Page 18 of Catching My Dreams

Noah didn’t know how to admit that he’d said those things because he was too embarrassed to confess he had a crush on her. He was a dumb kid who was being teased by his friends, and he’d reacted like the idiot boy he’d been.

He’d told them he thought Ella was annoying. In their eyes, he had no right to be mad at her for ditching them when he’d supposedly wanted precisely that.

“What about the fact that she kept getting her precious manicures when you went missing?” he asked. “Sure, she was looking for you in her dreams every night, but she had time to stop in at a salon but not to join the search parties? That sounds like bullshit to me. She cared more about how her nails looked than finding you.”

“You can’t seriously believe that,” Asher said with a shake of his head, as though Noah hadn’t just pointed out some seriously problematic shit.

Noah scoffed. “I saw her showing off her new manicure to her gran when you were still missing. How can you not believe it?” His feelings for Ella were a complicated disaster of clashing emotions and contradictory desires, but this was the one thing he knew for certain. Ella might have cared about Asher, but she’d allowed her superficial tendencies to get in the way of helping her friend.

“The man has a point,” Chris said. He’d always shared Noah’s dislike for Ella, though his reasons were a lot less personal.

“You’re both idiots,” Asher sighed. He ran his hands over his face, the scars on his arms catching Noah’s attention.

Brett had left a permanent mark on Noah as well, but the single scar on his forearm was far less noticeable than Asher’s numerous thinner ones.

“Ella and her gran have a tradition. They get their nails done every week together and even get matching colors. I went with them once, and they spent the whole time gossiping and bonding over books and trashy TV shows.”

Noah swallowed. “She goes with her gran?” he asked. He felt unmoored. The words felt like they came from someone else, and when he blinked, he felt dizzy.

Asher nodded. “Every week since her parents started leaving her at home alone for months at a time. Ella never misses it because she knows it’s the highlight of her gran’s week.”

That meant she hadn’t been getting manicures because she cared how she looked. She’d been getting them because it was something special she did with her grandmother.

Noah felt the blood drain from his face. What had he said to Ella that morning after she’d accused him of thinking women who got manicures were shallow? Just the ones who keep getting weekly manicures when their best friend has gone missing. Fuck. He was an asshole.

“Oh,” was all he managed to say.

“That… actually makes a lot of sense,” Chris admitted. “Now I feel like a bit of a tool.”

“What about the yoga classes?” Noah asked, still trying to hold onto the fraying edges of everything he thought he knew about the woman who haunted his thoughts and dreams. “She was going to those but couldn’t be bothered to help us put up missing person posters.”

“She does yoga because it helps her with her stress and her muscle tension. Besides, my mom told me Ella did help with the posters. My mom gave her a bunch of them to put up around Old Town.”

“But we didn’t see her there,” Noah argued. He couldn’t have been that wrong about her, could he have? “Chris and I were the first to arrive, and your mom didn’t start handing out posters until everyone was there and we all knew where to go.”

“She said Ella arrived early and just wanted to get going, so she gave her a bunch of posters and sent her on her way.”

“Shit,” Noah murmured.

Asher leaned forward, his elbows planted on the table between them. “I know you don’t like her, but Ella did more than anyone else to help find me. If you don’t see that, you’re fucking blind.”

Noah felt like he might vomit. He’d always held a grudge against Ella for keeping Asher as a friend while snubbing him, but his dislike for her had reached new levels after Asher went missing. And now he was finding out he was completely wrong.

She may have ditched him when they were kids, but she wasn’t at all the callous person he’d thought she was. He’d both wanted her and resented her for so long and now he was more confused than ever.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t think I had to,” Asher bit out. “After she traced me to that basement and after she told us about what she went through with Brett, I didn’t realize you needed more evidence that she wasn’t the cow you always make her out to be.”

“I…” The sentence died in his throat. He had no defense. “I need to go.”

Noah stumbled to his feet, the ground feeling like it was shifting beneath him.

He ignored Asher and Chris, who asked him where he was going, and left the small restaurant, his breaths feeling choppy and shallow. What the hell had he done?

“If you love Asher so much, how could you not do everything in your power to save him?”

“Maybe you’ve been right all along. Maybe I am just that selfish.”

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