Chapter Fifteen
The inside of Jeremiah’s car smelled like Noelle’s perfume.
It had always been part of their plan that her commitment to him would last for only the duration of the weekend.
So then why did he feel so off without her here?
In a short period of time, he’d gotten used to her warm presence.
He’d become accustomed to the sound of her laugh and the boost of serotonin that shot to his brain whenever he’d made her smile.
His hands had become familiar with the feel of hers as they’d threaded their fingers and pressed their palms together countless times.
He hadn’t been prepared for how amazing it felt to kiss and touch her intimately.
Now he’d never be able to forget the feeling of her smooth, soft skin, or how she’d moaned in his ear last night.
He’d looked forward to the way he’d lock eyes with her around his family, acknowledging their shared secret.
Or how her whole face lit up simply because she was excited to eat cookies or talk to him about the plot of the book she was reading.
This weekend she’d been by his side, unknowingly grounding him whenever his thoughts had started to spiral. She’d been his partner in crime.
He missed her already.
It took him a moment to realize that the silence was so loud because Noelle had been playing her music.
He fumbled to reconnect his phone so that he wouldn’t be stuck alone with his thoughts, but he barely had a chance to open his music app because Celeste was calling him. She probably wanted to check in.
Before he’d left Heart Beach this morning, he’d talked with his mom in her office, and she’d told him that she was concerned about him in the aftermath of his “breakup.” She’d reminded him that he didn’t have to chase after someone who didn’t want to be with him, and that if Noelle couldn’t see his value, then she didn’t deserve him.
He’d reassured Celeste that he was okay and that he just wanted to nurse his broken heart in peace and get back home and focus on work.
And separately, he’d be able to catch his breath after being in Heart Beach, constantly confronted with his guilt over how he’d left things with Pop before he died.
“Hey, Ma,” he said, connecting the call on his car’s speaker. “What’s up?”
“Are you home yet?” Celeste asked.
He could hear Ashley’s and Harper’s high-pitched voices in the background.
He felt a slight tug in his stomach. Being back at Heart Beach had been hard, but there had been pockets of joy too.
Like being with his nieces on the boardwalk and catching up with Amara and Robin at breakfast. Things with Percy were tough right now, and leaving Heart Beach meant that he wouldn’t risk getting into it with Percy again.
But as Jeremiah heard his nieces chattering in the background, a part of him wished that he could have handled staying in Heart Beach for a bit longer.
“Not home yet,” he said. “Almost. Why? Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Celeste said. “I’m calling about Noelle.”
“Mom, I’m gonna be okay,” Jeremiah insisted, although as he said those words, he got another whiff of Noelle’s lingering perfume, and it caused his chest to tighten. He swallowed. “It was a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing.”
“I want you to work things out with her and bring her back next weekend.”
He almost swerved out of his lane into another car. “I’m sorry,” he sputtered. “What?”
“I think I was wrong about her.”
He blinked, dumfounded. “Less than two hours ago, you said you didn’t think she deserved me. What changed your mind so fast?”
“Well, I saw her helping the girls this morning with their routine, and it was just the sweetest thing. My instincts are telling me that I overreacted about how she broke up with you. You’re both hurt, and hurt people say hurtful things.”
Jeremiah’s brain was doing mental gymnastics. His mom watching Noelle interact with his nieces had brought on her sudden change of heart? What had Noelle done, exactly? Teach Harper and Ashley an entire Beyoncé routine in five minutes?
“But it’s not just about her helping the girls, Miah,” Celeste said. “Aside from the drama last night, you lit up around Noelle. I haven’t seen you happy like that since before Pop died. It was nice to see you that way.”
Jeremiah paused, falling quiet. He and Noelle had pretended to be in love for the benefit of his family.
What Celeste saw between them had been manufactured.
But…what if Celeste had been able to see past what Jeremiah had struggled to keep in check?
That he’d started to like Noelle in a way that was not outlined in their agreement.
Now, suddenly, Celeste was invested in him and Noelle getting back together.
Jeremiah rubbed a hand over his face. This was all his fault.
He’d buried himself too deep with his lie.
Under no circumstances would he admit to Celeste that he had hired Noelle to be his girlfriend in order to back up his story.
In an unexpected turn of events, their plan had backfired.
More than backfired—it had blown the fuck up in his face.
“The rest of the family enjoyed you being here too,” Celeste continued.
“Life is short, Miah. We’re here one day and gone the next.
I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or be unnecessarily morbid, but that’s just the truth of it.
We’re family and we have to cherish each other.
Otherwise, what do we have? We want you here.
” She paused, and Jeremiah felt the weight of her words settle around him.
“So, patch things up with Noelle, okay? Bring her as your date to the gala. Spend time with us before you’re a West Coaster.
And please don’t tell me that you can’t come down on the weekends because of your job.
You work hard but you don’t work on the weekends, and you’re already working remotely.
I don’t see why you can’t work from Heart Beach if need be. ”
We’re family and we have to cherish each other.
Jeremiah grasped on to those words because they were true.
He’d wasted years hanging around the wrong people.
His family was important to him. Spending more time at Heart Beach with them, keeping his mom happy, was what he should be doing.
But that meant a month of weekends with no escape from his complicated feelings about Pop’s death.
And weekends where he’d inevitably argue with Percy again.
Noelle told him that he should talk to his family about his grief over Pop, that they were a soft place to land.
He wanted to believe that he could work himself up to that, even if he didn’t feel fully capable.
Also, what if agreeing to return to Heart Beach meant that he could continue helping Noelle?
She still needed more tuition money. She deserved to go back to college and become a librarian or be whatever she wanted to be.
If he brought Noelle back to Heart Beach, they could play the part of a happy couple for a few more weeks, and he could pay her in return.
Then, once summer ended and he moved to California, he and Noelle really could go their separate ways, and that would be the end of it.
He could keep Celeste happy and help Noelle at the same time.
Well, that was only if Noelle agreed to extend their arrangement.
He exhaled deeply.
“I—I’ll try to work things out with Noelle,” he said. “But I can’t promise she’ll want to come back with me.”
“She’ll want to work it out. I know she will. She loved being here with you, I could tell. Trust me. Listen, I’m so glad we had this talk, sweetheart. We’re heading to the beach now, so I’ve gotta go. But I’ll see you Friday, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll be there.”
The call ended. Jeremiah blinked rapidly as he tried to gather his bearings. Then he turned off the nearest exit and hopped back on the highway in the opposite direction. He called Noelle, and she answered on the first ring.
“Hi,” she said. “Did you forget something?”
At the sound of her voice, the tension slowly left his body.
“Nah, I didn’t,” he said. “Are you still home?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I want to talk to you about something,” he said. “Do you mind coming back outside?”
She paused. Then, “Okay.”
Fifteen minutes later, he reentered Noelle’s apartment complex.
She was waiting on the sidewalk in front of her building.
She’d changed out of the sundress from earlier and was now wearing an old Hidden Gems Books T-shirt and denim shorts.
He felt a strong tightening in his chest again at the sight of her.
She smiled curiously at him as he got out of the car and walked toward her.
“What’s up?” she asked.
Better to just come out with it.
“The plan backfired,” he said, and she frowned.
“My family wants us to work it out because…my happiness is important to them, and they thought we looked happy. My mom asked me to spend the last few weekends at Heart Beach before I move, and even though I have a lot going on, I don’t have the heart to tell her no, because I should be there with them.
She wants you to come back with me because she saw you being kind to my nieces and their friends, and despite our dramatic breakup, my family sees something in us and wants us to stay together. ”
Noelle’s eyes widened. “I really didn’t think much of it when I helped your nieces. I just figured they needed some guidance. And your sisters did make a couple comments last night about us working things out, but I didn’t think they were that invested.” She blinked at him. “What are you gonna do?”
“When is your next wedding?” he asked.
“September. I have a bridal shower the last Saturday of August. Why?”
“If you spend the next four weekends with me in Heart Beach, I’ll pay you the same rate per weekend,” he said. “So fourteen thousand total. No, fifteen.”
Noelle’s jaw dropped. “Fifteen thousand…”
“Is that enough to cover the rest of what you need for tuition and your bills for the month?”
She blinked and nodded silently.
“Okay,” he said. If she agreed to extend their arrangement, he wanted to make sure she had everything she needed and then some.
He didn’t want her to have to worry about anything.
“If you say yes, what I’m thinking is that when I move, I’ll say we broke up and things fizzled out, and that will be it. ”
“Jeremiah…” Her laugh was half surprise, half confusion. “I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t an extremely appealing offer. But wouldn’t it be easier and less expensive if you just told your family the truth?”
“Telling them the truth would cause a lot of drama and it’s not drama that I have the capacity to deal with right now.
” He could predict his family’s reactions.
His mom and sister would look at him with crushed expressions of hurt and disappointment, and Percy would criticize him for being careless and irresponsible.
He cleared his throat. “I just want to keep the peace and keep my mom happy. And I want you to have that money, so all your tuition problems will be taken care of.”
Noelle stared at him, brows drawn together as she bit her lip.
“If I come back, will I have to act removed from everyone?” she asked. “Because that was hard, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with it for a whole month.”
“No, there’s no point now,” he said. “You can just be at the house and enjoy yourself. And pretend to be my girlfriend, of course. That’s all I’m asking.”
She eyed him silently. He waited, anxious.
“If I do this, I need you to explain to me what’s going on between you and your brother,” she said. “You don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty, but I need the gist of it.”
It was a fair request. He just hadn’t expected her to ask it.
“The gist of it is that Percy is mad at me for leaving Smith’s Sweets,” Jeremiah said. “He thinks I did it to be selfish, but I was just trying to grow and see what I could accomplish on my own.”
That was one way to summarize the situation. He didn’t need to go into the guilt and shame he’d felt about making his family look bad.
Noelle took a deep breath. Then a slow smile crept across her face.
“This is crazy,” she finally said. “But you’ve got yourself another deal, Jeremiah Smith.”
He smiled too, filled with relief. And another feeling that he refused to acknowledge just yet. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling wider.
“Send me a new agreement to sign,” he said. “I’ll pick you up on Friday.”
“All right.”
He walked backward to his car, facing her. “And call me if you need anything in the meantime.”
“I will,” she said. She laughed and shook her head. “Crazy!”
His heart pounded a little harder at the sound of her laugh.
He chose not to examine why.