Chapter Twenty-Two Noah
Chapter Twenty-Two
Noah
“Noah, come on. You gotta get off the ground.”
I recognize Chase’s voice, but I barely hear it because I’m fucking numb. But then if that’s true, why does everything still hurt?
My head hangs, eyes on the dirt.
I hate me too, Goldie.
“Noah,” Chase presses, urging my shoulder back, but I dig my fingers deeper into the cold hard ground, feeling the hurt underneath my nails as they jam into the earth.
I want to hurt, to feel all the pain I’ve caused. I’ve ruined us. I’ve broken her heart with my lies and selfish cowardice.
And now she sees me for who I truly am.
So, I’m not going to move. I won’t. I’ll stay here until I stop hearing her call me by my name or seeing her look at me like a goddamn stranger.
“Dude,” Chase calls to me again, but I shake my head.
“No,” I bark, not making any sense to anyone but myself. “I never lied about how much I loved her . . . I never . . .” My voice falls off, the rest said only in my head: I wanted this life. For her and Noah.
I hate myself. I wish I could kill Davis. Make it so his fucked-up life never existed.
“Fuck you,” I say between gritted teeth as my fist hits the ground. Then again until it grows faster and in force, pounding the ground so hard that I feel my skin pop before blood starts to spill over the grass beneath me.
“I hate you,” I roar, spittle falling from my mouth. “I fucking hate you.”
I hit the goddamn ground until I can’t lift my arm anymore, but that doesn’t stop me. I throw my other arm down, trying to demolish the spot where she told me she’d never forgive me. That she hated me.
A place like that can’t exist. It just can’t.
I hurl my arms down, but Chase grabs my wrists, stopping me. “Dude, stop. Noah . . . fuck. You’re bleeding.”
My head falls between my arms as he holds them together. I look like I’m praying. I wish there was a god to help me. I’d give anything for her forgiveness.
“I lost her,” I whisper. “She’s gone . . . I fucking lost her.”
“Shit.” I feel Chase’s hands cup my armpits before he tries to drag me up to standing, but I push him off.
“Just fucking leave me. Get outta here,” I groan. “Without her I’m dead anyway, so who fucking cares how it happens.”
But Chase keeps fighting with me. He pulls me up until I’m on my feet and standing in front of him.
I can’t even look at him. Everything fucking hurts too much. My chest jerks with the emotions I’ve kept at bay for so long. The self-hatred, the desperation, all of it. Everything bubbles to the surface, making my shoulders shake as I cry.
He grips my face to make me look at him, and his eyes connect with my red-rimmed ones. My hand lifts as I speak through the sadness.
“I love her. I fucking love her so much.”
He nods and pats my face.
“I know . . . but she’s gone. Noah, everyone’s gone.
And it’s just me and you.” My head drops as I almost buckle to the ground, but he forces it up again.
“I care about keeping you around, motherfucker. So you gotta put one foot in front of the other and help me do that, because I’m not leaving my best friend out here alone.
If you stay, I stay. And then we both get hypothermia. ”
I give no reaction to the words he’s saying other than closing my eyes and nodding. Because I can’t. She took my heart, ripped it out of my chest, and ran away with it. I’ve got nothing left.
There is no recovery from the loss of her. My Goldie.
“Put your arm over my shoulder,” he breathes out. “Help me get you home. Let’s start there.”
He drags my arm over him, urging me to walk, so I do, but I’m on autopilot, reliving my last moment with her on a loop.
“Only if you tell me whether I’m marrying Noah Adler or Davis Keller . . .”
“Please . . . I can’t lose you.”
“I will never forgive you. And I will forever hate, Noah.”
The cold slices over my face as we walk, and my eyes stay trained to the cobblestone street. I don’t know how far we’ve gone when Chase breaks the silence.
“What the fuck happened, Noah?”
I’m watching my feet, concentrating on putting one in front of the other like he asked, hyperaware of the ache in the center of my chest as I answer.
“I happened.”
I drag my arm away from him as we near the house . . . my house now. But I can’t seem to get my foot up the first step. I stare down at the stoop, holding the rail, dreading having to walk inside. She’ll never be inside to smile at me ever again.
“Dude, you can’t stop here.” He pushes me gently. “We need to get you inside—you’re fucking freezing.”
I drag my foot up the stair, slowly, only lifting my head to look at the door when I land on the last step.
It takes me a minute, but my heart jump-starts, beating a mile a minute, as I pull from Chase’s hold and blurt out, “Is she here?” because the door’s cracked open.
I slap it with the palm of my hand, letting it bounce off the doorstop as I tear inside, calling for her.
“Killer!”
My voice echoes around the emptiness, but I still scan every room, looking only for her face. Nothing around me registers as I run toward our room, desperate to see her. Praying she’s had a change of heart, that I’ll be able to explain and tell her the whole fucking truth.
Just one more chance to do this shit right. Please.
The moment I make it through our bedroom door, I grind to a stop, and cold washes over me as my mouth goes dry. The room is in disarray, shit everywhere.
But she’s not here.
I feel like the wind’s been knocked out of me.
“Dude, your place is destroyed,” Chase bellows from the other room. “They didn’t even steal anything.”
I reach for the wall and use it to help me back up three steps before I turn and walk into the living room.
My eyes land on all I missed—glass has been shattered into infinitesimal shards all over the kitchen floor, and the chairs have been crushed.
It’s as if someone beat them onto the counter over and over in a full rage, leaving splintered wood scattered across the floor.
Books have been ripped apart, pictures thrown from the walls; even the television is cracked.
There’s nothing left untouched. It’s all been demolished.
“This wasn’t her, right?” he says cautiously. My eyes land on thick slash marks across the couch, the stuffing billowed out. “What did she use, a machete?”
I circle the room, taking it all in as he keeps talking, and all my panic and fear begin to morph into rage. I can’t speak, but I can feel myself trembling as my eyes land on the front door.
“No . . .” he draws out, then under his breath adds, “this isn’t G . . . maybe her sister, though.”
I shake my head, my eyes fixed on the object behind him—the one stabbed into the front door. I’m breathing fast enough to have a goddamn heart attack because the fear I’ve spent the last thirty-two years of my life either hiding or running from closes in like a vise around my throat.
The newspaper articles, along with the four yellowed letters I discarded months ago, are pierced, stabbed into the dark oak door with the tip of a butcher knife.
“How the fuck?” I breathe out. “That’s impossible—”
But it’s not. Everything I walked away from that day in my office has been resurrected. Crucified on my door.
My entire focus is devoured into a cylinder of sight.
“Why would someone do that?” Chase breathes, but I already know the answer—to expose me in the way someone can do only if they also know the truth.
“He’s back,” I say, making Chase frown in confusion.
“What are you talking about? Who’s back?”
Chase follows me toward the now-closed front door, but I walk slowly before I stop, feeling my chest rising faster and faster. I yank the letters down one by one, moving quicker and quicker as I do, discarding them all onto the floor as Chase picks them up.
My whole life, I’ve run from this moment. Scared to be found. Hungry to be free. I just wanted to be Noah . . . But he has to die now, because Davis has been found.
Until I tug on the last letter, and my chest feels like it caves in.
Because staring back at me is an old photo of my mother. She’s smiling as she stands with her arms spread in front of a sign that reads Camp Weonoke, 1994 in red digital print at the bottom.
But it’s what’s scratched in thick angry slashes that’s made my pulse slow to the calmest of rage and ready for Noah to die because Davis has been found—“MINE.”
“Chase,” I breathe out, finally finding my voice as I look over my shoulder at him. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
He lowers the article he’s reading before he holds up one of the letters.
“What do these have to do with you?”
I swallow hard as I understand there’s no more room for lies.
“Thirty-two years ago, my mother was attacked at a camp along with the other counselors—she survived by stabbing the guy in the chest. His body was never found . . .”
Chase looks down at one of the headlines, all the dots seeming to connect in his head before he blinks up at me, ashen and shocked.
“It was this Billy guy?”
Our eyes lock as I finally tell the goddamned truth.
“Billy’s my father. And he’s back to finish the job.”