“You assume correct. They wouldn’t give me money unless I came home, apologized, and agreed to follow the rules for the rest of my life. I decided I didn’t feel like doing any of that. I don’t like anyone telling me what to do. Being broke was good for me—I learned a lot, and it lit a fire of motivation in me to do something with my life. It brought me closer to my friends, who are my real family, my brothers in all but blood. It made me who I am.”
“I know that feeling,” I said. “I started out broke, too. I built Executive Ranks from almost nothing. I just wanted it so bad.”
“I know you know.” Noah smiled at me. “You worked harder than I did, Emma. We sold Dane’s software and made a ton of money in our early twenties. The other guys came from poor families, so it was a big deal to them. But when we hit it big and started Tower, I was the only one who was back to square one. I was the only one of us who had gone backward and was wondering what the hell to do with his life all over again.”
It all clicked into place: Noah’s seemingly careless life, his lack of willingness to be at work all the time. Then I remembered Aidan’s words about Noah always picking projects that made money, even when they looked like losers, and even more of the mystery came into focus. “That’s how you pick investments,” I said as the thoughts came into my head. “You pick things that have value but might lose money. Independent films. New film technology. The Chicago community project.”
Noah scratched the back of his neck. “Maybe?”
“You think they’re going to lose money, but they don’t,” I said. “A lot of them turn out to be profitable, not because of your decisions, but despite them.” I sat up straighter as it hit me. “Noah. You have spent all of these years at Tower VC trying to lose money?”
“I have lost us money,” he said, as if that were a point of pride. “Not all of my underdogs turn a profit. But how was I supposed to know Brad Pitt would read that script? Jesus, what a long shot. And the Chicago project was purely sentimental. I even got Aidan to agree to lose money on that one, and apparently the property value is about to go up. What a joke.”
I laughed, because the whole thing was so absurd. “That’s your big secret? You’re the worst venture capitalist anyone has ever seen. Your problem is that you can’t lose money even when you try.”
“I lose money lots of places,” Noah argued, and I realized this was genuinely his goal. “I get the odd success with Tower, which means the boys don’t fire me. But they don’t know everything I do. Which leads us back to why my mother just called to chew me out.”
“Why?” I asked. It was incredible that there was even more to this story. “Did you lose her money, too?”
“I absolutely fucking did, yes. Remember I told you they set me up a trust fund? By law I was supposed to get it when I was twenty-one, whether my parents hated me or not. They tried to fight it by taking me to court. I hired my own lawyers and fought back. It took a long time, but a few years ago I finally got access to my money.”
I sat forward on my chaise. “And what did you do with it?”
“I spent it.”
“On what?”
He looked up at the night sky, recalling. “Well, a few of my friends needed some cash. And I know a lot of the business owners around here. Word got around that I can help people out when they need it.”
That was infuriatingly vague, but then I remembered. “The restaurant where we had dinner the first night,” I said. “The owner was overjoyed to see you.”
Noah nodded. “They’d had some water damage that insurance wouldn’t cover, and they needed some new kitchen equipment. I made an investment in his business. If he can afford to repay me then he will, interest free. If he can’t, well, that’s the way it goes.” He shrugged. “The women’s shelter got a big donation. The food bank got a ton of supplies. I invested in a small business program for students at the local college. My favorite bodega got some money for a new sign. The list is pretty long. It’s actually weirdly hard to spend that much money, but I did it. My mother has just now figured out that the entire trust fund is completely gone.”
“And she’s furious.”
“Very fucking furious.” He smiled again, a real smile this time that had satisfaction and amusement in it. “She keeps calling me. She thinks I spent the money on drugs and prostitutes.”
I coughed. “I don’t know how much your trust fund was, but that sounds like a lot of drugs and prostitutes.”
“Several decades’ worth,” Noah agreed.
“And the other partners don’t know about this?”
“Alex knows about some of the small businesses I help, because he comes to L.A. from time to time. Aidan and Dane think I mostly goof off, which is fine with me.” He leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. “They all know about what happened when I was fifteen. But the rest of it—you’re the only one who knows the whole story.”
“This house,” I said, because now everything, everything made sense. “It’s a great house, but it isn’t a billionaire’s house. You don’t own any other properties. You only own one car.”
“I don’t keep most of my money,” Noah said. “Don’t get me wrong, I have a comfortable life. But how much does one guy need? I don’t need a home in the south of France or six cars. You can’t take it with you, like they say. So I have enough to live day to day, enough to enjoy my life, and money in savings. And that’s it.”
I shook my head. “You really are a man of mystery, Noah. I never would have guessed. Actually, I didn’t guess.”
He sipped his drink. “Yes, you did. You guessed it all just now.”
“I mean before. I just assumed… Well, I underestimated you.”
Noah frowned at that. “How would you know? No one knows another person when they first meet them, not really. And I don’t tell people this stuff. So I don’t see how you were supposed to figure it out.”
It always seemed so simple when I with Noah, the complicated parts of life explained so easily. He was a genius at it.
He was a genius at a lot of things, apparently. And I had underestimated him. I wonder how many other people did, too.