3. Noel
3
Noel
A ddison W.
There was something in the way she dipped her chin, in how she peered up at him from under lowered lashes. Shy, he thought. Not coy. Even the way she said his name, so proper and professional, made him pause and take notice. He’d almost asked her today if they knew each other from somewhere else, from some other time, but then he’d reconsidered. He knew how it would sound if they hadn’t; a pickup line. He wasn’t a pickup line kind of guy.
Even so, Noel found it difficult to ignore the surge of anticipation he felt every time he interacted with the woman behind the ticket counter. He’d noticed her the first time he’d flown out of the small Evansville airport, but he’d already been entering his information in the self-help kiosk when he glanced up and met her gaze. As luck would have it, the kiosk refused to process his boarding pass, and Addison had swept in to help.
As she’d tapped the screen to override the system, he’d subtly studied her profile, the hint of gloss on her lips, her long eyelashes that framed her big, green eyes. He’d have asked her out then and there if it weren’t for how utterly impulsive that would have been.
Noel didn’t do impulsive.
She’d had on a light floral scent, and when she got close, he’d had to force himself not to lean in and sniff her. There was something almost nostalgic about it, and it teased his senses long after he could no longer smell it. He couldn’t decide what exactly it reminded him of; he just knew he really liked it.
It was probably for the best; he thought as he settled into a hard plastic seat in the waiting area at his gate. He had no business getting curious about a woman, not with all the things he was currently juggling. This was the third time he’d been in and out of this airport in as many months. “You just know her from here, you dolt,” he muttered, chiding himself now for even considering engaging with her.
Noel’s phone buzzed in his pocket yet again, but he ignored it. He would not respond to another text or call until he was on the ground at the other end of this flight. The morning had already been chaotic, his phone disrupting him with bid after bid for his attention, and Aunt Gigi’s garbled texts were the icing on the cake. Why couldn’t she proofread before she sent them?
He refused to feel guilty about not being accessible while he was in the air, or even in these few minutes before boarding his flight. Sometimes a man just needed to disconnect from it all, and here in the crowded waiting area, Noel relished the sense of detachment that came with ignoring his phone.
Besides, he had a book to read. He patted his messenger bag just to be certain the book he’d bought a couple of days ago was in there. He wouldn’t start it until he was settled into his seat on the plane, but the thought of losing himself inside someone else’s story had his anticipation building. He hoped The World on Fire lived up to his growing expectations.
Talk about impulse. Noel hadn’t bought or even read a book in far too long. But the window display in the bookshop featuring the series with its fantastic artwork had caught his eye, and on impulse, he’d gone inside to check it out.
“Ah. Our own Mr. Archer,” the proprietress had said when she’d come across him reading the back of the book. She’d pointed at the name on the cover. “He’s homegrown. A local boy.”
“Is it good?” It was a silly question. Of course, she’d say it was good. She was in the business of selling books, after all.
But the woman had surprised him; she'd studied him for several moments before responding. “I don’t know that I’d call it good,” she finally said. “It will transport you, though, and you’ll come out the other end of it feeling both wrung out and hopeful at the same time.” She grinned and waved a hand at the display. “I wouldn’t have it in my front window if I didn’t think it was brilliant.”
Why Noel even dreamed he had the luxury of reading during this chaotic season in his life, he had no idea, but despite his reservations, the premise of the novel intrigued him enough to purchase the first in the series. He’d decided then and there that rather than going over his budget analysis for the monthly report on his upcoming flight, he’d break tradition and read on the plane instead.
Noel had worked in accounting for corporate Carpe Diem Resorts and Hotels for almost a decade, and last fall, he'd been offered a position as Financial Auditor at the company’s high-end resort in the beautiful tourist town of Autumn Lake. The resort was only a half-hour drive from the thriving river city of Evansville, and centrally located between many major cities, including Nashville, Louisville, St. Louis, and Indianapolis. It was also less than a day’s travel, whether by car or plane, to his only remaining family in West Virginia.
What had seemed like a dream job, however, had quickly become something of a nightmare. It had taken Noel about a week of reviewing and assessing the company’s financial statements, control systems, and policies and procedures to realize that if things didn’t change, and quickly, the resort was heading for some pretty rough waters.
From what he could determine, John Sheridan, the Operational Internal Auditor whose responsibilities had included the financial operations before Noel’s position had been created, hadn’t done anything as nefarious as embezzlement or tax evasion. But the resort’s economic instability was evidence that the man wasn’t equipped to cover the scope of the tasks expected of him alone. The purpose of separating the financial aspects from the rest of the operational processes had been to provide relief to the man.
Instead, John had taken personal offense at having some of his responsibilities taken from him, and he seemed determined to take it out on Noel.
Handling disgruntled or discouraged clients was something Noel was accustomed to. It came with the territory; money often did that to people. But he’d not expected it from John—or John’s devoted assistant, Paula Swinton—especially since the three of them needed to work as a team to maintain the operational efficiency of the resort.
John, apparently, was not interested in being part of a team, and from what Noel could tell, John wasn't keen on letting Paula be a team player, either. The man somehow managed to keep her so busy—doing what, Noel wasn't sure—that Noel felt bad asking for her help with any of his own tasks.
At first, Noel had gone out of his way to refer to John for input, to seek him out with questions or concerns, but by the time he’d presented his first reports to the board of directors in mid-December, Noel had all but given up on winning John over. He began avoiding the guy unless interaction with him was absolutely necessary, keeping his head down and his mind busy, focusing solely on the duties of his own position.
In some ways, the tension between them eased up when he stopped trying so hard, but for Noel, the day-in-day-out stress of working with someone who seemed to resent his very existence ate away at him. It stirred up things inside of him that he’d thought he’d long ago laid to rest.
A man’s voice boomed out over the speaker system, jerking Noel’s attention back to the moment. “Good morning, travelers. Flight number 6125 is now ready to start boarding.” He spoke quickly, his words running together, becoming almost indecipherable as he droned on, but folks seemed to know what to do, anyway. Noel was no exception, and he made his way to the ticket line, along with everyone else.
The plane wasn’t large. It held about sixty passengers when at capacity, and with only one seat on one side of the aisle and two on the other, he didn’t bother spending the extra money for business or first class. He’d been able to procure one of the single seats, and with a nod of greeting to the young couple across the aisle from him, he settled in and buckled up.
He pulled the book from his carryon, then shoved the messenger bag under the seat in front of him. Once they were in the air, the flight attendants would make their way through the cabin with drinks and snacks. But other than that, he had a few hours to disappear between the pages. And if he enjoyed the writing, he’d hunt down the other books in the series, and start making reading a priority in his life again.
Reading. Books. Fiction. Science Fiction and Fantasy had been his favorites. The Narnia Series. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Dragonriders of Pern. Rats of Nimh. The Dune Saga . Tales of wild adventures so far removed from the life he lived had been his escape when he was a boy.
He opened the front cover, pausing just a moment to appreciate the resistance of the binding, the way the pages of a new book hesitated to open up to him upon that initial cracking of the spine.
To his surprise, Noel found that he could, indeed, still squeeze through that imaginary portal and lose himself in the realm of other realities. The book swept him right out of his plane seat and into another world where the fate of the future rested on the shoulders of eight intrepid freedom fighters.
The fading beam of the headlamp cast a malignant glow over the mountain of refuse that blocked their way. Keeria squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to give in to the despair that nipped at her heels. She couldn’t let the others see it, though. They were counting on her to get them out, to keep the flame of hope burning, no matter how improbable their survival seemed….
So caught up was he in the story that he was surprised when he felt the altitude change and realized they were already descending. He finished the chapter he was on—and of course; it ended on a precarious cliffhanger—and tucked the book away.
The moment Noel exited the plane and turned his phone on, reality came crashing back in the form of a slew of message alerts. Up until he slid into the driver’s seat of the car he’d rented, Aunt Gigi kept insisting that she was ready to jump in her big old boat of a car and come get him. “You don’t need to spend all your money on a rental, Noel,” she’d hollered into the phone at him.
She hollered not because she was angry, but because she was hard of hearing, and she never turned her television off. Or down. He could just picture her sitting in her easy chair in front of the ancient TV, with her phone clamped between ear and shoulder, her hands working her knitting needles with lightning speed as she fashioned yet another comfortable cardigan made from recycled thrift store sweaters. She donated them to the nursing home where her husband had spent the last years of his life, and it always made her day to see yet another resident wearing one of her creations. “Cardigans are much easier to put on than pullover sweaters,” she’d told him, maybe a hundred times. “Arthritis makes for uncooperative shoulder joints.”
If it weren’t for his aunt and her open-armed exuberance, Noel wouldn’t be making this trip. Or any of the ones he’d made to Bald Knob over the last few years. He went back solely to visit her, to show his love and appreciation for the woman who’d been so instrumental in helping him find his way out of the darkness in which he’d been raised.
His father still lived in Bald Knob, too, but Noel hadn’t seen the man in years.
Bruno Stewart was a hard, vicious human, and the fact that Bruno and Gigi were siblings boggled the mind. Noel’s mother, Nita, had died fifteen years ago, the life simply leaching out of her far too prematurely. She’d been beaten down—beaten regularly, although she denied it every time anyone dared to ask about bruises, sprains, and even a broken bone or two—by the life of poverty, shame, and suffering Bruno had provided her with.
Noel had somehow managed to evade Bruno’s drunken rampages that followed Nita’s ragtag funeral. Gigi had insisted Bruno was “grieving something fierce, poor soul,” but Noel thought it was much more likely that the man was angry about having to cook and clean for himself now that his wife was gone. He’d turned narrowed eyes in Noel’s direction more than once in those days, a look that Noel knew all too well. A look that meant he’d better make himself scarce if he knew what was good for him.
Scarce, he’d made himself.
It was Aunt Gigi who had pressed a tight roll of bills into his hand during the wake when his father had been preoccupied with neighbors paying their respect. Her words had been an echo of his mother’s, albeit a little less dramatic. “Finish school so you have that diploma, then git yerself on outta this holler, Noel. You got somethin’ in you that needs to see the light of day. The mines ain’t no place fer the likes of you.”
The money she’d given him had gotten him all the way to Los Angeles before he’d run out, but he’d always been a hard worker, and labor jobs weren’t difficult to find year-round in that part of the country. It had taken him almost a year, working his way up the coast, before he finally ended up in Washington State, where he worked even harder to complete his business degree. It was an accomplishment that felt to him like the final severing of ties that bound him to his old life, the ultimate spreading of his wings. His only regret was that his mother hadn’t been there to witness it all. He hoped she knew that he’d gotten out, and that she was proud of the man he’d become.
Yet, here he was, driving too fast on the circuitous country road that would take him back to the place that used to be home. A place to which he no longer belonged.