CHAPTER 10. Connor
I’m nodding at the right moments, smiling when I’m supposed to, making fishing jokes that have Daniel and Brad laughing into their whiskey glasses. Perfect son-in-law material. Or at least a convincing imitation of it.
But my eyes keep drifting across the room to where Noah stands by the window with Rick.
Their bodies are angled toward each other in a way that speaks of history.
Familiarity. Years of knowing exactly how to occupy the same space.
Every laugh that reaches me feels like a hook sinking deeper into my chest. I should be fully present in this conversation about Irish streams versus American lakes, but all I can think about is the way Rick leans a little too close to Noah, and the way Noah doesn’t step back.
Fuck.
“So you’re saying Irish trout actually fight harder?” Daniel asks, his face bright with amusement as he gives the whiskey in his glass a swirl. “Even though they’re smaller?”
I force my attention back to him.
God. I like fishing talk. I’m good at fishing talk. But right now every bit of my focus is on Noah, and this feels like torture.
“Absolutely,” I say, with a smile I hope looks real. “Brown trout especially. They’ll make you work for every inch of line. It’s like they’ve got something to prove.”
Daniel and Brad both chuckle, exchanging an amused look.
Yeah. Apparently I’m better at charming the parents than I am at charming my own fake boyfriend, who’s still angry with me and has apparently decided to ignore me for the rest of the evening.
“It’s the current, right?” Brad asks. “Makes them harder to reel in?”
“Pretty much.” I force my attention back to Brad, though my eyes cut to Noah again and catch him nodding at something Rick says.
“In a stream, even a smaller trout can make you work. They’ll tuck into the current, dive for cover, run the line under rocks if they can.
Back home, half the fun was standing there in miserable weather, soaked through, trying to bring one in before it slipped the hook. ”
Brad laughs, lifting his glass. “That sounds like Maine. Daniel and I once spent an entire freezing morning at my cabin trying to catch trout and came back with nothing but wet socks.”
Daniel grins. “And a lot of excuses.”
They fall into the story, and I nod when I’m supposed to, but the thread of the conversation is already slipping away from me. My attention drifts right back to Noah.
I know it’s stupid. I know I have no right to feel anything about who he talks to, or who makes him smile, or whether he still looks at Rick like some part of him remembers being loved by him.
But I keep watching anyway, waiting for Noah to pull back, to glance over, to give me any sign that he hasn’t completely shut me out.
Then Rick says something I can’t hear, and Noah smiles.
It’s not the tight, polite smile he’s been wearing since dinner started. This one is softer. Easier. The kind I’ve been trying to pull out of him all evening and failing miserably.
My stomach twists.
Noah barely looked at me through dinner, and since everyone left the table and spread out around the room, he hasn’t said a single word to me. Not one.
I know he’s still shaken by what happened with Maya. Of course he is. Having your sister overhear most of the argument about your fake-boyfriend lie is bad enough. Having to sit her down afterward and tell her why you lied in the first place is a whole other kind of awful.
Her reaction was better than I expected, though the conversation itself was still a complete mess.
We went into her room on the second floor, and she shut the door behind us with this look on her face that made my stomach drop. Then she asked if it was true. If Noah and I weren’t really together. If we’d been lying to everyone.
Noah told her everything. About Rick. About Cassidy. About asking me to come here as a favor. He kept his eyes on the floor the whole time, his voice shrinking with every sentence.
Maya didn’t interrupt once. She just sat on the edge of the bed, frowning while Noah talked. Every so often, her eyes cut to me, like she was trying to work something out, though I couldn’t tell what.
Then Noah asked her not to tell their parents. Maya went quiet for a long moment before she said she wouldn’t.
And that was it. Noah and I went back downstairs and pretended everything was fine.
It wasn’t.
When Maya joined us later, she was quieter than usual, her mood visibly off. Noah sat through the whole dinner like he wanted to disappear into the wallpaper, and now he’s avoiding me by putting as much space between us as the room allows.
Which would be fair, probably, if he weren’t doing it by talking to Rick.
I want to cross the room and claim Noah in some obvious way that would make Rick back off. But I don’t have that right. Not anymore.
“Connor?”
I blink and turn back to Daniel, realizing too late that he’s been talking to me. “Sorry, what was that?”
“I asked what kind of setup you prefer. Fly fishing or spinning rods?”
“Oh. Fly, definitely.” I sit up a little, forcing myself back into the conversation. “There’s something about the rhythm of it. It clears your head.”
Brad grins. “A purist. I respect that.”
I smile back, but it feels stiff on my face. Across the room, Caroline, Maria, Maya, and Cassidy are at the dining table, playing some card game that involves dramatic slapping and exaggerated groans. Maya looks over again—her third glance in the last ten minutes.
I can’t read her expression exactly, but it isn’t the disappointment I expected. It’s something more complicated. Like she’s working something out.
Or maybe she’s just noticed how badly I’m pretending not to watch her little brother.
“My father was the same way,” I say to Daniel and Brad before the silence stretches too long. “He wouldn’t touch a spinning rod. Said it was like cheating.”
“Smart man,” Daniel says, then laughs and raises his glass. “To fathers and fishing.”
I raise mine too, the whiskey catching the lamplight before I take a sip. It burns going down, but the sting barely registers, because across the room Rick touches Noah’s arm.
His fingers linger, and Noah doesn’t pull away.
Something ugly twists in my chest.
This was supposed to be simple. A weekend of pretending.
A favor for a neighbor I barely knew and maybe had a harmless little crush on, no big deal.
I’d help Noah save face, make his ex jealous, maybe even have a decent time myself, then go back to my apartment and my shifts and the thin wall between us.
I wasn’t supposed to start falling for him.
The realization hits with a sick certainty.
I’m falling for Noah Caldwell. Hard. At the worst possible time.
And there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Connor,” Daniel says, pulling me out of my head again. His voice is quieter this time. “I want to thank you.”
I look at him, confused. “For what?”
He gives me a small smile.
“For Noah,” he says, glancing across the room at his son. “I haven’t seen him this happy in years. There was always something he held back. But with you, he seems like himself again.”
The irony is brutal enough to make it hard to breathe. Daniel is thanking me for making Noah happy when I’ve just made everything worse. When Noah has barely looked at me all evening.
“He’s easy to be with,” I say, because underneath everything else, that part is true.
Being with Noah is easy. Not simple, clearly.
Not after tonight. But easy in a way nothing has felt for a long time.
He’s smart without making a performance of it.
Funny when he forgets to be self-conscious.
He cares too much about everything—rescue dogs, other people’s feelings, whether he’s said the wrong thing—and then gets embarrassed the second anyone notices.
He’s strangely perceptive too, in the way people get when they’ve spent too long bracing for the worst. And his face gives away every thought before he can stop it, which should make him terrible at hiding things but mostly just makes him look like a deer in headlights.
Even the way he panics over every minor disaster is unfairly endearing.
It makes me want to catch him by the shoulders and tell him to breathe.
Of course I fell for him. I’m starting to think I never stood a chance.
“Well, I’m glad he found you,” Daniel says, reaching over the coffee table to clap a hand on my shoulder. “You’re good for each other.”
“Thank you,” I say, because I don’t know what else to do with that.
Across the room, Noah laughs again.
My chest tightens before I can stop it. Rick is standing even closer now, angled toward Noah like he still has some claim on him. His hand lifts to Noah’s arm, his fingers lingering there a moment too long.
And Noah doesn’t pull away.
My grip tightens around my glass. I should look away. I should let it go. I should remember he was never mine in the first place.
Instead, I set the glass down a little too hard.
“Excuse me,” I say, already standing. “I need to use the restroom.”
I don’t wait for a response. I just turn and head for the stairs.
I need a minute away from all of it.
I make it to the upstairs bathroom, lock the door behind me, and lean back against it with my eyes closed.
For a moment, I just stand there, trying to get air into my lungs while my chest tightens and heat crawls up my neck.
It’s a panic attack. I know the shape of it well enough to recognize it, even when I hate that it’s happening.
But this time it isn’t grief or exhaustion or the hospital still clinging to me after a bad shift.
It’s jealousy.
Plain, humiliating jealousy, because Noah is downstairs talking to Rick, and I can’t do a single thing about it.
Which is absurd. Why the hell would I have a panic attack over that? I’m a grown man. A doctor. I spend my days talking people through fear, keeping my head while people fall apart in front of me.
This should be nothing.
I barely even know the guy.
But here I am.