Page 105 of Catching My Dreams

“Not even Asher?” he asked skeptically.

Riley shook her head. “I wanted to talk to you before I said anything.”

Noah allowed himself a small breath of relief. The more people who knew, the greater the risk. “You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “Not Asher. Not Chris. Not Ella. No one.”

“Why?” she asked, her brows drawing together in a frown. “We can help you figure this out.”

“No, you can’t,” he gritted out. “Brett will kill her if he even suspects you know anything. He’ll fucking kill her, Riley. Do you understand?”

Riley paled, her lips parting in shock. “What are you talking about? He’s obsessed with her.”

“That’s the problem,” Noah said. “If he can’t have her, nobody else can.”

“Oh my god,” Riley murmured, the words full of horror. She shook her head. “He can’t…We need to…Fuck.”

“I’m glad she’s staying with you, but you can’t tell anyone what you know,” he repeated. “And this is the last time you and I speak about it.”

She just stared at him for several beats, her eyes shiny and filled with sadness. Maybe for him. Maybe for Ella. Or maybe for both. “Okay,” she eventually agreed, sounding defeated.

He nodded and started to walk away, but she stopped him again, this time by gently placing her hand on his arm.

“I’m so sorry, Noah.”

“Yeah, me too,” he said before marching away from her and from the risk their conversation had posed.

30

“This one is from all of us,” Riley said, handing Ella a surprisingly heavy gift from across the restaurant table.

It was Sunday and the day after Ella’s birthday. With the football game taking up her afternoon and her already made plans to meet Becca and Jasmine for dinner, they’d had to celebrate a day late. Not that Ella cared in the slightest, especially given how much they were spoiling her.

“This is too much,” she said with a small shake of her head.

Riley had already given her a gorgeous dark green notebook that had a floral pattern in gold foil on the front cover and spine, Asher had gotten her a Taylor Swift hoodie, and Chris had given her a mug that had the words ‘Fuck off. I’m reading.’ under a cute cartoon image of a stack of books.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” she said as she started carefully opening the final gift.

Riley and the others exchanged a look, but Ella didn’t want to think about what their shared glance meant, so she focused on unwrapping the present. She peeled the light green and white polka dot gift wrap off, her smile widening when she saw what was under it.

“This is amazing,” she said, and she meant it. She already had all of the Jane Austen books that were in the box set, but her copies were all well-worn, and none of them were the beautiful clothbound editions that these were. “I love it.”

She obsessed over her new book collection for at least another minute before setting it aside.

“Thank you,” she said, looking between Riley and Asher, who were on the other side of the table, and Chris, who was sitting next to her. “You guys are the best.”

Asher answered her grin with his own, but Riley and Chris kept giving her that pitying and sad smile they’d been sending her way all evening. And Ella couldn’t deny that her smile was muted as well.

The three of them had made a great effort to make her birthday a good one, but they couldn’t take away the aching and constant reminder in her chest that there was somebody missing.

Noah wasn’t there, and his absence was impossible for her to ignore. It took the celebration of her twentieth birthday from being the perfect occasion to being just another day without him.

“We are, aren’t we?” Chris agreed, puffing his chest out slightly.

“And thank you for not telling the restaurant to do the whole slice of cake and singing thing,” Ella added, folding the polka dot gift wrap into a neat rectangle. They’d already paid for their food, and she’d let out a sigh of relief when their waiter hadn’t been singing when he’d brought the check to their table.

Chris and Riley shared a wide-eyed look. “What’s so bad about that?” Riley asked.

“Ella hates the attention,” Asher explained with a roll of his eyes. “I did it to her once, and she went so red, I thought she might have been having an allergic reaction.”

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