It was another Thursday night with my friends, the third since I’d started staying with Noah. It had been almost a week since he’d brought me a few personal items from my boat, and he’d been right with his theory that having a few of my things around his apartment would help me relax. It was easier to code my way through my problems with ducks I’d had for years. It was easier to focus when I had pictures of my friends and that old blanket my grandmother made me. Seeing familiar things made me feel less like a guest in Noah’s house.
Except feeling like I wasn’t a guest was making it even harder to go slow.
I was on a steep slide, and that slide had been covered in grease. I was speeding down it, recklessly and headfirst, and every single day that I spent with Noah made me care even less that I might get hurt at the end. I’d been hurt in the past, and I’d picked myself up and brushed myself off. I’d even survived a Noah-shaped heartbreak in the past. No matter how this ended,I knew that I’d be able to pick myself up and put the pieces back together.
But there was that naive part of me that hoped I wouldn’t find myself shattered.
Every text from Noah made that naive hope swell, so was it that surprising that I wanted to spend more time texting him? But Holden did have a point. He would be at home when I got back. I was supposed to be spending time with my friends. Seb and Jonas weren’t spending the entire night texting their boyfriends, and I never wanted to be the person who put my boyfriend above my friends.
I hadneverbeen that person in the past, not even when I’d been with Noah in high school and deep in the throes of first love. I typed a quick reply to Noah and tucked my phone back away.
“Sorry,” I apologized to my friends. “I’ll stop texting Noah. He was just telling me about this documentary he’s watching tonight.”
“He’s at home watching a documentary?” Jonas questioned.
“And he’s texting you about it?” Jonas’s question sounded curious, but there was clear judgment in Eli’s voice. “What the hell is so interesting that he’s texting you about it?”
“It’s just some serial killer documentary,” I told him with a shrug. “I don’t know. There was a fact that he wanted to tell me.”
“He’s texting you random facts from a documentary. You two are really grossly domestic, aren’t you?” Eli scoffed.
I smiled brightly because we were grossly domestic. I loved sitting home with him, curled up on the couch. I loved that we alternated Netflix selections. We cooked dinner together a few nights in the past week, and we still moved seamlessly around the kitchen together. We’d even spent the past Saturday running errands and cleaning his apartment, not that it needed it. But with two of us there, little bits of clutter piled up faster. Andokay, maybe my small duck collection had to find a place where it could live while I was there, some place that wasn’t his living room table.
I could feel my friends watching me, waiting for an answer, though I knew they were all smart enough to read between the lines. But if they wanted to hear me admit it, then I would proudly admit that we were deep in domestic bliss. “We are. He’ll probably still be awake, waiting for me, when I get home.”
“Home?” Eli questioned.
“I mean to his place. When I get back to his place.” Because it wasn’t my home. I was staying there temporarily until my apartment was fit for human habitation again. The landlord had sent an email earlier that week to let us know that repairs were underway, but they might take a little longer than planned. By the time they were done, I wondered if my apartment would even feel like home anymore.
Noah’s place already felt like home.
Jonas studied me while he took a sip of his beer. I shifted under the weight of his gaze, unsure what it was that he was seeing in my face. “You’re starting to fall for him, aren’t you?” he asked as he rested his bottle of beer on the table.
For a moment, I hated that my friends knew me as well as they did. Because his words held the truth. I was falling for Noah. Even though we’d planned to take it slow, my heart didn’t get the memo. Every little thing that he’d done for me in the almost month we’d been together compounded into this truth.
He’d found me surrounded by rubber ducks and made sure I ate something. He’d come for me in the middle of the night when my apartment caught fire. He sat with me all night at the expense of his own sleep, and I knew how important his sleep was to him. He gave me a place to stay, insisted that I stay with him, even though we wanted to take it slow. He’d taken me shopping to make sure I had all the basics I needed to live,and he hadn’t complained once about driving me around until I had my keys and car back. He’d held me when I woke up with a nightmare full of flame-filled bedrooms and mocking rubber ducks, and when I was stressed by my job and feeling unsettled, he’d gone out of his way to provide comfort to me.
It wasn’t just the bigger moments that had me falling back in love with him, either. It was the quiet moments, the little things that were so small that someone could blink and miss them. He let me choose the music in the car, even though he hated showtunes and almost every single one of my playlists contained at least one. He made sure his cabinets were stocked with my favorite hot cocoa brand, and he’d even gone out of his way to pick me up donuts from the bakery by my apartment one morning. He held me on the couch while we watched shows, and he listened when I rambled about anything and everything.
I felt seen with him, seen in a way that only he’d ever made me feel.
How could I do anything except fall for him?
But how could I explain that to my friends in a way they could understand? How could I explain to them that I wasn’t recklessly diving headfirst into this thing with Noah? It barely made sense to me. I was usually more cautious with my heart, even though I gave it away freely to my partners in the past. I took my time. I moved with purpose through my relationships. I knew a part of it was just the fact that it usually took time for the physical spark to strike.
That wasn’t a problem with Noah either.
It was like he was the exception to every rule I’d ever had.
“Matt?” Jonas asked softly.
“I am,” I admitted in a small voice. I was surprised they were able to hear me over the laughter of the table behind us, raucous and loud and unaffected by the fact that I had somehow started to fall back in love with my ex-boyfriend in just a matter ofweeks. So much for taking it slow. My friends exchanged glances at each other. Holden sat up straight, no longer leaning his head on Holden’s shoulder. Eli’s whiskey-colored eyes were narrowed as he studied me. Seb and Jonas had both turned to look at me from our side of the booth. I felt like a bright spotlight was blaring down on me. I hated that feeling. I rubbed my arms and nodded. “Yeah,” I repeated. “I’m falling for him.”
“You two haven’t even been back together for a month,” Eli pointed out. I could hear the cynical pragmatism in his voice. If I was the grand romantic in the group, Eli was the cynical realist. He had always looked at romantic relationships with a certain amount of disdain. He’d teased Seb and Jonas when they’d started dating their boyfriends, because Eli couldn’t fathom doing the same thing. The entire time I’d known him, he’d never had a relationship, and he’d always been more than willing to throw ice water over the rest of us when we started falling too hard, too fast.
This was my ice bucket moment.
“But a lot’s happened in that month,” I reminded him. “We planned on taking it slow. We really did, but then I started staying with him…”
