Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
FOO FIGHTERS — EVERLONG
Things I’ve learned about Nolan Braddock in the time that I’ve known him:
Watching him cook is a turn-on.
Catching him as he slips on his slutty little glasses to read is, surprisingly, also a turn-on.
But hearing him speak Italian? With authority?
Be still, my raging hormones. I have to resist the urge to fan my face with the map of Italy’s southern coast to keep from bursting into flames in the middle of this car rental place.
Okay, so maybe those aren’t things I’ve learned about him, so much as they’re things I’ve learned about myself.
“Alright, some good news and some bad news,” Nolan says, rapping his knuckles abruptly on the counter in front of us as he turns from the front desk clerk, whom he had been negotiating with, to face me.
At least, it sounded like a negotiation—the fervent cadence of the Italian language seemed to oscillate effortlessly between friendly and furious.
“The good news is that they have a car available.”
“Great!” I say, already feeling better about the odds of finding Molly and bringing her back to the ship.
“The bad news is you need an international driving permit to rent the car, and to drive, which I’m assuming you don’t have—”
He waits for me to shake my head before continuing.
“In that case, I have to be the one to drive.”
I cock my head to the side, perplexed. How is that bad news? I hate driving. Having lived in Toronto my entire adult life, I am well acquainted with the transit system. Subways and streetcars have served me very well over the years, thank you very much.
Besides, cars are expensive.
So, yeah—I’ll pass.
“That’s fine—passenger picks the music, anyway, and I just so happen to have excellent taste. You focus on the road, I’ll focus on the jams.”
Oh God. Did I really just use the word “jams”? Ugh.
I try to stop myself from wincing, but my face must be doing something funny because Nolan peers down at me, his gaze scrutinizing, and asks, “You okay?”
“Um…yeah,” I mumble, my cheeks burning.
Nolan smirks and crosses his arms over his chest, his head cocked to the side in amusement.
“Anyway, passenger princess, where I’m from, the driver picks the music.” He winks and turns back to the representative, saying something in rapid Italian. She nods curtly and turns her attention back to her computer—I’m guessing to get the rental set up.
“Oh, so it’s an Aussie thing, then, huh? That the driver picks the music?”
“No,” he says without looking at me. “It’s a Nolan Braddock thing.”
My stomach does a little flip at his cocky tone, but outwardly, I manage to snort a laugh.
“Fine, you can pick the playlist. But just know, I’m judging you—and it,” I warn, doing my best to give him a haughty smirk. His eyes are on me now, narrowed mischievously, and he thrusts his hand out toward me to shake.
I take it, his large palm warm and soft against mine.
“Deal.”
After Nolan signs a few waivers and forms, the representative leads us out to the parking lot, where we load our bags into a shiny red Fiat 500.
It only takes us about twenty minutes to cross to the mainland using the ferry, and we finally manage to get on the road just before 9 PM, which means we’ll be pulling into the town of Amalfi a little after 3 AM.
With Nolan behind the wheel—his playlist starting off fairly strong with a ’90s Foo Fighters song—I finally have time to slip out my phone and check my tracking app. It tells me that Molly arrived in Amalfi an hour ago, and after checking my banking app, I can see a charge pending.
A ONE-THOUSAND-DOLLAR CHARGE.
I nearly drop my phone and scream when I see it, but instead, a strained sort of squeak escapes me, causing Nolan to shift his focus from the road to my stricken face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh…nothing,” I manage. Barely. I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience. There is no way I’m going to be reimbursed for this by the show unless I do something spectacular for ratings. And, given Molly’s apparent lack of money, I bet she’ll be unable to pay me back, either.
“Yeah, it definitely sounded like nothing.” Nolan’s sarcasm is earned, but I still shoot daggers at him before locking my phone and tucking it away in my pocket.
“Molly dropped a grand on my credit card. I think she hired a car to take her to Amalfi,” I finally say.
“Oh, shit,” he says, genuine concern pressing his brows together as he drags his gaze back to the road. “Can you even tap a watch to pay for a charge that big?”
“I have no idea, but either way, that’s a few days of work—at least—to pay that off.”
“What’s the drama between you and this Molly person anyway?”
“You want the long story, or the short story?” I ask, fiddling with my hoodie string—wrapping it slowly around one finger, then uncoiling it, over and over again.
“We have a six-hour drive ahead of us. I think I can handle the long story.” He turns to smile at me, then notices my fidgeting and reaches over to pull my hand away from the string.
But he doesn’t let go—instead, he threads his fingers through mine and lays my palm on top of the gear shift, his palm blanketing it.
“Relax,” he says, “and tell me the story.”
So, I do.
I begin with how Molly and I met in Camera Club, and how she called me out on being an ice queen. And how, after that, we had bonded almost immediately over Twilight (cue side-eye and a small head shake from Nolan) and Veronica Mars (this one, at least, earned his approving nod).
I tried to paint him a picture of how Molly was the impulsive Thelma to my more reserved Louise. She made the rash, often emotional, decisions—and I pulled her back to reality before she made a mistake that might blow up in her face.
Usually, it had to do with a man.
Okay—it was always about a man.
Not that she had bad taste. In almost all categories—with the glaring exception of their moral character—her taste in men was impeccable.
She just had a habit of choosing men who were more interested in how she looked on their arm than how she felt in their relationship.
And I guess I was protective of her. As often happens with female friendships—especially with a dynamic like that—we bickered. A lot. But we also had so much fun it sometimes felt illegal—and sometimes it was.
In Molly, I had found a soul sister. Someone I could share everything with—how it felt losing my mom at such a young age, the challenges of raising my younger sister, and then, when I started dating, how much boys—and later, men—sucked.
When I walked Nolan through the betrayal, I also shared with him that things with Molly had felt rocky for a while.
She had made new friends in college—not that I faulted her for it, I had, too—but some of them were…
less-than-stellar influences. She suddenly spent a lot of time partying and blowing off class.
And then, eventually, maybe a month or so after Colin Wakelin’s class began, things felt…
different. She became distant, and consistently cranky.
I was so used to Molly being a firecracker; not in the angry way that she is now, but in a joyful, passionate way.
Those final few months of our friendship had felt flat.
I admit, I had been struggling with things in my family—being away from them was beginning to take its toll on Dad and Kyla, and I was traveling home every weekend to help out.
So, after Molly’s betrayal, our friendship already felt so threadbare that walking away was easier than breathing life back into a seemingly doomed relationship.
“So, you hadn’t seen her since then, until she showed up on the ship?” Nolan asks.
“Yup. And, as it turns out, she knew I was going to be here.”
“Interesting…” I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t.
“What’s interesting about that?”
“Well, it just seems obvious that she wanted to see you.” He flicks his eyes away from the road to me, and I narrow my gaze—not in anger, but in confusion.
“No…she was hoping I wouldn’t be here.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asks, holding my gaze for another beat before turning his attention back to the road.
“What do you… Yes, of course. Why would she want to see me?”
“Well…have you thought about her over the years?”
I ponder his question for a while.
Truthfully, I thought about her nearly every day of the four years that followed graduation.
Then less after that. But there were still moments, like when I turned on the television in a Parisian hotel and Twilight had been playing—in English, no less—and I felt the overwhelming urge to send her a message.
And when Dad died…I almost sent that message. I’d gotten her number from a mutual friend, a former classmate. I’d fully intended to text her but chickened out at the last minute.
“Yeah,” I eventually admit. “A lot, actually.”
“So, maybe she did, too. And maybe she finally decided she was done not being friends, and wanted to fix things.”
“But then why did she look at me like she wanted to pounce on me when I first spotted her?”
“Who knows why any of us do anything? Maybe she thought things would be different when she saw you.”
He has a point. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her, and the response my body had to the sight of her was something akin to shock and terror.
Yes, she had a heads-up that I would be there, but maybe seeing me in person brought back all the same memories I’d been flooded with, and she realized she still had unresolved feelings.
“You’re pretty good at that, you know,” I say, twisting to face Nolan.
“What’s that?”
“Seeing things from every angle. Seeing the good first, instead of the bad.”
“Oh, yeah?” he chuckles. I nod, a slight smile curling at my lips.
“It’s why I feel drawn to you.”
“I’m not always like that,” he says. “I have a bad habit of acting first and asking questions later.”
“Is that why you sent me a love letter the first—no, second time we met?”
He throws his head back and laughs.
“It was not a love letter.”
“Yeah, and I’m not a melon murderer,” I retort.
“Alright, fine. I’ll admit that I tend to come on strong when I’m attracted to someone. But the fact that you recognized a lyric from some dumb ’90s one-hit-wonder?”
I gasp in mock indignation. “‘Steal My Sunshine’ is not just some dumb song.”
He laughs. “No, you’re right. It was the song I listened to every day when I sat in that café doing my homework. I mean…come on. I can’t ignore fate when it says, ‘Hey, Nolan, don’t let this woman get away. She’s something special.’”
“You listened to ‘Steal My Sunshine’ every day?”
“For a year. Maybe more, actually. The owner of the bakery only had one CD she would play, some mixtape with a bunch of hits, and ‘Steal My Sunshine’ was on it. Twice.”
“That’s dedication,” I say with a smirk.
“So, yeah—I guess it really was kind of a love letter. Or an “I’m really into you” letter. Because I am—really into you, that is.”
“Yeah? Must be my wit and charm,” I offer sarcastically.
“It is,” he replies quickly, the sincerity in his voice humbling.
Nolan’s gaze locks on mine for a second, and I lift my hand to the back of his head, threading my fingers through his hair. He leans back into my grip, angling his head forward slightly so I can scratch at the base of his neck.
Nolan closes his eyes momentarily as a low groan escapes his mouth. As they drift open again, his expression is a bit dazed.
“Chloe, I think you’re going to have to stop that. We have a few more hours where I need to be focused on the road, and this…isn’t helping me stay focused.”
I smirk.
“Oh, no?”
I tunnel my hands through his hair harder, pushing my fingertips into his skin to massage his scalp. His eyes flutter closed again, and before he can say anything else—or groan, because honestly, I would pay good money to hear that sound again—I pull my hand away and return it to my lap.
“Shit,” he says, his eyes snapping open. I steal a glance at him as he adjusts his position in the seat, and stare smugly out the window, knowing that I’ve probably made the next few minutes or so very uncomfortable for him.