18 #2
Then she moved toward a chest of drawers covered in sheets of paper—syllabi, study guides, assignment outlines—and a stack of textbooks took up the entirety of his desktop.
The books were thick, not a single paperback among them, and Olivia read titles like Clinical Psychomotor Skills , Experimental Psychology and Human Agency , and Medical Vocabulary .
She trailed her fingers along the spines as she read.
Then she scanned a piece of paper beside the stack: his entire month’s work schedule.
There was a block of time on almost every day, often lasting late into the night.
How does he have time for anything else? she wondered. How does he have time for me ?
He makes time , her mind replied, and she realized it was right.
It was a humbling thought, and for the first time, she felt bad about wasting so much of his semester with her stupid game.
But it hadn’t felt like a game all week.
It hadn’t felt like a challenge to raise the stakes as high as they could go.
It had felt... real. Intentional. Like something had changed.
Something she wasn’t sure she was ready for.
Olivia was watching Gone in Sixty Seconds when she heard Noah’s car pull into the driveway and shut off. Moments later, the door from the garage clicked open, and footsteps sounded on the kitchen linoleum.
“Pixie?” he called.
“In here,” she answered, turning down the volume on the television.
Noah drifted into his room and flopped face-first onto the mattress beside her. A long groan reverberated through the material.
“Bad shift, huh?” she asked.
He mumbled something that got lost in translation.
“What was that?”
Noah sighed and turned his head to one side, his eyes still closed as he folded his arms beneath his cheek. “A guy came in as high as a kite and wanted to buy forty-seven tiny bags of Cheetos,” he said.
Olivia blinked. That was the most random answer he could have given. “Is that a problem?” she asked.
“It is when you can only find forty-three bags in the whole store,” he muttered.
Olivia winced. “I take it big bags weren’t an option?”
“Big bags have ‘government air,’ whatever that is.”
Olivia laughed softly and reached out to run her hand through his hair. It wasn’t really a calculated decision—just something that felt right. “Who knew there were so many nuts in Willow Creek? It seems like such a normal town,” she observed.
Noah groaned again, though this time, it sounded more like pleasure than pain. Olivia kept her fingertips moving across his scalp.
“They come for the samples,” he mumbled. “Like stray cats. ”
She looked fondly down at where his hair was slipping through her fingers. “Well, the semester is almost over; there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” she assured him.
He chuckled dryly. “Are you sure it’s daylight? Because it feels like a train.”
Olivia didn’t answer, turning her attention back to the movie instead.
Her hand kept moving almost absentmindedly, and she gradually realized he hadn’t said anything for a long time.
In fact, he hadn’t moved at all. She looked down and saw his back rise and fall in a slow, even rhythm, his eyes closed and the stress gone from his face.
He’d actually fallen asleep.
She smiled as his lashes fluttered through whatever dream he was having.
He’d been at work for some part of every day that week, filling his own hours and some of his coworkers’ as well; Wednesday he’d even worked both opening and closing shifts!
A swell of emotion rose up in her chest, but it wasn’t pity.
It was respect. Noah Campbell, despite his class-clown attitude, was one of the hardest-working young men she’d ever met—both on the clock and off—but he never acted tired when she was around.
In fact, just earlier that week, he’d begged her to stay at the arcade until they’d turned on the multicolored lights around the mini-golf course, and it had been his idea to have late-night appetizers afterward.
He made time for her.
And not because he wants to win , a voice said softly. It sounded an awful lot like her brother Michael.
Finally, Noah stirred. He took a deep breath and rolled onto his back before blinking slowly up at her as if through a haze. Then, he smiled, and it was one of the most genuine things Olivia had ever seen.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, his voice thick from sleep. He cleared his throat and rubbed the palm of his hand across his face—and Olivia saw it.
The blip.
It was a strange moment that kept happening over and over: on the bridge beside the arcade’s tiny windmill, in the stairwell at her apartment, in the parking lot of the pizza place.
It was as if Noah had something he wanted to say but couldn’t quite work up the nerve to spit it out, and she was at her wit’s end as to what it might be.
Or, what she wanted it to be.
He rolled onto his side before propping his head on one hand. “Can I tell you a secret?” he asked.
Olivia felt her throat tighten, and it was suddenly hard to swallow. “A secret? I thought you were a vault.”
“Shut up. Do you want to know or not?”
“Of course I want to know,” she replied.
“Jake is going to ask Lexie to marry him.”
Oh. Olivia relaxed against his headboard. That wasn’t a secret. At least, not from her. “I know,” she declared. “I helped him figure out her ring size.”
Noah shook his head as if in disbelief. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, I can. I think we all saw it coming, but I just can’t believe someone I know is going to get married , you know?”
She nodded. “It is hard to believe we’re that old. I think it’ll be a while before I’m ready, though—after grad school, at least.” She toyed with a loose thread on his comforter and wondered aloud, “What about you? Do you see yourself ever getting down on one knee?”
Noah let out a long breath and chewed on his bottom lip like he was thinking hard. “Last year, I’d have said no,” he finally admitted. “But now... I think, if the right person came along, then yeah. I mean, it’ll be a few years, but... yeah. I can see it.”
He looked up at her as he finished, and the blip happened again. But just as Olivia was about to shake him until whatever it was came out of his mouth, he suddenly pulled himself to a sitting position and swung his socked feet to the floor. “You hungry?” he asked. “I’ll go light the grill.”
Olivia growled in frustration as he left the room. There was definitely something floating around in his head, and one way or another, she needed to find out what it was.
The Hawk’s Nest was crowded for a Sunday night. Noah opened the door and shouldered his way toward a back corner booth where he knew his friends Parker and Beckett would be waiting. Unfortunately, they weren’t alone.
“Campbell! This is Charlotte,” Parker said, nudging the girl currently sitting beneath his arm. Then he gestured across the table. “And Beckett found McKenna over by the jukebox showing very poor taste in classic rock, so we rescued her, too.”
Noah glanced toward his lab partner, who was doing a whole lot more than just “rescuing” McKenna.
.. unless she’d needed mouth-to-mouth. “Nice to meet you, Charlotte,” he said distractedly.
He wrinkled his nose as he watched the display in front of him.
After a few seconds, he shook his head hard, breaking himself out of his own thoughts and turning back to Parker, who had obviously lost interest in Noah’s presence.
Instead, he was whispering something in Charlotte’s ear that turned her cheeks a pretty shade of pink.
Wonderful.
Noah grabbed an empty chair from a nearby table and swung it around to the outside edge of the booth, setting it down hard enough to make both Parker and Charlotte jump.
Her face flushed almost guiltily, and she murmured something about the bathroom before sliding out of the bench seat and slipping past Noah without looking him in the eye.
Parker, however, had no problem meeting Noah’s hard stare. “What’s the deal, man? If you want one, go find one for yourself.”
“I thought this was a guy’s night,” Noah pointed out. “We said no dates.”
“Yeah, we said that, but look around you, man! This place is packed with girls coming off that spring break Panama City Beach high. They’ve got to go to class in the morning, but they want one more night of fun before it happens. Why not help a lady out?”
Noah glanced around the room and saw that the crowd was, in fact, mostly female—which was odd, since the Hawk’s Nest tended to be a male-dominated hole-in-the-wall.
“The odds are in your favor, Campbell. Go use them,” Parker urged with a roll of his eyes. But then his expression shifted to one of clear interest. “Unless you’re still with Warrior Princess. Is that a thing now?”
Noah felt his chest tighten at the question.
Yes?
No.
Sort of ?
He decided to go with yes. Manifest destiny and all that, right?
“Yeah, it is,” he said. It wasn’t really a lie—he and Olivia were a “thing”; he just wasn’t totally sure what the thing was.
Parker leaned back and raised a bottle to his lips, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he pointed the drink toward Noah. “Then you’d better leave or get her down here, because this is not a safe place for a taken man to be.”
Charlotte came back at that moment and sidled past Noah’s chair before sliding back into her spot beside Parker. Noah’s friend gave him one final nod, a clear “see you later,” before giving the girl at his side his full attention.
Noah understood the dismissal; he’d given it himself a time or two.
He didn’t take it personally, but he also wasn’t pleased.
He’d worked most of the day, had worked all week while his friends were off having fun, and he’d been hoping to shoot the breeze and blow off steam with the guys before classes started back up.
But, then again, he couldn’t exactly blame them.