My phone buzzed, letting me know I had a message. I was grateful for the distraction. As much as I missed that girl, I got anxious when I thought about trying to find her. I was afraid that girl would want to succumb to snuggling, and we all knew what snuggling led to. How could I ever trust another man after being so blindsided? I began hyperventilating just thinking about endangering myself in such a way again. I could almost hear my old self laugh at me for being such a scaredy-cat. And taunt me with what I was missing out on. Believe me, I knew. Unfortunately, my body still craved the touch of a man. Kisses to curl my toes and tingle my spine. Gentle caresses and fevered touches. But what I missed most was a hand to hold. Not just any hand—a hand that said, “I have you and I’ll never let you go.” I wasn’t sure there was such a hand. At least not for me.
Phone. I needed to look at my phone. I pressed the home button and noticed the scrapes on my hands. Last night my brothers wanted to get in a basketball game before we all went home, a little three-on-three action. Except Kellan declined, citing that the cold air was bad for his singing voice. Noah had stepped in, and though we were on opposite teams, he got onto my brother Ashton for knocking me down. My brothers had never gone easy on me because I was a girl. Sure, they’d beat up any boy who had tried to mess with me, but they never treated me like a princess. Which I appreciated. It made me a better ballplayer, and once upon a time I thought it made me good at reading boys and men. That was a critical error on my part. Just like me going up against Ashton last night, the biggest and by far the strongest of my brothers. I had tried faking to the right hoping he would go for it, giving me time to make a jump shot, but he was, admittedly, the best player out of all the siblings. He’d blocked my shot and used too much force, knocking my butt to the cement. My hands had tried their best to lessen the impact. They were rewarded with searing pain for their effort.
While nursing my pride and looking at my scraped and bloodied hands, Noah had gotten in Ashton’s face, poking his chest and telling him to be more careful. We all stood, shocked by how worked up he was about it, accusing Ashton of being a Neanderthal and making him apologize. This woman of Noah’s was having some impact on him. I’d only ever seen him get that worked up once before. It was a memory I didn’t wish to remember, but it was emblazoned on my brain like a cattle brand, painful and permanent. I’d had to run into the office a couple of months after the incident. Ben and I were already well into divorce proceedings. I had done everything I could at the time to stay away from him. But unbeknownst to me, Ben was at the office, and Noah too, filing some invoices for some contracting work he had done. I’d tried to slip out without Ben noticing me, but he’d cornered me. He’d had the audacity to tell me that I had blown things out of proportion, and I was only embarrassing myself by helping other people remove exes from their photos. He’d said it made me look bitter and desperate. He was right—I was bitter, and desperate to know why he’d broken his promise to love me forever in the most humiliating way possible. I had no words for him that day. I was only able to stand there and blink back the tears, trying to see any trace of the man I loved. He was nowhere to be found, and that killed me more than anything. Noah came to the rescue that day. I’d never seen him so furious. He’d yelled at Ben and told him to shut the hell up and leave me alone. Ben didn’t take too kindly to it—and it had almost come to blows. My dad had to intervene.
I never did tell Noah how much that meant to me. I knew that had caused a rift between him and Ben that took a long while to repair, per Mara’s intel. But Ben and Noah were more than friends. They were brothers from another mother, as they would say. It was why I had to let Noah go. Except apparently, Noah had other plans for our friendship. Even though I knew it was only a matter of time before he gave up on it. As soon as that woman of his gave into him, and I knew she would, because I’d never known Noah not to get the girl. As soon as she did, Noah would forget about me. It would be a relief and hurt at the same time. Despite my rebuffs, it meant a lot to me that he wasn’t willing to let go. For now, that was.