Well, forget Mrs. Rabinowitz and Fifi. I was much happier here. There were many, many things to explore. “That’s a whole six hours away. Plenty of time.”
He let out a sound that was a mixture of laughter and regret. “Please don’t tempt me, Juliet. I’m not as strong as you seem to think I am, and I have promises I intend to keep.”
Great. He had to go and be honorable. But to be fair, that was probably the only reason I’d been enjoying myself. I knew, as much as I’d ever known anything, that he wasn’t going to push me or try to kiss me, and it made me feel safe and unworried.
I tried to come down from the surge of adrenaline that was raging through me. I’d had rushes of adrenaline before, but they’d always been negative. This one was mixed with want and desire and made my blood feel too thick for my veins.
It was a heady sensation, and I liked it.
“So I’m going to go.” He said the words, but he wasn’t moving. He lifted a hand up, running his fingers over my lower lip. That didn’t bother me, either. Then he was moving to hug me, holding me tight against him.
Leaving me to wonder why we hadn’t been doing this all along, either. I adored the feeling of his strong arms being wrapped around me, the hard planes of his chest pressed against me, his face touching mine. I almost turned to kiss his cheek again when he withdrew.
“Now I’m really going,” he said. To my disappointment, he actually did start walking away. But then he called over his shoulder, “By the way, you snore.”
“I do not!” I called back.
He turned around so that he was walking backward. “You a hundred percent do, and it’s adorable.”
I waved to him, and he returned it before turning around. I watched him go, again admiring the view, and then sighed as I fished in my pocket for my key. I will admit that it took me much longer than it should have to get the key into the stupid lock and get the door open.
When I got inside, a strange mixture of fear and doubt swelled up inside me, whispering insidious lies about how I should be worried and scared and run away from Noah.
Nope. I shook my head. I was going to do what he’d suggested and replace those negative thoughts with positive affirmations.
“Listen up, brain. I’m going to kiss Noah Douglas as much as I want to, and you’re not going to overreact or melt down over it. I will kiss him and enjoy it. This is going to happen.”
And I was going to keep telling myself that until it became reality.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I made it to my appointment despite the fact that I was exhausted because I’d barely slept. I just kept running what had happened on the porch through my mind over and over again. It felt like everything had changed, and I was eager to see how that would translate when I saw Noah again.
To my dismay, he sent me a text that said:
That made me laugh, and I sent him an emoji with its tongue sticking out.
I texted Shelby, thinking maybe we could hang out. I felt like a bad friend—we’d been just sending general “hey, how are you, thinking of you” kinds of messages. I hadn’t told her about Noah or how we were hanging out, because those were conversations I wasn’t ready to have yet. Maybe that was selfish of me, but I wanted to fix this phobia and it felt like this might work and I wasn’t willing to jinx it.
She texted me back a sad face, saying she had been so busy and that we’d catch up soon. She did ask:
And she would die if she knew what those ways entailed.
And that’s how the next few days went, me finding ways to amuse myself, taking care of Sunshine, going to my appointments, and doing everything in my power not to spend every minute of every day thinking about Noah.
I failed miserably. He was on my mind constantly. I also kept reliving those moments on Gladys’s porch, wondering what it would be like when I saw him again.
Because he didn’t contact me. I guess part of me had expected him to since he’d become so important to me, and it hurt a little that he didn’t seem to feel the same way. I tried to be fair—he was there to work