Page 80 of Vicious Arrangement
“I think my heart just skipped a beat. It’s a miracle, you’ve given it life,” I say.
“Why don’t you ever talk about your family?”
I shrug. “There’s nothing to say, and I don’t talk about my childhood.”
“I’d like to know.”
“Would you like to know my father was an abusive asshole who beat his wife and kid, then killed her and finally himself. Oh, that’s when he wasn’t cheating on my mom. It’s not exactly a great conversational starter: hey I’m a chip off the old murdering, cheating asshole block.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says, “it must have been horrible for you. Do you have siblings? Other family?”
“Nope.”
We fall into silence until we get to Brooklyn, and I carry the sleeping Joshy inside.
Asher is there, back in his normal clothes, and he takes his son. “How did it go?”
“It went fine,” I mutter. “I’ll see you later this week.”
And I leave. I regret what I told her, how much I said.
The very last thing I want is her pity.
Chapter Twenty-One
ARIA
Wednesday of the following week,I sit outside the hospital, eating a salad for lunch. There’s a tiny park across the road that I like, even if it isn’t much. There are usually kids playing with a parent or a nanny.
I sigh and take a sip of the juice I stole from the fridge that morning. Kale, green apple, beet, and ginger, according to the label Andre makes with his little label gun he seems to love.
Who’d ever have thought I’d be living somewhere with regular staff that included a personal chef?
I close my eyes and let the breeze brush over me as kids scream in delight and traffic honks on the road. Then I open them and take a bite of my salad.
After the fishing trip with the adorable Josh, where I saw a side of Noah a girl could fall head over heels in love with—soft, patient, happy, a man who was as comfortable in a boardroom as he was praising a small child for catching a waterlogged plastic bag, one Noah removed from the hook and binned and helped the kid recast—I really don’t know where I stand.
When he opened up to me… and a handful of words about his family was for Noah opening up, I hugged that to myself.
Not the horror story that he told me about in all the spaces of his matter-of-fact words, but I hugged the idea Noah and I seemed to reach a place where it wasn’t just sex. We could have meaningful dialogue.
It was, in essence, a giant step for Noah.
But Noah’s still Noah. Complicated. Difficult. An asshole.
He’s cold and seemingly unfeeling, with all the little arrogant things that add up to “asshole” if one isn’t looking properly.
For the longest time, I didn’t look properly.
I take another sip.
He has scars. Deep ones, and ugly festering ones I suspect. But the difference is that he has a perfect golden child exterior. He plays the man who’s had it all, and still does, and takes it for granted.
Except…
After seeing him with Josh, both when we went fishing and when he came home ready to rip Asher and me apart over nothing at all, listening to what he told me and what he didn’t, the way he sometimes touches me… after everything Gramps and Asher have said about Noah…
I think there’s more to him. So much more. And I think he isn’t taking it for granted. I think someone hurt him badly after he was hurt by his father, after he lost his mother, and he thinks he’s unworthy of… things… like maybe love… and so he wears a disguise.
