Chapter 36 Noah
Noah
The light in the room is soft when I open my eyes, and for a second, I don’t know where I am.
I turn my head to find Damien sitting on the edge of the mattress, already dressed in black joggers and a hoodie, elbows braced on his knees, phone loose in his hands.
He looks wrecked. Not the dramatic kind—no dark circles or exaggerated misery—but the kind of exhaustion that lives in your bones when you’ve been awake too long and scared even longer.
He notices me moving immediately. Of course he does.
“Hey,” he says softly, turning toward me. “How you feeling?”
I swallow, testing myself. My throat is dry, but not painful. My head aches faintly, like the echo of a migraine instead of the thing itself. “Okay,” I say after a moment. “Tired. But… okay.”
He reaches out, knuckles brushing my hand. “Good. That’s good.”
He keeps brushing his knuckles down my arm. It’s all code for I don’t want to leave you, and I get it. Part of me wants to ask him to stay, to call in sick and skip practice and curl around me all day, protecting me from every bad thought and bad memory that wants to crawl back in.
But I know that’s not possible. I know the game tonight is important, and Damien is needed. I know I can’t be the thing that derails his life every time I fall apart.
He stands then, pacing once like he can’t help it, then stops himself and looks back at me. “I’m not going to class today,” he says immediately. “I told Coach I’m dealing with a family thing. I’ll still be at the game tonight, but—”
“No,” I say, too quickly, and wince when my voice cracks. I push myself up against the headboard, wrapping the blanket tighter around my waist. “You have to go. You can’t skip everything because of me.”
His jaw tightens. “I’m not leaving you. I can stay, you know. Nobody will miss me in the first two classes, and I can always get what I need from Ryan later.”
“You’re being ridiculous, Mien,” I say, even as my chest aches at the thought of him walking out that door. “You can’t afford to skip again—one day is enough. Besides, you have a game tonight, and you need to be focused before Coach benches you.”
He huffs at that. “Blue—”
“I’ll be fine,” I say again, doing my best to sound steady and not like I’m lying to both of us. “Sage is coming over with Nate after his lecture, and Ryan said he’d check in between classes. The Sin Bin’s practically Fort Knox. Go. I promise I won’t set myself on fire in your absence.”
Damien shoots me a look, exasperated and affectionate. I can see the tension in his jaw, the protective urge he can’t quite swallow down. “Don’t joke about that, Blue.” He drags a hand through his hair, dark eyes worried. “I hate this.”
I manage a weak smile. “I know.”
He steps closer, kneels beside the bed, and cups my face with both hands, thumbs warm against my cheeks.
“If anything feels off,” he says quietly, eyes locked on mine, “anything at all—you call me. I don’t care if I’m in the locker room, on the court, or in the middle of a press conference. You call.”
“I swear,” I say, meaning it. I give him a weak smile. “I’m safe here. Everyone in the house knows, and honestly, I’d have to fight to even get out of bed with how often they keep poking their heads in. I’ll be okay. Go be a jock. Win your game. I’ll be right here when you’re done.”
He huffs out a reluctant laugh, stands, and grabs his bag. At the door, he hesitates, then looks back at me one more time. “I love you,” he says.
The words still feel unreal, but they don’t scare me anymore. “I love you too,” I answer, and mean it with everything I have left. He lingers another minute, then finally leaves, shutting the door so quietly it barely clicks.
The house settles after him, the low hum of conversation in the kitchen, the sound of someone’s shower running down the hall, a faint thump of music from somewhere upstairs. All the signs of life that I’m not quite ready to participate in.
I lie back, the sheets soft under me, the faintest scent of Damien’s shampoo clinging to the pillowcase. My arms settle over my stomach, and I stare at the ceiling, watching the patterns the sunlight makes through the window blinds.
I should rest, but my mind is a snake pit.
The aftermath is always like this—the raw, scraped-bare feeling isn’t new.
It’s not even surprising. I’ve been bent into shapes that don’t fit my body for as long as I can remember.
It’s just another scar in a long list I’ve been collecting since I was old enough to notice I wasn’t built like everyone else.
Even as a kid, I could sense it. The way my parents would go stiff when I started talking too much about the things I loved. How my father would sigh and look away, how my mother would purse her lips and try to find the polite way to ask if I couldn’t just “act normal for once.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever be the kind of person who can take those words and let them roll off my back. I don’t know how anyone does. I’m so tired of it all—of being told I’m not enough, of being measured and found lacking, of being broken by the people who are supposed to put me back together.
I think about my mother in Milan. The cold floors, the long, echoing corridors of my mother’s penthouse.
I remember how every visit was a minefield of expectations.
Clothes, manners, posture. How many calories I ate at breakfast, how quickly I smiled, how quietly I sat through her charity dinners, how much weight I’d lost since the last time she saw me.
Every word was a trap, every look a critique dressed up as concern.
Smile smaller. Shoulders straighter. Don’t speak unless spoken to. You look too soft. You walk like you’re sorry. Eat something. Not that. Never that. You’ll ruin your shape. Be good. Be beautiful. Be better.
Be nothing.
The sound of her voice is the soundtrack to my childhood, every syllable whittling away at whatever self-worth I managed to scrape together.
Everything was always almost enough. Never enough to be loved out loud, not the way she loved herself or the way she loved her causes.
I was something to be presented, not held.
It’s always the people who are supposed to love you who teach you shame. They’ve done nothing but break me open, then resent me for bleeding.
It makes me sick how, even now, I hear their voices in my head louder than my own. How quickly I shrink when someone raises their voice, how I flinch from praise because it feels like bait for disappointment. How I learned to punish myself before anyone else could.
It’s not my fault that my mind doesn’t work like everyone else’s. It’s not my fault that noise overwhelms me, that routines calm me, that my body reacts before logic can catch up. It’s not my fault that food feels like a battlefield some days, or that love feels dangerous even when it’s gentle.
I know I’m beautiful, that’s the strangest part.
I know it the way you know a fact from repetition—enough people tell you something, and it becomes the truth.
The mirror says I am, and sometimes, when I’m standing under the right light, in the right clothes, with the right mask in place, I can almost feel it.
But there’s a gap between knowing and believing. There’s a canyon between seeing beauty in your reflection and feeling it in your bones. My parents never let me close that gap. They handed me a list of everything that was wrong and called it love.
Damien never made me feel wrong. Not once.
He never looked at my stims or my silences like they needed fixing, never got angry when I needed routine, or space, or just the quiet of a closed door.
He learned my moods faster than my own mother.
He made it okay for me to be “too much,” because he never saw it as too much at all. He said it was just me.
That’s what love should be, I think. Not flawless, but gentle.
Not something that asks or takes, but something that waits and welcomes.
It isn’t measured out or earned, just given, patient and real.
And I want that—god, I want it—with a need that sits deep in my chest and doesn’t let go.
I want it with Damien more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
But I still wonder sometimes if I’m even capable of being loved in the way I need.
If the damage can be undone, or if I’ll always be this…
haunted thing, living in the shadow of everyone else’s expectations.
My parents carved me up so well that I sometimes forget I was ever whole in the first place.
A sniff escapes before I can swallow it, and I press the heels of my palms to my eyes, angry at myself for being so damn soft all the time.
I hear a light knock at the door, a hesitant tap that makes me tense. For a heartbeat, I hope it’s Damien, hope he’s forgotten something and come back, hope he’ll crawl into bed with me and wrap me up until the shaking stops.
“Noah?” Adrian’s voice is muffled through the door. “Can I… can I come in?”
I sit up slowly and brush my hand through my hair, fingers catching on the tangles. I’m in one of Damien’s old hoodies—too big, sleeves past my hands—and I wrap it tighter around me. I manage a hoarse, “Yeah. It’s open.”
Adrian pokes his head around the door. He looks even more anxious than usual, hands stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie, hair a mess, the green in his eyes almost too bright. He closes the door quietly behind him, lingering just inside the threshold like he’s not sure he should even be here.
“Hey,” I say, forcing a tired smile. “You don’t have to hover, you know. I’m not gonna, like, turn into smoke and float away.”
He huffs out a laugh, but it’s thin. “Sorry. Just wanted to check in. Make sure you’re okay.”
I gesture at the bed. “I’m upright, aren’t I? Damien would have a meltdown if I tried anything stupid while he’s not here. I think I’m on round-the-clock surveillance or something.”
Adrian attempts a smile, but it slips. He sits down on the edge of the mattress, keeping a careful distance.
His fingers twitch restlessly on his knees.
For a few minutes, he just sits there, eyes fixed on the pattern of the comforter, not saying anything.
The silence stretches until I can’t take it anymore.
“You look like you’re about to confess to murder,” I say, nudging him gently with my foot. “Did you break something? Did Liam finally snap and go full captain psycho on the field?”
He shakes his head, not meeting my eyes. “No, it’s nothing like that. I just… I don’t know. I wanted to see if you were alright. You scared us.”
I study him for a second. Adrian is never this nervous about anything. He’s quiet and controlled, but I don’t know him as anxious at all. “Adrian. You know you can talk to me, right?”
He finally glances up, meeting my gaze for a second before looking away again. His throat works as he swallows. “I’m just… I don’t know if you’d want to hear it. I don’t know if I should.”
My nerves jolt at that. “If it’s about me, I’d rather know. If it’s about you, you don’t have to say anything, but… I promise I’m not gonna freak out on you.”
He lets out a shaky breath and rubs a hand over his face, then stares hard at the window like he might find an answer out there. “It’s just—this is my fault. All of this. You, what happened… I’m sorry, Noah. I’m so fucking sorry.”
A chill slips down my spine. I study his face, trying to read what’s going unsaid there. “What? Adrian, none of this is your fault. You didn’t—”
“No, you don’t get it! You don’t know—” His voice breaks, and he looks so wrecked that it scares me. “I should have told you sooner, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what would happen.”
Now I’m really confused. I reach out, grabbing his wrist. “Told me what? What the hell are you talking about? You’re scaring me.”
He pulls away, nearly jumping to his feet. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I never wanted to hurt you, Noah. I never wanted—fuck!”
“Adrian, wait—” I call, but he’s already out the door, the sound of his hurried footsteps fading down the hall.
I sit there in the sudden quiet, my heart thudding hard against my ribs. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes once more, fighting the urge to cry again, too exhausted to chase him, too strung out to do anything but sit with the emptiness.
Whatever Adrian was about to say wasn’t small. I can still feel the weight of it, hanging in the air between us, dragging me back under the waves.
I stare at the open door, a hundred questions tumbling through my head, none of them making any sense. All I can do is wrap Damien’s blanket tighter around me, curling into the lingering warmth, and wait for someone to come back and explain what the hell is going on.