Chapter 10 Torin
Torin
It’s strange to be at the Vancliff residence when none of the siblings are actually here.
I’m completely surrounded by so much Noah, but he isn’t even around to glare at me or blush or pretend he’s not hard… or whatever the fuck Noah Vancliff does.
I’m currently in his childhood bedroom.
Looking at a very cute stuffed animal panda that he apparently still keeps next to his pillow on the bed.
I look around the room knowing I’m on stolen time. Noah’s father is outside right now setting up the bar for our final schmoozing event of the week with Prince Fuckface Vaughn Everstrom.
I made up that first name, but it seems as fitting as any other.
Prince Vaughn is royalty from the Vaskar Coast that we’ve been courting for the last handful of days.
The fucking ridiculous combination of words in that sentence.
When Noah’s father called me asking if I’d come to the mansion this week to wine-and-dine the visiting royalty, I knew it wasn’t really a question.
I had to come.
Phillip Vancliff doesn’t really fuck around when it comes to his charities, and the prince is toying with the idea of donating millions and millions of dollars. When Phillip mentioned that I was now his stepson, the prince apparently went full fanboy on him and had to meet me.
I never thought a single photoshoot I did carrying planks of fucking wood would be so far-reaching, but apparently foreign royalty sees these things, too.
Before I had to leave Crimson, I hired a man from a private security company to tail Noah for the week.
Cost a fucking pile of money to get someone well-credentialed that quickly, but Phillip is going to pay me more than that for this week.
But I’ve realized Noah can’t be trusted to be alone.
He’s way too distractible.
Way too predictable, too.
He stops to look at butterflies along the sidewalk, and one afternoon last week I even saw him take a nap on a bench on the edge of campus.
The man literally almost got kidnapped, yet he acts like he’s immortal.
The security I hired agreed to be subtle, wear normal clothes, and make sure Noah gets everywhere okay while I’m not around to watch over him.
Roman’s way too busy and vague about his own shit, and after the black Benz was able to tail Noah so easily the other day, I don’t trust Roman to protect him for shit.
He needs me.
So right now, at least I know a professional is making sure he doesn’t get offed while he’s too busy doodling hearts on his homework assignments.
I dipped into Noah’s bedroom for the first time tonight.
I found a very interesting array of purple sex toys in one deep drawer of his closet, first of all.
The shocker is that most of them were clearly made for women. It’s obvious that he went above and beyond with the Clit Sucker Extreme and a G-spot stimulator that I’d love to see pushed up his tight ass instead.
I pull open a fancy wooden drawer on Noah’s desk.
There are high school yearbooks inside, as well as a couple of old Polaroid cameras that Noah seems to love so much. But there’s also a stack of leather-bound planners, similar to the kind he still uses now at Crimson.
I grab one and flip through it.
Most of it is garden variety high school shit. He wrote down every date he had with any girl. There are silly notes from parties, like “Remember!! Lemonade is a sick mixer for blue raspberry vodka.”
But some of it is cooler.
Noah seems to have started studying Latin in his senior year of high school, and he started taking notes in the language. I don’t understand most of them, but it’s cool, and not something I ever knew he was learning.
When I flip to a few months later in the same planner, there’s another note that shocks me even more.
“New private chef, Kolina. Delicious steak and mashed potatoes. Her son Torin didn’t talk much, but seems cool as fuck.”
“Excuse me?” I mutter out loud to myself as I see that entry.
Never in my fucking life did I think that Noah’s first impression of me was that I was cool.
I remember that night.
I specifically remember thinking he was looking at me across the dinner table like he wanted to squash me like a bug. Shoo, poor kid, and get the hell out of my mansion.
After a certain point that night, he wouldn’t even look at me anymore, and I was always certain it was because he was sick of my presence.
But maybe he was… shy.
I was probably wearing the fake leather jacket I always used to rock in high school, and I’m sure I mentioned that I was openly bisexual, because I love making that clear to people when I first meet them to weed out any asshole homophobes.
Knowing what I know about Noah now…
Everything about that night seems different, suddenly.
Did you feel even a shred of curiosity toward me?
“Torin, love, are you ready?” I hear Mom’s voice cut down the long marble hall.
I slam the planner shut and shove the drawer back in, dipping out into the hallway. I turn the corner and walk back toward the main part of the house, finding Mom.
She looks lovely.
Mom always looked good, even back when we were broke and she only had one secondhand “nice” dress that she wore to every charity event, sewing up any hole that ever started to form on its seams.
But now she’s in a gleaming dark purple dress that I’m sure Phillip got for her. The ceilings in the mansion are colossal, but she still manages to look tall underneath them, smiling at me as I come down the long hall.
“Hey. I’m here,” I tell her.
“Prince Vaughn loves the outdoor bar,” she says. Her heels click on the floor as she puts her hand to the back of my suit. “But he was only out there for about two minutes before he started asking about you.”
“Seems like that’s all he ever does,” I mutter under my breath.
Mom puffs out a little laugh. “He does seem a bit single-minded, doesn’t he?”
I shake my head. “Single brain-celled, maybe.”
“Torin,” Mom says, disapproval creeping into her tone.
“What? I don’t have to pretend to like him just because he’s going to donate. Maybe to his face, but—”
She pauses near the end of the corridor upstairs. We’re in one hallway of many hallways in this house, still far off from the others downstairs.
“I know you struggle with people who flaunt their wealth,” Mom tells me, reaching out to squeeze my hand. “But find a way to just see them as people, Torin. They aren’t that different from us.”
I frown. “I don’t think they’re different at all.
They’re the ones who put themselves on a high pedestal.
Last night the Prince said he doesn’t understand why more people don’t want pedigreed Dachshunds instead of rescue mutts, and I’m telling you, I was two seconds from tossing my drink in his face. ”
“That was… well, to use your words, fucked up. Yes,” Mom says.
When my mother swears in English, I know she really means it. Her native language is Danish, but by now she’s fluent in both.
“It’s revolting.”
I clench my jaw. “And his reaction to your gift. I could still murder him.”
Mom gifted a bottle of wine to the prince that was at least three hundred dollars, and when he received the gift, he laughed.
Laughed.
In my mother’s face.
The only thing that came out of his mouth was a measly “oh, I think my chef will be happy with this one.”
She squeezes my hand again, and it reminds me of the way she’d beg me to behave when I was younger, always trying to keep me out of trouble when I seemed hell-bent on stirring up chaos.
“Torin, you know how much Prince Vaughn’s donation could mean,” she says.
Her eyes crack my heart into two pieces.
“He pities us,” I tell her. “Even now. You’re married to Noah’s father, you’re wearing multi-thousand-dollar gowns, you’re gracious and kind and involved, and he still pities us. I have a hard time accepting that.”
Her expression is soft. It’s like she has a permanent, glowing shield of okayness around her that can’t be breached.
I’m envious of that, sometimes.
“He can think whatever he’d like,” she tells me.
“How?”
“Because I know who I am.”
And just as quickly, my heart feels like it’s whole again.
I sigh. “Yeah. I know who the fuck I am, too.”
Her laugh brings me back down to Earth. “You always have.”
Mom has always been a generous person.
She would feed the two of us off of the same bag of potatoes and on-sale pork for an entire week, and we’d have plain oats every morning and fresh fruit was considered a goddamn luxury.
Kids in school never outright bullied me, because they were scared of me, to be honest. But I overheard enough to know that they noticed my threadbare jacket, and that they commented on my thrift-store shoes.
I look around at the gleaming marble floor now, with one long, red runner rug lining the hall. There are literal marble columns dotting the end of the corridor, where it opens up toward the staircase landing.
“This is never going to be my world,” I tell Mom. “But I won’t toss my drink in the prince’s face. Unless he says the word mutt again.”
She pulls me into a hug before we head off again.
As we walk down the hall, I glance over everything on the walls, noticing one thing more than anything else.
Noah.
I’m surrounded by him again.
Family photographs line the walls in the mansion, and right above the staircase, there’s a family portrait from just last year. Noah’s smiling softly in it, and he has that faraway look in his eyes that he gets sometimes.
Like he’s always searching for something.
Wishing for something.
Last week, I was so close to you I could see the changes in your eyes.
The way you light up when you’re given what you want.
…Like my mouth. And my tongue.
The hookup with Noah has played on repeat in my mind every time I’ve gotten off this week.
Normally, I move on after hookups, but my whole world is colored by Noah lately, and I’ve let myself indulge.
The memory of the way he kissed me is intoxicating. He was so eager to give himself to me, even with all of the denial that streams out of his mouth all of the time.