Chapter 5 Matt
“You’re distracted again,” Holden’s tinny voice sounded over my phone’s speaker.
I was supposed to be working on that big project I had on my plate.
He was supposed to be drawing art for a tattoo appointment he had later that day.
Instead, we’d been chatting on the phone for almost an hour.
He’d told me about the guy Eli had brought home the night before.
Apparently, they’d been loud. Really loud.
Like Holden was telling me that he was playing a game of “Guess the Position”, which went beyond anything I could imagine.
I didn’t know how he handled living with Eli sometimes.
I wasn’t contributing much to the conversation.
My mind was still on that kiss with Noah from the night before.
He’d looked so wounded when I’d suggested he go home instead of come upstairs with me.
I spent most of the night staring at my computer screen before pulling up codes on a crowd sourcing site and adding documentation while an episode of Glee played in the background.
It was a level four crisis.
Glee was still playing, which was probably a red flag to Holden.
My friends knew I only watched that show when I had things on my mind.
Except that the off-the-wall show choir from Ohio wasn’t doing anything to make me feel better, and I couldn’t focus on Holden or the project I was supposed to be working on.
I had a small army of rubber ducks around me, and instead of feeling comforted by their presence, I felt judged by their little painted eyes.
If the ducks could talk, I was pretty sure the light purple one, the one that I always pulled out first when I needed to talk through a coding problem, would be offering the advice of talking it out.
I didn’t even have to talk it out with the ducks.
I could talk it out with Holden, someone who could actually give me feedback.
“Noah and I kissed last night,” I finally said. The words felt like they were being dragged out of me. “Don’t tell Eli, okay? Don’t tell anyone. Not yet. Not until I figure things out.”
“Figure what out?”
“How I felt about the kiss?” Holden was quiet on the other end of the phone.
I’d made the right choice of who to talk to about this.
He wouldn’t pry until he felt like it was necessary.
He would let me sit in silence for a few moments while I tried to think about how I felt about the kiss.
“I liked it. He’s a really good kisser. He’s gotten better at kissing, and he was always an amazing kisser.
Except then he wanted to go upstairs, and I just knew I was going to regret it.
So, I told him no, and he looked so hurt, Holden. ”
“And now you feel bad cuz you hurt him?”
“Yes.” I sighed.
“Have you talked to him since the kiss?”
“No.”
“You should. Otherwise, you’re just going to watch Glee all day, and no one wants to witness you go on another binge of that show.”
I laughed and agreed. I needed to talk to Noah, and I needed to do it now. If I waited, I’d overthink it, and then I’d talk myself out of it. “I’m going to go. To the museum, I mean. I’m going to go to the museum and talk to him now.”
“Good. I’m going to go try to figure out how to put this prompt into art. Call me later?”
“Promise.”
An hour later, I was at the museum. It didn’t take long to find the exhibit Noah was setting up or to spot him among the workers in the open room.
He looked completely in his element, directing a team of people moving the paintings around and stepping back to study different elements of the room.
I could have stood there watching him for hours.
That was the boy I remembered from high school. He’d always been so certain, and he’d always had an eye for how things should look.
I probably would have watched him until he was finished if he hadn’t turned and spotted me. I saw the slow smile spread across his face, and I lifted my hand to offer a small wave. He whispered something to one of the guys who was setting up the exhibit and walked over toward me.
“If you’re busy, I can come back,” I told him as he approached.
“No.” He reached down and unlatched the thick, red velvet rope from across the door. He stepped around it and secured the rope back in place. “I think we need to talk.”
“We do,” I agreed. “Lead the way?”
I expected him to lead me toward the offices, but instead, we stepped into one of the open galleries.
We walked in silence at first, studying the paintings on the wall and the sculptures that lined the room.
Every once in a while, he’d offer up some fact about one of the pieces, something that he’d learned with his art history degree or maybe just knew from his job at the museum.
We made it through the entire first room without addressing the elephant in the room. I was going to have to be the one that started it. It was pretty damn obvious that he was just waiting on me to start the conversation. “I don’t regret kissing you,” I told him quietly.
“I don’t regret it either.” Well, there was that. Neither one of us regretted the night before. “I guess that’s a good thing.”
“It is.”
We stepped into the next gallery. I recognized some of the paintings from our shared teenage afternoons spent at this same museum.
Noah talked my ear off about whatever gallery we were currently in.
He seemed to know something about every artist on the wall, be it their history, the style of art, or even the work itself.
I’d been enamored, listening to him talk about every piece we passed.
Watching the way his keen eyes studied every picture now, I wondered if he was fighting the urge to narrate our trip the way he had when we were younger.
The heavy silence had settled back over us like a thick blanket.
How was it so hard to talk to him now when it had once been as easy as breathing?
Hell, even yesterday, talking to him felt natural.
Of course, yesterday we didn’t have anything heavy to talk about.
Today, we had the kiss to discuss, and I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it.
That had to be a first. I was never lost for words. If anything, most people thought I was a chatterbox.
“So…” I rubbed my hand over the back of my neck nervously.
I needed to say something to make this conversation happen.
I’d shown up at his place of business, after all.
The problem wasn’t talking about the kiss.
It was talking about the after of it. It was talking about that moment he wanted to come upstairs and I turned him down.
I could still see that hurt look in his green eyes, and I needed to address that.
“Do you remember this painting?” Noah asked, as we stopped in front of a painting of two men standing in a forest, staring at the moon. One man leaned on the shoulder of another. It had caught my eye on our first date, and Noah had told me everything he knew about it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t remember anything that he’d told me.
I only remembered watching the way his lips moved, carefully shaping every word, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke.
Even now, I could remember the passionate look in his eyes as he talked about the story behind the painting, the date and the artist, and the fact that this painting wasn’t the authentic one.
“We saw it on our first date,” I reminisced.
“Do you remember what it’s called?”
“No,” I admitted with a laugh. “I remember you gave me a whole lecture on it, but I didn’t absorb a single word of it.
Just that you knew what you were talking about, and you talked about it with so much passion, that I thought I was falling in love with the painting because of you.
” I thought I was falling in love with him in that moment, too, but even in hindsight, that seemed ridiculous to admit.
Maybe even more so in hindsight, because I was older and wiser and more experienced with love than I’d been at sixteen.
“Two Men Contemplating the Moon.”
“What?”
“The name of the painting. It’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon.”
“You said the real thing was at the Met, right?” See, I did remember something. At least, I thought I was remembering it correctly. He nodded, and pride swelled inside me. “Did you go see it?”
“Once or twice, when I first moved to the city. But the Met’s huge. I couldn’t go see it every time I went, not if I wanted to explore the rest of the museum.”
I’d never been to the Met, but I knew how long it took Noah to look around art museums. The fact that we were already in our second gallery room and we’d only been walking, mostly in silence, for about half an hour was amazing.
Back then, it had taken us at least five dates to make our way through every room of the museum, and it wasn’t that large. “Did you actually see every exhibit?”
“I lived there for almost four years.”
There was an indignant tone to his voice that tugged at my memories. It was a voice I’d heard at least a thousand times when we’d been together. I knew exactly what it meant when I heard it. I’d toed too close to a truth that he didn’t want me stepping on, so of course, I stepped further onto it.
“So, you finally got to see the last permanent exhibit what? A month before you left? Two weeks?”
“No,” he scoffed. I thought that maybe I’d offended him.
Maybe my memory of him finding my old habit of poking at him endearing was wrong and he found it annoying.
Or maybe it was something that had changed over the years.
Maybe I’d accidentally upset him. Maybe I should have backed up before—My spiraling thoughts derailed when a bright smile exploded across his face.
“I saw the last permanent exhibit the day before I left. Moira took me. It was one of the last items on our city bucket list.”
“City bucket list?” I questioned with a raised eyebrow.
“It was a list we created together when we were at Brown, just before we graduated, and we decided we were moving to New York. We had a whole list of things we wanted to do, places we wanted to visit, cliches we wanted to live out, all of it.” That sounded just like him.
I was so happy he’d found a friend who shared that trait with him.
He’d always been a planner. “She wanted to make sure that I got everything done on it before I moved.”
“Did you add things to it?”
“No, it was set in stone. We had other lists of things we heard about to try. It was mostly restaurants, galleries, and stores. Maybe the occasional night club, but it was different from the bucket list. It was less sacred.”
I nodded. I didn’t have any kind of list like that when I’d been in California for college, and I’d come right back to King’s Bay after graduation. The closest I’d come were my sailing trips, but even those were done without a lot of planning beyond picking a destination and plotting my route.
I looked back at the painting on the wall. “But you saw the real one? Was it everything you hoped it’d be?”
“The colors were subtly different,” he said quietly.
His attention turned to the painting, and he began listing the differences between the painting in front of us and the real one in New York.
I wouldn’t have noticed any of them. I wouldn’t have noticed the change in the brush strokes or the aging of the canvas.
I wouldn’t have been able to tell that the gold of the moon was subtly different, but Noah? He knew it all.
I saw that old glimmer in his eyes again, the passion as he pointed out little details in the painting and described in painstaking detail how it was different than the original.
My stomach swooped, and I stopped paying attention to the parts of the painting he pointed at.
I was too focused on him. I watched his lips shaped words that I wasn’t taking in, watched his Adam’s apple bob. It was our first date all over again.
Except I was no longer the sixteen-year-old on his first date.
I was older and more experienced. I knew what the feeling in my gut was now.
I was attracted to the confident way he talked about the painting and the knowledge he had about art.
I found the way he talked about it to be so damn sexy.
I wasn’t timid, and I knew what I wanted to do about the attraction I was feeling toward him.
I stepped in front of him and kissed him.
The feelings I had last night came back in force. It hadn’t been tiredness that made every part of my body come alive when our lips touched. It wasn’t the fact that he’d just pulled me out of an overthinking spiral. It was just Noah.
And he kissed me back, the same way he had the night before.
His hands wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me in tighter.
When he deepened the kiss, my knees went weak.
I lost all sense of decorum. My hand slid up his back, anchoring in place in the strands of hair at the base of his neck.
I didn’t know how long the kiss lasted. I didn’t care how long the kiss lasted. I just didn’t want it to end.
But like all good things, it did.
He pulled away, his lips swollen and wet and so tempting that I dove back in for another kiss.
He dodged my attacking lips and put a hand on my chest. He took a step back, putting space between us.
“As much as I would love for this to continue, I am at work.” Right.
We were not on a date. He was at work. I had just kissed him like that while he was at work, in a room full of cameras.
Whatever boldness I’d felt when my lips crashed into his faded away.
“But I think we still need to talk. About last night.”
Right. That was the real reason I was there. Not to kiss him again, but to talk about what had happened the night before.
I looked around the gallery room. An elderly couple walked through the arch and started walking around.
Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have this conversation with them around.
I didn’t want to give someone’s grandmother a heart attack talking about why I didn’t invite him upstairs. “What time do you get off?”
“Five.” He paused. “Meet me at the beach? Our old spot?” He cocked his head to the side, like he was thinking. “Wait, our old spot is still there, right? It hasn’t been wiped off the map in a hurricane or anything?”
“It’s still there,” I assured him. “I would have told you if it was gone.”
And I would have known, because before it had been our spot, it had been mine. It was a place I’d shared with him when we were younger. I’d reclaimed it when I moved back to King’s Bay, going there when I needed to clear my head.
“I can meet you there at 5:30?”
“Perfect.” He looked around the room quickly before he leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the lips. “I should get back, but I’ll see you at 5:30.”