CHAPTER 7. Noah #4
I fumble with my phone, lifting it and blindly tapping the screen without even checking whether I actually got anything.
Connor’s tongue brushes my lower lip, then traces the seam of my mouth, and when I open for him, he slips inside.
Fuck.
The second our tongues touch, want tears through me so hard it almost hurts.
I want Connor. I want him naked. I want him on top of me. I want him inside me, and I don’t even care that wanting him like this is exactly how I get my heart broken all over again.
A sound slips out of me, low and helpless.
And that’s when my stupid, lagging brain finally catches up.
When he said a kiss, he meant on the cheek.
That’s why he tilted his head like that.
Oh my God.
I jerk back, dragging in air, my head spinning.
Connor looks at me with glassy eyes and parted lips, and I say, “You meant on the cheek, didn’t you?”
He nods, and my whole face goes up in flames.
“Well,” I say quickly, already backing away, “I think I got the pictures. We should probably head back.”
I don’t wait for him to answer. I just turn and head for the trail, down into the trees.
Connor catches up with me almost immediately, and for the first few minutes we walk in silence. It’s awkward, and the whole time I’m burning with humiliation over that kiss—over the fact that I completely misunderstood him and kissed him on the mouth.
He kissed you back, my brain offers unhelpfully, but he probably just felt sorry for me. Especially after I basically cried on his chest over my ex.
“We should’ve put sunscreen on,” Connor says, breaking the silence.
I glance at him, caught off guard by how casually he says it.
“Yeah,” I say quickly. “Sorry about that. I was so desperate to get out of our room, I didn’t even dry my hair.” I run a hand through it to prove the point.
Connor gives me a quick smirk.
We keep walking, our shoes scuffing against the dirt, the woods quiet around us except for the wind moving through the branches. The panic in my chest doesn’t disappear, but it loosens enough that I can breathe without feeling like I’m about to choke on it.
As we step around the thick roots of an old pine, Connor says suddenly, “I’ve been there too, you know. With someone who couldn’t admit what we were to each other.”
I blink at him, thrown by the confession. “You have?”
He nods, his gaze on the path ahead. “Years ago. Back in Ireland, before I moved to the States.”
“What happened?” I ask, more eager than I mean to sound.
Connor stays quiet for a few moments before he answers. “We lived in the same village, Quinn and I. Grew up together. Started as friends, then became something more in our late teens.”
My ears prick up at the name—Quinn. It could be a man or a woman, and Connor doesn’t offer a pronoun to clear it up.
“Quinn’s family was very traditional. Very Catholic,” he says. “We’d meet in secret—back rooms at the pub, empty fishing boats, anywhere we could get a minute alone. But in public, Quinn would barely look at me.”
I stop short.
Even without the pronoun, my heart starts hammering. Catholic. Traditional. Wait.
Connor can’t be—
He kicks a stone off the path and watches it vanish into the brush. “I tried to tell myself it was enough. That I understood the pressure. The fear. But after a while…” He trails off, and I hear myself finish it for him, pulse pounding in my ears.
“It stops being enough.”
Connor nods, then looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes that makes my breath catch. Like he knows exactly what kind of hurt I’ve been carrying around since Rick.
“I kept hoping things would change,” he says. “But after a while, I started realizing they probably never would.”
I want to ask. I want to pin down exactly who Quinn was.
But the words stick in my throat. Maybe Quinn was a girl from some rigid, suffocating family who still couldn’t choose Connor.
It’s possible, even if it feels like a stretch.
But he’s avoiding specifics so carefully I can’t tell whether it’s on purpose or just the way he tells the story.
Either way, I don’t have the nerve to ask outright.
“So you left?” I ask instead.
“Yeah,” Connor says. He looks ahead again, following the curve of the trail. “I realized Quinn was always going to choose that life—the one other people expected—over me. So I applied to med schools in the States, got in, packed up, and left.”
“That must’ve been hard,” I say.
He nods. “It was. But it had to happen.” After a beat, he adds, “About a year ago, my sister told me Quinn got married. Has kids now.”
He says it like he’s made peace with it, but I can still hear the pain in his voice.
“Did that hurt?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Not because I still had feelings. More because it confirmed what I already knew. That I was never going to be the person Quinn chose in the light of day.”
I look at him, and my breath catches.
That only makes sense if Quinn was a man. If Quinn married a woman.
Right?
My pulse kicks up again. I search Connor’s face for something that will finally settle it, but he gives me nothing.
“Are you…” I start, then stop, suddenly too aware of how badly I want the answer.
“Mhm?” he says, glancing at me.
I swallow. “Are you seeing anyone now?”
Not what I actually wanted to ask, but close enough.
A small smile touches his mouth. “No,” he says. “I’m not seeing anyone.”
“Oh,” I say, because that still tells me absolutely nothing. Then I remember the woman the guys and I saw with him. “What about that hot dark-haired woman who was at your place last week? We ran into you in the hallway.”
Connor looks confused for a second. Then his face clears.
“You mean Sarah?” He lets out a laugh. “That’s my sister. She was visiting from Ireland.”
“Oh,” I say again, feeling like an idiot. “I just assumed she was your girlfriend or something.”
Connor’s mouth twitches. “Jesus. No.”
My heart does a weird little flip.
Not a girlfriend. Not seeing anyone.
That still doesn’t mean he’s into guys.
“I’ve been avoiding dating for a while,” Connor says as we duck under a low branch. “Too much hassle for zero return.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of my own dating disasters. “My last Grindr date showed up an hour late for dinner, then suggested we skip the meal, buy vodka, and go straight to some cheap motel.”
Connor gives me a look. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish.” I kick a twig off the path. “And the one before that spent the whole dinner playing footsie with my dick under the table until I faked a work emergency and bailed.”
“Jesus Christ.” Connor laughs. “Romance is dead.”
“It’s so dead,” I say, and he laughs again. “What about you? Any horror stories?”
Connor huffs out a breath that sounds a lot like a laugh. “I once went on a date with someone who brought their mother.”
I turn to him. “No.”
“Yes.” He grins. “They didn’t mention it beforehand. Just showed up with her and said she was screening potential partners.”
They.
Does he mean a non-binary person, or is this his way of dodging gender markers again? By now, I’m starting to think he’s doing it on purpose.
I don’t let the brief flare of frustration show on my face. I just laugh and say, “Absolutely not.”
“I’m serious,” he says. “She spent the whole dinner asking about my finances and family medical history.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. There was no second date.”
I laugh again, and some of the awkwardness finally starts to loosen as we keep heading down the trail.
Then Connor says, “I’ve noticed you don’t really like being touched.”
His voice is casual, but there’s a question under it.
I glance over at him. “What do you mean?”
“Yesterday, especially at first, you seemed uncomfortable,” he says. “Tense. I couldn’t tell if I was overdoing it with the touching.”
Heat floods my face so fast it almost hurts. “That’s—that’s not what it was.”
“No?” Connor says, turning his head slightly toward me. “Then what was it?”
I stare at the ground. At the bushes growing on the sides of the path. Anywhere but him.
“I…” I start, then get stuck.
I can’t exactly say because I liked it. Probably more than I should have.
“I…”
But before I can force anything else out, we hear footsteps on the path ahead. Connor and I both turn toward the sound. A second later, Rick comes around the bend, and my stomach drops straight to my feet.
He looks up, spots us, and something in his face brightens when he sees me.
“Noah,” he says, catching my eye. “I was looking for you.”