Page 60 of Love Hollow at Last
At that, Nobu gave a genuine laugh.“Listen to you!You looked pretty awkward in high school yourself.”
“Okay.Justin is way hotter, though.”
Nobu raised his eyebrows.“I agree.Anyway, senior year, I finally told Joseph how I felt.”
“Okay.”Noah tried to remember whether he had noticed anything going on with Nobu during that time, but he’d been so fixated on his own unimpressive grades that his siblings’ emotional lives were a blank.
Nobu sighed.“Supposedly, he felt the same.And we were going to the same college, so I thought we were set.”
Noah squinted, trying to see Nobu’s expression in the fading light.“So what the hell happened?Broke up in college?”
“He got a girlfriend once we got there,” said Nobu shortly.“It was like the whole thing had never happened.”
Noah took a sip of his wine.“This feels like some sort of parable, dude.You’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“I thought Aya shouldn’t get too attached to you and that you shouldn’t expect anything from Aya,” he said.
Noah snorted.“Yeah, and you were right.”
“No,” he said firmly.“I was wrong.And I take responsibility for that, even though you two were idiots for listening to me.”
Noah thought back.He might have been completely oblivious to how Nobu was feeling during those years, but he remembered his own painful insecurity.Nobu had warned him that Aya wouldn’t want anything serious, and he’d believed that without question.
“You’re not responsible for how things are now,” said Noah finally.“I could have reached out to her.I also could have come home more often, and I just didn’t.”
Nobu was silent.
“Do you think Nami will forgive me?”Noah asked.He didn’t dare ask about Aya.Her forgiveness seemed impossible.
Nobu grinned.“You might be the most famous, but Nami will always be the most impressive of all of us.”
Noah nodded.“Yeah, I know.So what does that mean?”
“It means you should at least give it a shot.”
51
Aya
Aya swam a lot when she was staying with Emi and Charles.Emi was like a sister to Aya, but Charles was virtually a stranger.The weather in Santa Cruz was so mild that it shocked her.Emi’s street of suburban mansions was the very definition of quiet.At first, it was as if Aya had been transported to an alien landscape, as if Love Hollow had never existed.
When Aya was swimming, she didn’t have to think about how she had abandoned her beloved museum.Mrs.Irving, who was uncharacteristically sympathetic, had insisted she would work everything out.Aya didn’t have faith that things would go well, but when forced to choose between the museum and her PhD, she had firmly checked “none of the above.”The option she had chosen was to cry in a darkened room, hand over the Pilgrimage responsibilities to her mother and sister, and think about how her flirtation with Noah had cost her the best job of her life.
Eventually, Emi carted Aya off to California.It was better, Emi explained, to have a change of scene.And indeed, Aya stopped crying once she was in California.She ate and swam and slept.It was as if she had paused her life and crawled into an uncommonly pretty screensaver.Pool.Lounge chairs.Sunshine.
The only way she knew that time was passing was the size and shape of Emi’s belly.By early August, it looked notably puffy, though Emi still insisted that it would look normal under a loose white coat.She needed to feel that it would, anyway, because her job was starting in September and she didn’t want to tell anyone there just yet.Emi might be working at a nonprofit clinic, but the general societal attitudes about pregnant women would still be in play.
“What did you really think back in high school?”Aya asked one night.They were drinking coconut water and relaxing on pool noodles, and the beauty of the sunset made Aya feel drunk.Which made a change—for weeks, she had hardly felt anything.
“Seriously?”asked Emi.“You’re sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you and Noah would be together forever,” Emi said thoughtfully.“Grandkids, shared room in the nursing home.All of it.”
Aya pushed her noodle down and tried to stand on it.The awkwardness of her efforts to balance meant she didn’t have to look at Emi.“You never said that, though.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Emi was giving her a wry smile.
