Page 99 of How to Say I Do
“Noël.”My bedroom was so quiet I could hear the person on the other end of the call: a woman, and she sounded frantic, andfurious, like calling Noël was an act of desperation. “Noël, youhaveto come in. Right now.”
“Dinah? What the fuck—”
“Noël.”She cut him off, her voice even more panic-stricken.“You have to get here. Right. Fucking. Now.”
“Dinah, what’s going on? What’s happening?”
“It’sElite!”Dinah screamed.“They called Harrison at 4:30 a.m. and told them they were canceling the Fashion Week contract because you haven’t given them anything they need for the Yarborough wedding.”
Noël was stock still in the darkness. His breath rattled. His shoulders rose and fell, faster, faster. “Dinah—”
“They are firing us. The editor-in-chief is on the phone with Harrison right now. I’m in the office, and I’m watching him get his ass torn out of him, Noël. And you know who he’s going to turn around and take this out on?”
“Dinah—”
“Not me!”She roared.“I didn’t fuck this up, Noël! And I can’t fix this! You need to get in here, now!”
“I’m in Texas! I can’t just—”
“You’d better find some fairy wings, then, or charter a plane, or start fucking running, because this is all coming down, Noël. It’s coming down onyou. You need to be here.”
And then she hung up, and Noël was left alone in the dark, holding his phone as the screen gleamed and then faded. The light peeled away from his cheeks like a burn. Not a part of him moved.
“Noël?” I scooted to the edge of the bed and reached for him. “Noël, what did she mean?”
He shied away from me and grabbed his clothes. “We have to get to the airport. Right now.”
The trip was hazy, nothing but a blur of dark country roads burning into pre-dawn, that fire and dusk rub of light on the horizon. I kept blinking, trying to make sense of what was happening.
Noël was a hair trigger beside me, working his phone and texting, emailing, and firing off voicemails in ten-second spits of fury. His boss wasn’t picking up. No one atElitewas taking his calls. This was a ‘round the clock industry, and the whole world shutting Noël out meant something. Dinah stopped texting him anything meaningful an hour into the drive, and before that, she’d just kept repeating the same phrase:Get here now.
Noël threw his cell into the footwell. He doubled over, his hands in his hair, his face between his knees. “I fucked up, Wyatt. Jesus, I fucked up.”
“What do you mean? What’s going on?”
“I—” He shook his head. His entire body was trembling. “I have to get back. I have to fix this somehow. Ohfuck…”
Dread churned inside me like battery acid. My dreams of twelve hours ago seemed like remote fairy tales. How could Noël stay in Texas or make a life with me at the ranch? Here was an emergency and we were two hours away from the airport, and another three hours from New York by the fastest jet. By the time he landed, whatever had gone wrong would be set in stone.
I got him to the airport forty minutes before the first flight out. He’d pleaded over the phone with a ticket agent, begging for the fastest flight possible to New York, and he’d snagged the last seat on a sun burner heading east. To make it, he’d have to race through security and hope the gate agents were the understanding sort when he came screaming in at the last second before they shut the doors.
My tires squealed at the departures drop-off. There was no time for a sweet goodbye.
But he turned to me. “I fucked up,” he breathed. His eyes were on fire and his hands were shaking. “I fucked up, but I’m going to fix this. I have to. I have to, because—”
Then his throat closed and he couldn’t get another word out. Fury and frustration and fatigue tore at him, and he looked at me with blazing red eyes filled with pain, the same way he’d looked at me when I’d met him at that Dallas/Fort Worth bar.
“Noël—"
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Sorry for what? I didn’t understand. He was keeping something locked up tight, and he wasn’t letting me near it. Whatever had happened, it had tapped into all his deep dark places, yanking on his shame.
And his fear. That had been fear shaking through him during the drive.
“I’m here,” I told him. “I’ll be here, okay? So just—”Come back to me. I’ll be waiting for you. Whatever it is, I understand. I understand you, Noël.
His expression cratered, and he threw open my truck door and scooted out, not looking back at me as he dialed and pressed his phone to his face and started jogging for the doors. “Dinah? Dinah, I’m at the airport.” Dinah hadn’t picked up her phone in an hour. He was leaving another voicemail. “I’ll be there in three and a half hours. I’m going to ask the pilot if there’s anything they can do to get us there faster—”
