Echo places a hand on my chest and nudges me back. I’m cautious, watching her stare at my stomach. She’s thinking, weighing, and I need to give her space. A rush of air escapes her lips, her arms fall to her sides, and my damn little siren switches her focus and looks down.
My lips edge up as her eyes widen. “No,” she whispers.
“No what?”
“There is no freaking way that will fit.”
Echo
The smugness radiating from Noah is nauseating. He wears this infuriating grin that encourages me to smack him upside the head, but the guilt from throwing his clothes into the pool prevents me from tackling him.
With a towel wrapped around his waist, he lays out his clothes on the floor, on the table and over the chairs. Basically anywhere there’s an open spot. The cross tattooed on his biceps stretches as he hooks a hanger holding his dress shirt onto the heater vent near the ceiling.
I saw Noah tonight...all of him, and he was gorgeous. I mean, I knew what to expect as I’m not a nun. We have biology books at school, and I’ve had sex ed, but it was different, standing there, seeing him...and then I went and said the most epically tragic thing ever: There is no freaking way that will fit.
Sitting on the bed in a tank top and pair of boy shorts, I press my hands over my blazing cheeks. Saying that was like handing a match and a can of gasoline to a pyromaniac. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
Noah chuckles. “Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t. I meant that...you know...there’s a limited space and you just appeared...and it’s not what I meant.” Stop digging the hole. It’s already too deep for daylight.
Will this ever cease being so uncomfortably weird and agonizing and strangely glorious? I like the glorious part. The rush of discovering something new, but I wish I could leave uncomfortable and agonizing behind.
Noah glances at me from over his shoulder. “So you saying I’m not abnormally large?”
“Yes.” That sounded bad. “No.” Somehow that sounded worse. “I’m sure you’re normal.”
The stubble on his face moves as he smiles. Noah places his hand near the knot on the towel hanging at his waist. “Would you like to have another look?”
My mouth goes dry, and I fumble with my hair pick before combing it through my curls. I’m doing my best for casual though casual seems impossible. I saw Noah tonight. “No, I think I’m good.”
“Regret skipping the conditioner?” Noah asks.
Yep. “I didn’t need it. Using too much can cause buildup.”
Not true at all. There are certain things needed to survive in life: water, food, conditioner. For the millionth time, the pick catches on a tangle, and I consider scissors. Lots of girls cut their hair short before college. Why shouldn’t I be one of them?
“Could have stayed in longer,” Noah says. “The hot water didn’t run out as fast as you thought it would.”
“Well...you know...it had been running for a while, and what type of guests would we be if we drained the water tank?”
“Uh-huh.” The bed dips as Noah sits beside me, and I don’t miss how the towel slides up his leg. Oh, God, I’m obsessed now.
“So you bolting had nothing to do with me being naked?” he asks in this I-know-everything tone, and I sort of want to wipe that smirk off his face. As I peek at him, I realize I could kiss it off.
I think of the shower and his wet body and the comforter on the bed becomes suddenly fascinating. “Not at all.”
I try the tangle again with both hands. The pick combs through the top then snags at the middle. Hard. The teeth scrape my skin, but when I attempt to pull it out, it yanks my hair, threatening to rip it out by the roots.
“Need help?” Noah asks.
“No.”
“That’s a ginormous knot.”
“I’ve got it.” Yet as I drag the pick through, it becomes totally ensnared, making everything worse, making me flush, making me want to... “Screw it!”
My hands slam down on the bed, and I sit there, utterly humiliated with a plastic growth now embedded in my hair. At least people will have something new to tease me about.
The heater kicks on, and I groan. The room teeters on sauna status. Noah shifts, and my shoulders slump when a tug on my hair causes my head to fall back. It’s as if he believes he can untangle the mess that is my life.
“It’s useless,” I tell Noah as the tugging on my hair inches increasingly close to yanking. “You’re right. I rushed out of the shower because you were naked, and I needed conditioner. Now I’m forever screwed.”
“Not forever, baby,” he says gently.
My eyes stupidly burn, and the weight of the last few days covers me like a shroud. “It feels like forever.”
He says nothing, and I’m very okay with that. Sometimes I prefer silence. My hair drifts right and left and up and down as Noah tries to repair the twisted damage.
“What if I can’t measure up?” I ask, and the pressure on my head pauses. The question even startles me.
“What?”
With Noah behind me, balancing a lock of my hair with one hand and the wedged-in pick with the other, I’m literally stuck, and I fight the urge to dash to the opposite side of the room...or the country. “Nothing.”
“Talk, Echo.”
I link my fingers together and unlink them. Noah grants me a moment of silence as he continues to extricate the tangle. As each stroke works through larger sections of my hair, I sense my reprieve coming to an end. He won’t let this go, and I’m not sure I want him to.
I drop my mouth open to tell him the truth then lose my courage. “I messed up my only hope at making a contact with an art gallery in Vail.”
“How’s that?” Noah pauses to use his fingers against the knot. “Showed them your art and they felt inferior?”
I giggle before sighing. I wish. I’ll be going home a failure—as someone not capable of succeeding on my own with my art. At least not without my mother’s help, and that isn’t an option. “No, I wasn’t thinking straight. There was a painting of the constellation Aires that was wrong and after everything that happened...the owner came out...and he asked what I thought and...I messed up.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Not good.”
“Not good like I need to talk to him or not good that you’re scared you hurt his feelings?”
“Second one, and since when do you have talks with people?”
“I’ll rephrase. If he yelled at you, I need to shove my foot up his ass.” My head jerks back, but then the pick swipes clean through my hair. “Got it.”
“Thanks.”
I wait for him to hand me the pick back, but he continues to brush the rest of my hair. No one’s done anything like that for me before, and the act makes my skin joyously sensitive.
After a few minutes, he places the pick on the nightstand and settles back against the pillows. I turn and watch as he messes his hand through his hair. I like it damp. It’s a tad bit darker and gives him this hint of wildness.
“I don’t want you scared of me, Echo.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
I think of the first night we made out in the basement of his foster parents’ house. He told me he didn’t want me to be scared of him. I told him I wasn’t, but I was. I was frightened by the sensations caused by his touch. Months later and I’m still terrified. Noah’s right. I’m no different.
I move so that I face him, but stay safely near the end of the bed. “I’m scared.”
Noah scratches his chin with his knuckles and shakes his hair over his eyes. “Me, too.”
“What?” Maybe we aren’t discussing the same thing.
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?” He?
??s Noah Hutchins. They guy who has done it backward, sideways and forward. “I mean you’ve done this, and I haven’t. I can’t even get myself together enough to handle looking at your—” I wave both hands frantically in the air “—stuff.”
“Stuff?”
Oh, my God. “Noah, if there was something sharp nearby, I’d slam it into my brain so I wouldn’t have to have this conversation. So can you stop pointing out my inability to say...stop pointing out my inabilities.”
“Fine. We’ll do this your way.” Noah stretches out his legs and offers me his hand. “But we’re talking.”
Talking. We’re going to do this. We are going to talk about it. We’ve discussed this before...the night I was willing to do it with him, but we didn’t do it, we did other things, and since then he’s been patient.
Still sitting cross-legged, I edge closer to him and bring his hand into my lap so that I can hold it in both of mine. My knee rubs against his thigh, and I like how the hair on his legs tickles my skin.
Noah frowns and tips his chin, indicating that I should come closer, but I can’t. I need distance so I can curl into a ball and die if the conversation becomes too much. That would be harder to do being tucked next to Noah.
“What are you scared of?” I ask.
Noah slides his ring finger along mine, and a small amount of liquid heat flows into my veins. “Hurting you.”
Fantastic. “So you are abnormally large.”
Noah laughs, and I blush so hard that I could roast marshmallows off my cheeks. He squeezes my fingers until I finally meet his gaze. “While I don’t go around checking out the competition, I’d say I’m normal.”
New, refreshing air fills my lungs. Good. That’s good. I think. “Lila said her first time hurt.”
“I’ll try not to hurt you, but a lot of it’s going to depend on how into it you are.”
Kill me. Please tell me we aren’t discussing what I believe we’re discussing. “Got it.”
Yet he keeps going. “Because if you aren’t sure this is what you want to do and you say yes, it’s going to be difficult because you won’t be—”
“I said I got it,” I snap, and throw him a glare that says I’ll happily cut his stuff off if he doesn’t shut up.
“I’ve got condoms that are lu—”
“No.” I slam my hands over my face. “You have them. I know you have them. I do not need to know their specific function and attributes.”
Noah brushes his thumb against the inside of my wrist before he wraps his fingers around my hand. He pulls until my shield gives. “It’s okay. I’m fine continuing with what we’re doing.”
My foot rocks frantically on the bed. “But I want to.”
Noah’s grim as he watches my foot. “If it’s this difficult for you to talk about sex—”
“Because I’m embarrassed!” I yell. “I’m embarrassed because you know everything, and I know nothing, and I hate that no matter what I do, I won’t be good enough.”
Noah sits up, and when I try to duck out of reach, he advances like a tiger and flips me so that I’m lying flat on the bed. He presses his palms onto the comforter on both sides of my head, and his dark eyes bore into mine. My heart pounds wildly and, because I can’t help myself, I reach up and touch his face, sliding my fingers over the rough shadow of his jaw.
Noah leans into my touch, and I love that I have that effect on him. I lick my lips, half hoping he kisses me—half wondering what would happen if he did.
“Echo, kissing you for the rest of my life would be good enough, and you need to get these fucked-up thoughts out of your brain. I’m scared of making love to you because you’re too good for me. I’m terrified that after I share this with you, you’ll realize the mistake, and I can’t take that. Not from you.”
My eyebrows furrow. “Mistake?”
Noah slams his eyes shut then rolls away. Now I’m the one up after him, clinging to his hand before he can bolt off the bed. “What do you mean that I’ll think it was a mistake?”
“Let me go.” A thunderhead creeps onto his face as he stands next to the bed.
“No.” I wind my other hand around his wrist. “We’re talking about this.”
“I’m going to put some of these clothes in the dryer.” He reaches for the only pair of jeans that are halfway dry. I let go of him, grab them then shove them underneath my bottom.
Noah pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’ll go naked, Echo.”
I’m sure he would. “I looked at your penis today so you can talk to me about this.”
Noah’s eyes widen as they jump to me.
“Yep, I said it.” That’s right, world, I’m capable of a sexual conversation.
We’re silent and I toe his T-shirt on the ground that has a skull and crossbones on the back. “You’re good enough for me. In fact, you’re the best for me.”
“You don’t get it. There were girls...”
It’s hard to keep from cringing, and I hate that he notices. I love him so much, and it’s difficult to imagine him intimate with anyone else.
Noah swears softly. “This is how I don’t want to hurt you.”
I don’t want to hurt, either, especially over this. “We went to school together and despite my lack of popularity, I still had ears and heard the gossip. This is old news, so keep going.”
It helps that every girl we’re discussing is thousands of miles away in Kentucky.
“I warned them up front what I was and what it would be. I was a game to some girls, and I was fine being played. Others regretted it. Those girls, afterward, I’d see how they’d look at me at school. I think most of them thought after we had sex, I’d fall in love and when I didn’t—they regretted it. I hated the expression on their faces, but I swear to you, I gave them the out.”
“Like you give me the out?” I hedge. Noah never pushes me. Ever.
“I need you to be sure.” Noah meets my eyes. “I want it to be different with us. I don’t want you to view me as some sort of prize you scored or as the asshole that used you. I don’t want to lose the way you look at me—like I’m something...someone. I’ve survived a lot, but I don’t think I can survive if you regretted it. It would kill me if you looked at me any different than you do now.”
There are moments when your heart breaks and melts at the same time. When there’s so much love flooding your soul that you’re drowning in the tide. This is that moment with Noah. “I could never look at you differently.”
Noah stares at the floor, and his voice gets strained. “I hope not.”
The direction of the conversation bothers me. More than I would have thought it would. “Don’t you trust how I feel? What I say?”
Noah’s that soft place I fall. He makes me laugh. I can talk to him for hours, plus he makes every area of my body hot and drives it close to the brink of insanity. I love him. He loves me. Why am I hesitant to make love to Noah? What is it that I don’t trust?
“Someday, Echo, you’re going to wake up and realize that you’re more than me. That everyone you know is right. That I’m a phase that’ll die out. Someday I won’t be the man you want to walk down the street with.”
A slow, agonizing burn tortures my stomach as I replay his last statement. “You don’t trust me?”
A long heavy silence. I might as well be suffocating.
“Probably as much as you trust me.” He clears his throat. “Which is more than I trust anyone else in my life.”
I am suffocating, and that sting in my chest is the lack of air. It’s creating a strange numbness throughout my mind and limbs. “I guess that’s good.”
But is it enough to help us last beyond a few months of living in a bubble?
“Do you ever think...” I cut myself off while focusing on a framed print of fir trees on the wall.
>
“Do I ever think what?”
“Are you scared that we’re going to be heading home soon? Back to everything that threatens to pull us apart?” This summer was supposed to change me, and it hasn’t. I’m returning the same person as when I left.
Noah nods, and his agreement smarts more than it should.
“What does that mean for us?” I ask.
Noah releases a long breath and crosses his arms over his chest.
My fingers shake as I shove my hair away from my face. “Did we leave Kentucky because we didn’t believe we’d last if we stayed?”
“I don’t know.” Noah kneads his eyes and when he lowers his hands he repeats, “I don’t know.”
Noah
Flames lick along the stairwell, blocking the only way up, and it’s the coughing from the living room that keeps me from charging the bedrooms. Smoke smothers my eyesight...my ability to breathe.
It’s dark. Too dark to see, but a burst of color from something electrical exploding in the kitchen creates a flash that illuminates my brothers on the floor. Jacob lying over a lifeless Tyler.
“Jacob!” I shout, and he lifts his head.
“Noah!” He hacks so hard that I’m afraid he’s choking—dying. Fear grips me like it never has before. They’re dying. My family is dying.
My lungs constrict and burn. I cough then crouch to move along the floor. Jacob launches himself at me. My heart beats again with the feel of tiny arms around my neck and the sight of Tyler’s chest fighting upward for air.
Sweat beads on my brow. The heat threatens to melt my skin. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“Upstairs.”
Upstairs. Nausea rolls through my stomach. My brothers out first. Then my parents. Maybe they escaped through the back. Out the window, down the tree. But this paralyzing panic eats the logic. They’d never leave without Jacob and Tyler. Never.
Behind me, the flames dance closer to the door. Protect them—a screaming mantra in my brain. I grab two blankets off the floor, wrap my brothers up and race for the exit.
Two steps to go for the foyer and there’s a crack from above. In pure instinct, I turn my body and huddle Tyler and Jacob close to my chest. A rush of hot air, embers flying around and pain slams into my shoulder. I yell out as fire feeds off my shirt, and I dart through a wall of flames for the door. Jesus Christ, I’m on fire.