Chapter 17
NOAH
Ifell asleep on the drive back home, which wasn’t unexpected in the wake of such an intense adrenaline rush. I was crashing, but that was nothing new. Except I woke up to hear Skye, Minho, and Xavier bickering over whether to wake me up or just carry me inside.
“I’m awake,” I mumbled, scrubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands. Everything hurt. I stumbled as I climbed out of the van, and Minho caught me with his arm around my waist. “Thanks,” I said quietly, still half asleep and groggy.
However, I was not so out of it that I didn’t clock the fact that he didn’t let go of me as we headed inside, and more than awake enough to notice his fingers had somehow found the bare skin of my waist beneath my still damp T-shirt.
A shiver of something unrelated to temperature ran through me, and I glanced over at Skye, who was on my other side.
He met my eyes with a questioning frown, but I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
I liked Minnie touching me…but that was the problem.
I really liked it. But he was touchy with the whole team, and it meant absolutely nothing.
I was making it weird when it shouldn’t be.
“Eight, do you want me to call your specialist?” Ace offered as I started up the stairs, my mind fixated on getting a hot shower. Ice would undoubtedly be better for my muscles, but I was cold, and I hated that feeling of bone-deep chills.
It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about, and I shook my head.
“No, I can do that,” I replied, continuing up more stairs.
“You need to start editing, don’t you?” We had left the filming of our challenge entry until the last minute possible to avoid the whole thing being leaked by bystanders too early.
The deadline to upload was in just six hours, and Ace insisted on cutting the footage together himself even if he did have two of Olympus’s producers weighing in with their expertise as well.
Once we made it upstairs, I peeled myself out of Minho’s hold and slipped into my shared bedroom with Skye before we could exchange any awkward conversation about that kiss. Shit! Had that been caught on camera by any of the bystanders?
“Hey, do you have my phone?” I asked Skye as he followed me into the room. “I left it in the van this morning.”
“Yup, sure do.” He pulled it from his pocket, along with his own. “You sure you wanna see it so soon?”
I grimaced, not answering. He assumed I wanted to see the footage of me plummeting from the high wire in the pouring rain after Xavier fucking dropped me. Bastard. But that was unimportant in comparison to what I was actually searching for.
“I’m gonna shower,” I mumbled, eyes glued to my phone as I loaded up ClikByte and searched for my creator name.
A sickening twist curled through my guts as hundreds of videos from today displayed.
Not wanting Skye to see what I was searching for, I ducked into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.
Biting my lip, I turned on the shower, then sat on top of the toilet seat as I typed Noah and Minho into the search bar.
Even more results displayed than I ever could have anticipated and not just from today.
There were countless clips of the most innocent moments between the two of us from various Team Olympus content over the past month.
Some of them I had no recollection of even happening and others I remembered very clearly…
but they hadn’t been the intimate flirtation that the Acolytes were implying with their edits and slow-motion zoom screens.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered under my breath, trying really hard not to buy into the narrative that fans were pushing between us.
Because it wasn’t true at all. So many out-of-context crops and clever edits painted a totally fictional story of a secret relationship between us.
Even worse, the further I scrolled and the deeper into the fan edits I dove, I discovered the relationship fantasies weren’t limited to me and Minho.
There was a huge faction who were utterly convinced that I was homewrecking the already adorable bond between Torin and August, while others had fabricated a whole storyline about me and Ace engaging in a dom/sub relationship… and that was just the surface.
The ones that made me actually laugh out loud were dating rumors between me and Giselle from GeeGee…which was extra preposterous for the fact that we’d quite literally never met. The only time I knew of that we’d even been in the same location was during the Clik Games introduction filming.
Forcing myself to ignore the absolute insanity of the fan theories, I returned to the footage of today’s incident. Had anyone caught me kissing Minho in the rain?
Sitting hunched over my phone on the toilet seat while the bathroom filled with steam, I watched the same scene from dozens of slightly different angles.
From me painfully descending the ladder step by step, to Minnie bursting out of the building shirtless and panicked.
The way he ran to me and scooped me up in that hug that made my ribs hurt just to watch, but without fail, in every single clip that I could find, the black canopy of the umbrella hid us from view until Ace and the guys reached us.
Sure, fans were going crazy for the way he’d hugged me, but they didn’t know what’d actually happened. No one did…except the two of us.
Finally satisfied, I let out a long breath of relief and put my phone down. No one knew about the kiss. Assuming Minnie wasn’t going to make a whole thing out of it, we could just pretend it’d never happened.
That was good. Really good.
With that band of anxiety eased around my chest, I stripped out of my cold, soggy clothes—hissing in pain as I peeled off my binder—and got into the shower that I so badly needed.
The water was hot enough that it hurt, but I bit my lip and suffered because it only felt that hot due to how cold I was.
I stayed in there for long enough that Skye knocked on the door to ask if I was okay. That was a sure sign it was time to get out, so no one else got worried enough to come checking on me.
Knowing that I didn’t need to hide from Skye, I simply wrapped up in a towel and headed back into the bedroom to find clean clothes, tossing my phone onto the bed so I’d remember where it was.
“You good?” he asked, sitting cross-legged on his own bed and scrolling ClikByte.
I grunted a nothing sort of response because no, I wasn’t good. But at the same time, I was alive and relatively uninjured, so I couldn’t exactly complain.
“You scared the crap out of everyone,” he added, and I glanced over to find him watching me thoughtfully. “What happened out there? Why’d Xavier let you fall?”
I huffed my frustration. “Clearly because he knew there was a net to catch me.” I leaned down to fish out some clean sweatpants from my drawer, and a little groan of pain escaped me when my back sang with pain.
“What hurts?” Skye asked, tossing his phone aside.
I retrieved the pants I wanted and tossed him a weak smile. “Fucking everything.”
He wrinkled his nose in sympathy. “Want me to put some ice rub on your back before you put the Velcro thing on?” He gestured to the clean binder I’d just pulled out.
“Yes,” I hissed with a long sigh. “Give me a second.” Ducking back into the bathroom, I pulled on underwear and sweatpants, then returned with just my towel covering my boobs. Skye gestured for me to lie down on my stomach and fetched a tube of athletic rub from his dresser.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said with an edge of teasing as he straddled my hips, keeping his weight on his knees to save tweaking my back any further. “I’m not hitting on you. You’re like my brother.”
I scoffed, tugging a pillow under my face as he started rubbing the strongly scented cream into my back.
“Your twin, you mean? The feeling is mutual.” Because as objectively attractive as Skye was, he didn’t set my heart fluttering like Minnie did.
Or Torin, for that matter. Or…shit…way too many of the team.
I needed to get that under control fast, or this was going to become a very uncomfortable living situation.
As if summoned by my thoughts, someone knocked on the door, then immediately opened it without waiting for a response.
“Oh, shit,” Z exclaimed, freezing one step into our room with a puzzled look on his face.
Well, shit. I was face down, flat against the mattress, so my tits were still hidden but it must look somewhat suspicious with Skye straddling me and my back totally bare.
“Bro, what the fuck?” Skye snapped, his hands easing up on my back as he focused on Z’s intrusion. “Ever heard of knocking?”
“I did knock,” Z replied defensively, his initial shock seeming to slip away as he clearly recognized the intense smell of athletic rub. “Are you okay, dude? You should have let the paramedic check your back for real.”
“I’m fine,” I grumbled, careful to stay flatter than a pancake against the quilts. “Just muscle sore and bruised.”
Z frowned but gave a small nod of acceptance anyway. “I came to see if you were hungry. We’re ordering burgers in for the Olympus staff that are lingering, since Tor refuses to cook for anyone other than our team.”
My stomach rumbled, disagreeing with me before I could say no. “Yes, please,” I said instead.
Z shot back a lopsided smile. “With pineapple and garlic sriracha, right?”
I gave a small laugh, because they’d all looked at me like I was a psycho when I’d first put in my preferred burger order. What could I say? I liked what I liked. “Yup, perfect. And brown sugar bubble tea, please—not that sugar-free herbal crap Ace keeps buying.”
He grinned, nodding. “Got it.”
“Uh, do I get food too?” Skye asked as Z started to leave, making the burgundy-haired sex symbol pause with confusion.
“Shit, yeah, sorry, Skye. Your usual, too?” Z ran a hand over the back of his neck, giving an apologetic smile. “Just figured that was a given.”
“Uh-huh, sure,” Skye murmured, his thumbs working the athletic rub into a particularly sore muscle alongside my spine. I groaned, then clapped a hand over my mouth while hiding my face in the pillow.
Please don’t tell me Z just heard that.
“Jesus, Noah,” he said with a laugh, confirming that he had definitely heard. I groaned again, this time burying my face in the bed.
Skye laughed. “Chill, Twin, he doesn’t suspect anything. Regardless of what you might think, your bare back is gender neutral.” He finished rubbing my lower back, then climbed off the bed to go wash his hands.
“Have you seen your notifications, yet?” he called out from the bathroom while I gritted my teeth in pain as I strapped the suffocatingly tight binder over my boobs. Thank fuck I’d refused to get the implants Rich had been pressuring me about.
I blew out a heavy breath, pulling a loose T-shirt over my head.
“Yeah. Some.” I glanced to my phone as it lit up, and I stifled another groan.
Miles was calling, which probably meant he had just seen the footage of my fall.
Nope. I didn’t have the energy for that, so I rejected the call and turned my phone over so I didn’t have to see it.
I’d call Jared later. After I recovered some.
He could deal with Miles for me. Or something.
“All okay?” Skye asked, watching. “Someone harassing you?”
I shook my head with a sigh. “Yes but no. It’s my, uh, sister.
” Because I really didn’t need to mess up and say brother in front of anyone else.
Skye nodded his understanding, though, and didn’t push for more information.
Eventually, I’d need to call Miles back, but for now I was content to leave my phone behind as we headed downstairs to join the team—and staff—for burgers.