“Fuck,”I snapped at the too-fucking-empty room when I twisted the base off the bullet blender too hard and sent my protein shake sloshing all over my desk. I glared at it, then scrubbed a hand over my face and took a breath.
Okay then.
Not the blender’s fault.
I was... a little on edge, let’s just say, but that wasn’t gonna do fuck-all to actually solve any problems.
No. Hold up. Not “problems”—unless you counted me wanting to hit something out of sheer frustration as a problem—but I needed to use the word “situation” for my own sanity, because it sounded less dire.
This whole cone-of-silence thing that Noah was playing at today, though? It was asituationthat had already passed the point of making me think about smoking-hot consequences to deliver to my slave and moved on to the stage where I was hard-core worrying that some freak accident had happened with Noah’s parentals during his breakfast with them.
Shooter?
Food poisoning?
Freak meteor falling from the sky?
I headed over to the closet to grab a towel out of the dirty clothes hamper to use for protein shake clean up, doing a hard reset on my brain while I was at it so I could use all that gray matter to get shit done instead of to drive myself crazy imagining worst-case scenarios.
This new master-slave, me-getting-to-be-the-one-in-charge-of-Noah’s-dick development in our lifelong friendship had obviously ramped my protective instincts right up into the red zone, but...
Fuck. Deep breath. Okay. Noah was probably fine. He had to be, because nothing else was gonna work for me. And yeah, it was true that he hadn’t replied to a single one of my texts and that wasn’t ever how we rolled, but what I needed to do was stop assuming he’d been dismembered or some shit and just get my ass over to the diner and collect my boy so I could calm the fuck down already.
I gave zero fucks at this point that his parentals had specifically told him not to bring me along to their little get together. They could just deal. Obviously, something had gone down, because I’d already been back from the gym long enough to shower, plow through a little homework, and then spill my goddamn shake everywhere, and there wasstillno sign of him.
Had they fuckingkidnappedhim?
I finished cleaning up and tossed the towel back into the hamper, then scooped up my wallet and keys, ready to track Noah down and go medieval on the ass of whatever was causing this media blackout between us. But then the dorm room door opened—fina-fucking-lly—and Noah slunk inside, looking…
Fuck.
My chest suddenly hurt.
He looked fuckingmiserable.
“Jesus,” I said, already across the room before I even realized I’d moved. I grabbed his biceps and shook him, because… just… just…fuck. “Noah, what the hell, bro? Why didn’t you answer my texts?”
His eyes were all red like he’d been fuckingcrying, but instead of crumpling against me the way nature intended and answering my damn question so I could fix whatever fucking bullshit had caused the sacrilege that was the expression currently on his face, he pulled away, ducking his head and then wrenching the scarf from around his neck, practically choking himself in the process.
“Whoa there,” I said, my heart thundering because… because… it… he… I just…
Motherfuck.
Okay, I had to get a grip. I didnotflail, mentally or otherwise... but if he wasn’t okay, then I wasn’t okay, and Noah pretty goddamn fucking clearly was not fucking okay right now.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Demanded. Whatever. “Where’ve you been? Why didn’t you, what’s going, uh, Jesus…Noah.”
What the actual fuck? Flailing again.Me.
“Sorry,” he whispered, not meeting my eyes as he finally managed to get his scarf off and tossed it aside. “It’s… um, it’s all fine.”
What?
Fine?
No, it really wasn’t.
Also, that wasn’t a fucking answer.
