“Yeah.” He didn’t elaborate, and while I thought that maybe I should ask what he meant, I didn’t. We sat in silence for a few moments, and I regretted calling. What if we just sat in awkward silence for a few minutes with nothing to say and then hung up? “I had a good time today.”
Well, at least Noah was able to break the awkward silence.
“So did I.” I smiled and put my laptop down. “What’d you do after?”
Noah told me a little about the rest of his evening. He’d had a lazy evening at home with a simple dinner, some time in front of the television, and a little light reading. He asked about my dinner with Holden, and I gave him an overview. I left out the fact that I was angsting over our hug for most of it.
“So, any reason you’re calling so late?”
“No,” I lied. “Just needed a distraction. Can’t focus on my project.”
“Is that all?” There was something in the tone of his voice that told me he didn’t believe me. He’d always been good at reading between the lines and seeing through my bullshit.
I took a deep breath to calm my nerves. “No.” Okay, I could do this. “I was thinking about you. About… uh… about the hug. Earlier.” Wow, I really was a coherent person capable of making all the sense in the world. “It felt… God, I don’t know how it felt. Or how I felt. I just… I keep thinking about it. I was distracted all through dinner, and I don’t even know why, and I’m pretty sure I’m reading things that aren’t—”
“Matt, breathe,” Noah interrupted with a laugh. “I’m coming over.”
I was going to tell him it wasn’t necessary, but he hung up. Fifteen minutes later, there was a text on my phone telling me he was downstairs. I put on a pair of shoes, grabbed my keys, and went outside to meet him.
Noah was sitting in his car, parked under a streetlight near the edge of the parking lot. I climbed into the passenger seat, and I felt it again. That tension that had lingered while we’d sat together on the boat. I’d thought it was one-sided, but if he was here? Then maybe I hadn’t been reading too much into it. Maybe it wasn’t as one-sided as I’d imagined and maybe it wasn’t all in my head.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I didn’t know where to start. Were we supposed to talk about the hug? Were we supposed to talk about something else and ignore the hug? The hug had been the reason he’d come over, after all, so it made sense that we’d talk about it. Except neither one of us were bringing it up.
I could feel Noah looking at me, and I snuck a peek at him out of the corner of my eye. He wasn’t even hiding the fact that he was staring at me, watching me. It only ramped the tension up tenfold.
Someone had to speak first, and it didn’t look like it was going to be him.
“Well, one of us has to say something,” I declared.
“I was waiting for you,” he admitted.
I angled myself toward him in my seat. Maybe this conversation would have been better inside. I should have invited him up to my apartment. It would’ve made more sense than sitting out in his car. I could only imagine what my neighbors would think if they looked outside.Oh, there’s that weird Matt guy. At least he’s found someone to talk to otherthan those damn ducks.I smiled in spite of myself, imagining the old lady that lived beneath me peeking out her window thinking exactly that.
She’d had the misfortune of having a few packages of ducks delivered to her door instead of mine.
“What was that smile for?” Noah asked.
“I’m just thinking about what my neighbors would think with us sitting out here,” I told him. “The woman beneath me already thinks I’m bonkers. She’s heard me talking to the ducks one too many times.”
He laughed. “You know, I don’t really care what your neighbors are going to think about us sitting out here. That’s also not what I wanted to talk about.”
“It’s easier than talking about what we need to talk about.” The hug. The elephant in the backseat. The fact that I thought he was going to kiss me when we hugged, or the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about his body pressed against mine. I didn’t have those kinds of thoughts all that often. I certainly didn’t have them enough for them to derail me the way this had.
Noah reached across the center console and squeezed my forearm. “I’ve been thinking about it too.”
I looked down at his long fingers resting on my arm and back up at him. “You have?”
“First time we’ve hugged since the summer after high school? Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it a little bit.” He gave me one of those smiles that had charmed me so well when we were younger. “Was it just me or was there a moment there? When we hugged?”
Then it hadn’t been entirely one-sided. It was comforting to know that he’d felt it too. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one thinking that the hug had lingered. “I thought there was.”
He re-positioned himself in the driver seat, angling himself toward me a little more. “Were you okay with there being a moment?”
I nodded. “Now that I know it wasn’t completely in my head, yeah, I was okay with it.” I bit my bottom lip, trying to hold myself back from saying anything else. I didn’t need to tell him how much I thought—hoped—that he was going to kiss me during that hug. It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t reciprocated, and then I’d end up even more in my head than I already was.
“I was okay with it too.”
His eyes met mine, and the small car felt like it heated up twenty degrees. Whatever moment we’d had when we’d hugged had followed us into the car, and it had grown. Every moment that his eyes held mine felt like an eternity. It felt like the car was shrinking and heating up at the same time, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was how I went. In a fiery car explosion caused by all this tension.
