Page 128 of I Shouldn't Feel This Way

I giggled and thought for as long as I could.

“This candle has an expiry date,” he warned. “We don’t have all …”

I shut my eyes and blew out the flickering flame.

Noah furrowed his brows. “You just broke the rules.”

“I like breaking rules if you haven’t noticed already.”

“What did you wish for?”

“If I tell you, it won’t come true.”

He chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I tricked you into making a birthday wish.”

“Technically, it’s no longer my birthday, so it wasn’t a birthday wish—and you didn’t trick me.”

“I was, and I’m still serious about getting you whatever you want, but I knew you wouldn’t make any demands.”

It was true, he was right. It felt odd to ask him to buy me expensive things. I’d learned at a very young age that if I made such requests, I’d get punished—by Rob.

“I wish you would let me spoil you,” Noah sighed. “If it was up to me, I would.”

“I don’t need extravagant gifts to be happy.”

He stared at me inquisitively and then stood up. “Hold that thought. I’ll be right back.”

I assumed he took a bathroom break, but he quickly returned and sat across from me again. Kate Miller began to sing “Feed TheLight” from the docked iPod that was mounted on the marble backsplash. Her voice was magic.

“What are you hiding behind your back?” I asked.

Noah smiled and revealed … a toy model … of a car. He set it on the counter and slowly rolled it toward me.

“I knew you’d get mad if I bought you something super expensive, so I decided on a more sensible gift.” He pointed at the toy. “That’s a ’69 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.”

I inspected the toy, rolling it on its wheels back and forth. It looked like it was approximately ten inches in length. “ … Thanks,” I finally said. My tomboy phase had long passed. I was sure the twelve year old me would have appreciated the present.

“Your name is on the license plate,” said Noah.

I looked at the back, and sure enough, there it was. The color of the body was pretty. It was a candy red with a black phoenix painted on the hood.

“I used to have a car like this back in college.” He stood up and sat on a stool next to me. “It was the love of my life at the time.”

At the time?Did that mean that Vanessa was the love of his life now? Where did I stand in his estimation? I wondered how many women he had made love to in that convertible. Did he still have it? I had not seen it among his collection in the garage. A car like that was definitely a chick magnet. I imagined for a moment, a younger Noah in his early twenties, driving the vintage vehicle on a bright sunny day, shades on, looking Hollywood-cool.

“Do you still have the car?” Curiosity got the best of me.

“No.”

“What happened to it?”

“I almost considered selling it to pay off some—ah—debtsI owed a few dealers. I didn’t want to go to my father for help.”

It was still difficult for me to grasp that he had a drug addiction at one point in his life. I just could not imagine Noah being anyone else other than the man he was at present.

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