Page 39 of How to Say I Do
A broken whimper, a ripped-open wail, and— Noël sank his face into my hair and came, weak spurts spitting over my hand. I ground into him, but my orgasm was mostly mental, all of my adoration hitting a high note as I held him as close to me as I could.
We pitched to our sides, still plastered together. His eyes were closed, but he smiled when I kissed his knuckles. My mind was a furnace, blazing with sweetness and silver and breaking dawns. I held his fingers to my lips. “We have one more day here.”
Noël made a noise, something like a grunt that was part pain, part disbelief. I understood—how could this ever end?
Well, it wouldn’t. We’d carry on and bring this home with us. This wasn’t the end. It was our beginning.
“I’ll come visit you in New York,” I breathed. “I need to check things at the ranch, but as soon as I do, as soon as I can, I’ll be on a plane.”
Later, I remembered the way Noël stilled after I spoke, how every piece and part of him turned to glass. Later. I didn’t see it then. I didn’t feel it. No, right then I barreled on, kissing his palm and nuzzling his wrist.
“And you gotta come to Texas. I want to show you everything. I want to see your face when you taste one of my grapes for the first time. I want to pour you a glass of my dad’s petite sirah, and I want to take you all the way out to the back pasture where I first saw a shooting star.” I was dizzy with everything I wanted, my dreams trying to paint themselves in my mind all at once.
Noël rested his fingers over my lips.
I kissed the tips and smiled.
Sleep claimed me shortly after, and, behind my eyelids, brushstrokes of a future with Noël took vivid shape, all of my dreams filled in with sunlight. Those reveries cradled me past dawn, but when I woke, I was alone.
Alone-alone, in the stillness of an empty place. No light peeked out from under the crack of the bathroom door. There was no figure on the balcony silhouetted by the sun.
“Noël?”
Then I spotted the note propped up against my hat. I saw the paper, and my eyes slammed closed. I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to see it, or realize what it meant to wake up alone and see words scrawled on a half-sheet of paper.
I reached for it, and—
Wyatt,
I’m sorry.
Noël had drawn a plumeria flower, and then he’d left the rest of the page blank.
I bowed my head. My bare feet found the floor. The bedsheets were still thrown on the ground, puddled and loose and marred by our lovemaking.
Yesterday, I’d thought everything was spun gold, that my long-buried dreams were coming true, and that held hands and sweet kisses led to magic and happy endings.
Now, as I stared out of the cold windows of my room, I spotted the discordant spaces. The jagged edges. Waves crashed too loudly. The light was too bright. Condensation clung to my windows. I watched a single drop of water make a slow run from the top of a pane to the bottom, and I felt like I was fracturing somewhere critical and irreparable.
Noël wasgone.
CHAPTER10
Noël
It wasn’t supposedto hurt this much.
My breath fogged up the scratched mirror in the first-class bathroom and turned my washed-out reflection into a ghost. I clung to the plastic counter, grit my teeth, and tried to exhale through the agony. Wyatt—
No. Don’t think about him.
We’d had a moment. One week. One wild, insane, indescribable, indefinable week. A week removed from time, cut off from the world. A pocket paradise, somewhere with no rules and no consequences, no past and no future. We’d had a hedonistic, immediate, rushingmoment. That’s all.
I was supposed to marry Jenna seven days ago. I’d had a trajectory, a path, a future. And then, suddenly, I didn’t. I’d had nothing, in fact. No direction, no plan, and no idea where to go or what to do. The end of her and me had been a nuclear shock.
Nothing in the wreckage of that was supposed to be solid.
There wererulesfor post-breakup hookups. I was supposed to waste myself on oceans of booze, pour tequila straight down my throat, and fuck myself into oblivion with as many warm and wonderful women I could find. Post-breakup blurs were supposed to be blazes of sun, sand, and ferociously inconsequential sex.
