Chapter 13
NOEL
The moment Luca’s gone, I am back to teetering on the brink of the kind of meltdown I haven’t had since I’ve gotten on the medication I want off of.
And I don’t even get a few moments to be upset in the privacy of my own home before my phone starts going off.
I dig it out to silence it, because I’m in no state to speak to anyone and every buzz sears right into my pounding head.
I hang up on whoever’s calling me without glancing at the screen and then fling it onto the coffee table, switch on the brand-new window unit my landlord installed this week—bliss—and then collapse on the couch.
I bury my bloated face in one of its cushions.
I’m grappling with my thoughts of whatever just happened at lunch with Demi. I don’t even know if I should be mad because maybe that is reasonable, looking up your sperm donor’s partner before they come around your baby and making sure they aren’t a fucking felon.
Which I kind of technically am, as a “youthful offender,” because cops don’t really like it when you stab holes in their tires while they watch.
But in my fucking defense they came out and did fuck all when I called.
I’d been scared my mom had been overdosing, first of many times, but after she’d been carted off in an ambulance, all they’d cared about was finding more of the stuff she’d overdosed on and had torn our house apart looking.
They manhandled me hard enough to leave bruises and made threats, but they didn’t find anything.
I’d already been furious but the crack whore comment sent me over the fucking edge.
Of course they’d run the charges way up—not only because I’d gotten nailed for shoplifting a few years before, but because they were cops.
It’s not like I even regret it. I’ve long made my peace with all the awful things from back then—or maybe peace is the wrong word, but I do accept it.
I don’t really think about it anymore. It’s a blip in the painful series of memories that comprise my childhood, an ache from an old, old hurt that only bothers me from time to time.
I am kind of nervous though, because it probably does affect my job prospects.
And figuring out how the hell to seal my record is just one more thing on my full plate.
But that’s not even what’s bothering me the most. It was the way Demi brought it up then tried to take it back.
Made me feel like I was lesser, subhuman, not on her level even though I’ve got a college education and a career, just like she does.
And even if I didn’t have those things that wouldn’t make me any worse than her.
Went there to extend my stupid little fucking olive branch just to be rebuffed and humiliated.
As if it wasn’t bad enough, I had to see her pregnant with Luca’s baby.
Confronted with that reality like standing before an oncoming freight train, slow and ominous. Something looming, yet not quite real.
Can I do this? Can I really handle sharing the man I love with the mother of his child?
Be intrinsically entwined with the two of them, potentially forever?
I want Luca so bad, but this—it’s different.
It’s hard. It’s throwing all these things in my face, that he had history with her, and I know it’s stupid to be jealous when I have my own sordid history and they aren’t even together, he doesn’t want her and she doesn’t want him.
I can’t help how I feel, though.
My phone buzzes again. I don’t move. It eventually stops ringing, only to go off again.
I want to freak the fuck out in peace, get it all out of my system before Luca returns, but that’s not happening and I grab my phone and look at the screen.
It’s an unknown number that’s called me three times in a row now.
Usually I ignore strange numbers unless they leave a message, but the persistence of this one makes me pick up.
“Hello?”
“Finally! Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass to get up with.”
Jordan. It is fucking Jordan. My sordid history is walking and talking, it’s here in the fucking room with us.
And my stomach seizes up before it nosedives right through the floor and for a moment, I think I’m going to faint.
The room spins. My gorge rises and I can feel my heart rate and blood pressure physically spike in real time because what the fuck does he want from me?
Absolution? A promise I won’t tell a soul?
He doesn’t need to extract these things from me, I haven’t breathed a solitary word.
“What do you want?” I demand. My voice is still hoarse from all the weeping. “Are you seriously calling me from a friend’s phone just to get around the fact that I blocked you?”
“I’m just checking on you, Noel. Jeez.” He sounds so put out, like I’m the one hurting his goddamn feelings. Of course.
“So whose phone is this?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He’s fucking infuriating as always and talking to him is actual self-harm. It hurts way worse than biting or cutting ever did without any of the associated relief. I just feel hot and sick, like the walls around me are caving in. I wish so badly Luca was here, wish he’d stayed.
“I’m hanging up now. And I’m blocking this number, too.” He has a lot of little bastard friends just like him, names and faces I can barely remember, people he never wanted to bring me around unless he had to.
“Wait. Don’t,” he says quickly. “We need to talk.”
“We don’t.”
“About the other weekend? We absolutely do. You never did let me know if you got home okay after you got sick.”
“Sick? I didn’t get sick. You drugged me to try and get me to—”
“No, no.” He runs me right over, talking a mile a minute. “That didn’t happen at all and you know that. Like, you do remember that, right? That nothing happened between us. You got really fucking drunk, and I tried to take you home.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. He cannot think I’m this stupid. “Are you fucking serious?”
“But then some guy came along—I guess he knew you, so I let him take you instead.”
I actually sit there with my mouth hanging open before I can scramble my brain for a coherent response. “No, Jordan, that’s not what happened. My boyfriend came and knocked your ass out for being a piece of shit creep.”
“That was your boyfriend?” He actually sounds a little nervous. “I thought you weren’t seeing anyone.”
I ignore this. “I know exactly what you did. You put that shit in my drink when I wasn’t looking.”
“Wow, Noel. I knew you were nuts, but this is next fucking level. I can’t believe you’re actually accusing me of that.” And he has the absolute gall to sound disgusted. “Are you having a psychotic break or something? Did you hallucinate all that just now? I heard you were taking crazy pills.”
“No!” I yell into the phone. “That’s what actually, factually happened, Jordan.” I ignore the pill comment too, he’s just trying to get under my skin. I don’t think he actually knows I’m back on meds.
“Did you get a drug test?” He’s infuriatingly calm. “Can you prove it?”
That brings me up short. No, I don’t have those things because I insisted on not going to the hospital. Maybe, seeing that Jordan is now harassing me, that was a mistake? I swallow, my hand clammy where it grips my phone. “My boyfriend saw,” I start to say.
“That guy didn’t see anything.” He sounds so smug. “He had no idea what was going on when he stumbled across us. He thought you were wasted, too. Actually, he was a jackass for no reason. Like, okay big man, punching a twenty-five-year-old boy—”
I feel like my hearing is going to static, ears ringing and buzzing. I close my eyes and press the fingertips of my free hand to my forehead.
“My point is,” Jordan goes on, “is that whatever you’re thinking of accusing me of doing didn’t actually happen.
And no one’s going to believe you, anyway, so it’s pointless.
You know? No reason to get all crazy about it.
Besides, nothing happened to you.” He pauses long enough to listen for the answer I don’t give him, then says, “Yeah? We’re cool? ”
This time I do hang up on him. And I block this number, too, whoever it belongs to. And then I go take the hottest, most scalding shower I can.
He’s right. I don’t have anything on him but fuzzy, warped memories and footage that’s no good unless I go to the police. Which I can’t.
It’s late by the time Luca arrives, almost dark, and his knock on the door rouses me from a deep and dreamless sleep.
I drag myself out of bed to let him in. I am at least squeaky clean from my earlier shower, but I’m pretty sure I still look like a nightmarish mess from all the crying and whatever. It doesn’t stop him from leaning down and giving me a kiss. “Okay?” he asks me.
No. “Mm.”
He tosses his backpack onto the couch and sits, and I crawl into his lap like a pathetic, mangy cat.
I tuck my head beneath his chin. He smells good, like he’s just gotten out of the shower himself; his hair’s still a little damp, too.
I breathe it all in. “Sorry it took a while,” he says.
“Had to clean up and talk to Demi about everything.”
Oh, god. I can’t take much more of this shit today. “Oh.”
“She’s not banning you from the baby or anything.
She says she’s extremely sorry about what she did.
She wants to apologize face-to-face, and she’d like to help you with sealing your record.
She used to be a paralegal—that sort of thing’s old hat to her.
” He peers at me. “But I assume you don’t want to see her anytime soon. ”
“No. Not really.” I don’t want to talk about her at all tonight.
And Luca is intuitive enough to pick up on that. “Problem for another day.” He hesitates, then says, “Am I allowed to ask? You know, about getting arrested or whatever.”