mine. And then I looked down at my leg, as Noah slid his hand onto it.
“You know what that was?” he asked, smiling.
“What?”
“We just got into trouble with the police for making out in a car, another quintessential teen experience!”
I reached down and slid my fingers through his. “Really?”
He nodded. “In the last two days you’ve re-lived your teens and, today, we re-lived childhood.”
I smiled. He was right. And I’d had more fun in the last few days than I’d ever had before.
“I’m having so much fun!” It was uncanny, but Noah and I had said it at the exact same time, and then found ourselves smiling at each other.
“Me too.” Again, we said it at the same time.
“These last few days with you have been . . .” I wanted to say the best of my life, but maybe that was too much?
“I know,” Noah said. “It’s been amazing.”
“It has.” I wanted to say more, only I didn’t. How much did I say to him? That from the moment he’d held my hand in that ambulance, something inside me had felt so comfortable with him. That even though we’d only known each other for nearly two weeks, it felt like he’d been in my life forever. It felt like we were old friends, meeting once more. And everything about that just felt right. Everything about him and me felt right. But I didn’t say any of that to him. Not yet anyway.
CHAPTER 62
We drove a little longer and soon we were going in circles.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked.
He squeezed my hand. “No. Do you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well, I don’t know about you.” Noah sounded tentative now. “I could seriously do with something more . . . adult, in my life right about now.” He dragged his eyes away from the road momentarily and glanced at me. A bolt of lightning seemed to rush through me. Splitting me in half like an atomic bomb, only for me to crash back together again with this internal force that made me jump out of my chair a little.
“Like what?” I crossed and uncrossed my legs; the word adult had conjured up all sorts of images in my head. His hand moved up and down my leg in a sweeping motion . . . yes, that was very adult. This was getting adult. We were moving away from PG and I had no idea what to do.
“What about a date?” he asked.
“A date?”
“Dinner?”
“But we’ve had dinner before, and lunch, and breakfast, and strange midnight snacks at a garage.”
“Those weren’t dates.” He said it in this tone. Rough and masculine and, my God, the tone made me feel like the chair was a hot frying pan and I was the bacon. And then the clincher, the thing he said that turned the sizzle into a downright burn.
“I’d like to take you on a real date, Zoe. Real.”
I flushed. I blushed. “I’ve never really been on a . . . well, I mean, I did internet dating for a while and it was horrible, and they weren’t really dates, you know?”
“I know what you mean. There’s seldom anything romantic about meeting someone online and going to a restaurant to eat food with them.”
“No,” I said.
There was a pause.
“So, let me take you on your first real date then, tonight.” His thumb ran up my leg in a way that told me he was thinking about more than just a date. What came after the date, perhaps. This made me feel two things: excitement and utter terror. Because I’m sure he had no idea how sexually inexperienced I really was. Sex had always terrified me. Being so close to someone. The germs. The possibility of sharing diseases. It was not something that had ever appealed to me, in real life, anyway. It appealed to me in books. But so far, my experiences had shown me that the real-life thing was very, very different to books.
My first sexual experience had been strange to say the least. It had been at the age of eighteen with a guy called Monty, a friend of mine who I’d been in and out of hospital with for a decade. We both had leukemia, his was worse than mine, but through it all we’d supported each other and become the best of friends. Even our parents had become friends. But the last time we were in hospital, things were very different. Monty’s leukemia had progressed and the doctors had said