It hadn’t seemed like he was just going through the motions when he’d helped Roger. Or when he’d helped me.
When he’d kissed me.
We were lying on our sides now, facing each other in silence. It seemed like he needed to marinate in his own words more than he needed to hear anything I might say.
And then… his foot brushed gently against my calf, skimming along my ankle in slow, absent strokes.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” he murmured, “but what made you cry up there? After you fell in. You were laughing…and then you weren’t.”
At the waterfall.
I exhaled slowly. “I realized…I hadn’t felt that happy in a really long time.”
His foot stilled, and when I glanced up, he was already looking at me.
“When’s the last time you felt happy?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
His eyebrows knit together, but he didn’t answer. The lack of a response was enough on its own. I’d seen him smiling a couple of times on this trip, with his mother, with me, but we both knew I wasn’t asking about the trip.
He looked like a man who wanted to tell me something, but he wasn’t sure what.
Then his fingers twitched against his thigh. Just once. As if maybe he was going to reach for me.
But then?—
Knock! Knock! Knock!
“Noah!”
The voice and the knocking sounded so near that I practically catapulted off the bed.
What in the actual fudge? That wasn’t the door, that was?—
Noah groaned, flopping onto his back. “Adjoining rooms,” he muttered, eyes shut, nostrils flared.
The knock came again, right over our heads, and then his mother’s barely muffled voice. “Noah, hon? Are you awake? I need you to look at this pill bottle. The label’s tiny and I can’t find my glasses?—”
I was already on my feet and grabbing my sandals, heart pounding as I half-hopped-half-shuffled backward toward the door.
Holy guacamole! His mom had been right there! The entire time! Nothing but a thin layer of drywall and plaster between us, her bed probably pressed up against the very same wall as Noah’s if the layout of my own room was anything to go by. For about the hundredth time, I felt like a teenager again. This time, one who was in trouble.
Had she heard us talking?
I groaned at the thought. At least we hadn’t, like, done anything—but we’d definitely flirted and talked about some really personal stuff. Hopefully, she hadn’t heard too much.
Noah stood up like he was going to stop me, but then paused, caught between me and the voice calling from the wall.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, barely above a whisper, eyes filled with regret, maybe? Or frustration.
Or both.
“It’s okay. Really.” I offered the quickest wave in human history, then slipped out the door before…
Before I could ask him to kiss me again.
Before I completely forgot why this was supposed to be a bad idea.
THE NARROW-GAUGE RAILROAD
