Chapter 18 Torin #2
“You have all of the resources in the world. You say you don’t know what to finally narrow down and major in. So, just finish your business credits and then open up your own coffee shop after college, one where you can be all snobby and elite. I’d never go there, but other snobby people would.”
His smile fades as he looks away. “The Vancliff family doesn’t do that kind of thing.”
“What?”
“Both of my parents don’t trust anything in the food business. They say most restaurants aren’t profitable.”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t want to hear the word profitable coming from your mouth. You have endless money.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “I can’t open a coffee shop for free.”
“No, but you can stand to take more risks. Try it out for a few years, see where things go.”
“It’s been drilled into me since I was a kid that anything in the food business is a ‘black hole’ for money. My father would laugh me out of the room, and my siblings would be even worse.”
I furrow my brow. “Your father would laugh? No way.”
He looks confused. “Why are you surprised by that?”
“I always got the impression that Phillip was this kind, encouraging, supportive… rich teddy bear,” I say. “I’m surprised he’d ever discourage you from doing something you want to do.”
He sighs. “Well, he did.”
I pause. “Did? Past tense? Wait. Does this mean you’ve had the idea in the past and it got shot down?”
Noah grabs the covers and pulls them up over his eyes. “Yes. Sort of. Worse, maybe.”
I squeeze his hip through the sheets. “Tell me.”
He peeks back out, then shoves the covers away. “I wanted to do something that was even more of a money pit. I had the idea, right before college, and Dad literally laughed at me.”
“Now I’m even more curious.”
“I wanted to have a bookstore. Not like the big chain bookstores, but the kind that’s cozy as fuck, with giant cafes inside.
The coffee would be great, of course. And I know that bookstores are a dying dream and I would be stupid to put my money into it, but it’s something I wish there was more of in the world.
I don’t know how it would be successful. It probably wouldn’t be.”
“Wow,” I tell him. “So… you did have an ambitious goal, and it just got shit on.”
“It’s unrealistic.”
“Just because the bookstore part might be hard to replicate doesn’t mean that you couldn’t make it work for you,” I tell him.
“I don’t know how.”
“Think creatively. What if it was a secondhand bookstore with a bomb ass coffee shop inside? Secondhand books don’t have the overhead of new ones, and the café would have the best coffee those fucks had ever had.
You could have all reclaimed, refinished furniture, too.
I could take care of that for you, easy. ”
I expect Noah to react with excitement, because I’m seeing the snowball of possibility starting to roll forward in my mind.
But instead, I’m looking at the sad puppy again.
“You’re so much better at ideas than I am,” he says.
“Bro, why do you look like you’re about to jump off a cliff?”
“It sounds amazing. But it also sounds like signing up for a lifetime of my siblings asking me why I didn’t become a goddamn lawyer, doctor, or data engineer.”
“Do you want to do any of those things?”
He shakes his head.
“Then fuck ‘em, Noah,” I tell him.
He peers over at me. “Since when are you some sort of high school counselor?”
“Since I realized that you’re more likely to suck my cock if you’re in a good mood rather than a bad one?”
He finally smiles again and I can’t help but stare, reaching out to run my thumb along his lower lip.
Pretty.
Very pretty.
“I need to fall asleep.”
“You’re the one who woke me up every hour tossing and turning, thinking about how hopeless your perfect life is.”
“It is far from perfect, Torin.”
“Whatever. I was just telling you the truth. If you can’t accept it, I’m done.”
The truth is that I’d never known how deeply Noah was living in the shadows of giants, though.
His parents have been business titans forever, and his grandparents were before them, too. All of his siblings are successful and not particularly close to Noah, as far as I can tell.
He’s the baby of the family, and until this summer he’d been hiding behind a veil of alcohol and excess, and probably hasn’t even given himself the chance to grow into something more.
And all I feel toward him is a surprising sense of warmth. A certainty that he deserves to trust himself more, and a realization of why he was so doubtful in the first place.
You don’t even know how good you are.
I’m only just realizing that now myself.
He goes quiet for a while.
I watch the shadows of the leafy trees outside swaying in the dim light, and the longer the silence lasts, the more sleepy I start to get again, too.
When he lets out a gentle hum, for a moment I think he’s about to start talking again.
But then I realize he’s already asleep.
Finally, he’s breathing evenly, peacefully, facing the wall. I start to drift off only a few minutes later, and for the rest of the night we’re out.