43. Queenie
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
QUEENIE
RECOMMENDED LISTENING ‘CHASING CARS’ BY SNOW PATROL
I blink. He’s never mentioned a Thalia before. Although, to be honest, we haven’t talked histories or anything in the time we’ve been together.
I’ve been with Noah a little more than a month. Now I’m in love with him. My heart speeds up uncomfortably, both at the phone call and the new feeling that won’t subside.
I debate answering it when he walks into the room, wiping his hands on a dishtowel.
“Here.” I toss the phone. He catches it in mid-air. “It’s ringing.”
He checks the caller ID and then his face closes off. “It can wait.” He sits down next to me.
I fold my legs and face him. “Who’s Thalia?”
Noah hesitates a second.
“An ex? A groupie? A cheerleader?” I ask him with a small smile. I don’t mind knowing. Unless she’s a tall, leggy blond or redhead who can reach his shoulders without getting a crick in her neck. Fuck.
“Why? Are you jealous?”
I shrug primly. “I don’t get jealous of other women. No man’s worth it.”
“Not even me?” He winks lasciviously at me. All boyish charm and scented goodness.
My heart lurches and I have to physically restrain from rubbing at it. Making sure it’s still inside my ribcage. “The jury’s still out on you.”
“I told you the day we met there’s no one but you.” Noah plays with the hem of the jersey. “I wasn’t lying.”
“But there must have been others before me,” I probe insistently. I’m not jealous. I don’t think. Maybe curious? Yes, I settle on the word. I’m curious.
“There were.” He gives me a self-deprecating smile. “I wasn’t a monk before I met you. But after the accident and going to rehab…I might as well have been.”
I blink, digesting this knowledge. So, Noah is really not a jock playboy. He’s decent. Knowing this weakens my defenses even more. “So, Thalia is…” I let the question trail off.
“My half-sister,” Noah says finally.
“Oh!” I did not expect this answer.
“Yeah. My dad…” He runs a hand over my arm. Talks without looking at me. “He met his new wife, my stepmom, Isabelle, a year after mum passed. And he married her within months.” His kissable lips twist into a thin smile. “His reason for it? He wanted to give me a stable home. A new mum. Like mums are replaceable.”
I touch his chest. “Oh, baby. I’m so sorry.” Calvin Dumaine, the millionaire lawyer, is an idiot.
“I tried to put up a brave front and it was okay for the most part.” He does not sound okay. “Because I spent my time in school or playing cricket. Then, she got pregnant when I was fourteen. And suddenly, dad was a…dad, you know? He took her to doctor’s appointments and attended Lamaze classes. The whole bit.” His mouth twists again. And his eyes take on a far-off gleam, like he’s reliving those memories again.
“I was happy for them. At least I tried to be. But I couldn’t understand how my father…how he quickly forgot my mum. He got a whole new family, just like that. And I was just a reminder of the dead wife, you know. Especially because I didn’t call her Mum, like he wanted me to.”
“Oh, Noah!” I reach out and hug him.
“It’s okay. I’m fine now.” He’s anything but fine, but I don’t press him on it. This is a tender wound even now. “But yeah. I started to feel like an outsider in my own home. And after a while…it just became easier to not live there. I hung around at Fox’s, after school and during holidays. Fox’s family has been very kind to me.”
“He’s a good friend.” I turn around and lay my head on his shoulder.
His arms come around me and settle at my waist. “The best.”
“Life’s awful sometimes, isn’t it?” I play with the buttons on his shirt.
“The fucking worst.” He kisses my shoulder. “But having you in it makes it bearable, you know?”
I nod. “Me too. Same. With you.” I close my eyes and the love floating and fluttering in me gives me the strength to tell him my ugly truth. “Before you came, I was floating. Like a ghost or a pariah.”
“Why a pariah?”
“Because I accused a very powerful man of something terrible.”
Noah stills behind me.
“Dolly…” I lick my lips. “Dolly wouldn’t tell me who attacked her till the night she left. But she’d have terrible nightmares. And I held her through all of them. It was hell.”
“Queenie—” He breathes against my hair.
“But one night, she told me… it was a professor from Thorndon. A Head of Department. She left the next morning and put the whole incident behind her. But I couldn’t.” I sniff against the barrage of tears filling me. “I tried to find out where she went. Who she met. How it happened. I tried to find answers.”
“And did you?”
“I don’t know,” I admit softly. “Sometimes I think I made it all up in my head. Because no one in the university believes me. Not staff. Not faculty. Not the administration. I couldn’t tell my parents the whole truth because they would be devastated. And…” I continue in a small voice. “I didn’t want them to tell me how I fucked my life up by going on this crusade.”
“Is that why you dropped out? Because all of this got to be too much for you?”
I flash back to the wintry sun streaming in through an office window. A man’s kind voice asking me – But who is going to believe you, Miss Madhavan? And the closing of an office door.
“Word spread around campus. I was a troublemaker asking questions she shouldn’t be. I was shunned out of classes, graded poorly. People would whisper about me when I rode into town. They weren’t outright cruel to me, but they made me feel like an alien. Other.” I sniffle again. “Small towns are a plague on humanity.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“It’s why…when the video came out, I lost my shit on you.” I swallow. “You didn’t deserve my overreaction.”
“It wasn’t a flattering situation for anyone.” Noah is so gallant my heart aches.
“But can you forgive me for it anyway?” I ask him, softly.
I don’t know if I want absolution or forgiveness. I don’t know if it’s because I told him the truth. Or because I love—I shake my head to dispel the traitorous thought.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Queenie.” His reply is instantaneous. Gratifying. “You protected yourself the best way you could.”
“You know, the night of the summer party?” He nods against my hair. “I was actually there to have a showdown with one of the people who made my life hell. I even memorized this monologue from Jab We Met ?—”
“ Jab We Met ?”
I snuggle into him. Safe and warm, a million miles away from the tragedy which blew me off the charted course of my life. Which brought me to him. “It’s a famous Bollywood movie. The heroine, Geet, she cusses out her ex in Hindi.”
“I’d pay money to see you cuss in Hindi.” He kisses my cheek. “So did you have your showdown. Did I miss it?”
I shake my head. “No. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want the public spectacle of it.”
“That makes sense. You want a quiet, normal life. Like everyone else.” He sounds tired, a little lost.
“I want…” My words trail off. Because I honestly don’t know what I want anymore. For someone who spent her whole life being sure, this uncertainty is destabilizing. Debilitating.
“Well, then, I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Noah turns me around and gives me a chaste kiss. “Will you trust me not to hurt you like that? Ever?”
You could break my heart and not even know it. The words don’t come out because they cannot be true. They just cannot.
I nod, slowly. And one tear slips out.
He kisses my wet cheek. “Then we’re good. We’re golden. Okay?”
I hug him slowly and wish with all my heart, it were true. That telling the truth would set me free. But telling my truth has only ensnared me further. Until I am caught between all the truths I’ve told and not told.