Page 32 of Your Fault

Luckily my mother had her own room, so I was alone when I dialed his number. I waited anxiously for him to respond. It was late in the US, so he was probably still sleeping, but I didn’t mind waking him, I was so impatient to talk to him.

“Noah?” He picked up on the fifth ring.

“I miss you,” I said simply.

I heard him sitting up and imagined him turning on the lampon the nightstand and running his hand over his face, waking up for me.

“Don’t wake me up just to tell me that, Freckles,” he said with a grunt. “Tell me you’re having a blast, that you’re not even thinking about me, because otherwise, that stupid trip doesn’t make any sense.”

I smiled, sad, and rested my head on my pillow.

“I am having fun, you know that, but it’s not the same without you,” I said, knowing that despite what he said, he was happy to hear I missed him. “How was it with Maddie?” I asked, wishing I could have been with him. I loved going with him to see his sister: it showed me a Nick who was completely different, one who was sweet, patient, fun, protective.

After a pause, he said, “Mom brought her.” His tone was one I knew very well. “If only you could have seen her…looking all stiff like a forty-year-old Barbie doll, forcing me to treat her in a way she definitely doesn’t deserve just because Maddie was in front of us.”

Shit. His mother.I still remembered how upset he’d been after seeing her in the hospital when Maddie got sick. The desperation in his voice, his eyes damp after seeing her for the first time in years.

“She shouldn’t force the situation like that,” I complained. I understood that Nick’s mother might want to have contact with him again—after all, he was her son—but that wasn’t the way to do it, putting him on the spot.

“I don’t know what the hell she wants, but I don’t want to see her again. I don’t give a shit about her or her life.” His tone was furious, but there was sorrow in it, too, even if he was good at covering it up. I knew him, though, and I knew there was a part of him that was hungry to find out what his mother had to say to him.

“Nicholas, don’t you think that…” I started, but he cut me off straightaway.

“Don’t go down that road, Noah. Forget it, don’t even try. There’s no way I’m talking with that woman or even being in the same room with her again.” His tone was frightening. That was only the second time I’d even considered suggesting he see his mother again. The first time, he’d lost his mind. There was something he wasn’t telling me. It was impossible that he hated her so much just because she’d abandoned him when he was a boy. That was horrible, sure, but I knew there was something else, something he wasn’t telling me.

“Sure, sorry,” I said, trying to calm things down.

I could hear him almost panting on the other line.

“What I’d like right now is to be inside you, forget all this bullshit, and just make love to you for hours and hours. I curse the second you left.”

I could feel butterflies in my stomach when I heard him say that. He was mad, but it didn’t keep me from warming up inside. I wanted to be in his arms, too, wanted him to kiss me all over, hold me down with his big hands, push me into the mattress, so hard but so tender and careful at the same time…

“I’m sorry this trip has been so terrible for you, I really am. I’d like to be with you right now, too.” I tried to make my words reach him, but I knew Nicholas was someone who needed contact to feel good, to feel loved… I wasn’t sure if my words would suffice to make him understand how much I loved him and how bad I felt when I thought about him suffering because of the thing with his mother and with no one able to help him but me because it was something he never talked about with anyone else, not even with Lion.

“Don’t worry about me, Noah, I’m fine,” he said a second later.

A part of me wanted him to wish me a pleasant trip, but the other undoubtedly wanted to upbraid me for ever leaving.

I heard my mother waking up in the next room over. We had slept late, and if we wanted to do all the things we had planned that day, we needed to get started.

“I have to go,” I told him, wishing I could talk to him for hours.

He was silent on the other end of the line.

“Be careful. I love you,” he finally said and hung up.

The trip was amazing. It was true that I missed Nick, but I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to be in all those amazing places. Italy I’d loved: we had seen the Colosseum, had walked through the narrow streets, had eaten tortellini and the best raspberry gelato I’d ever had. Now we’d been in London for two days, and I couldn’t feel more in love with the city. Everything about it seemed straight from a Dickens novel, and all the books I had read across the years were set in that city, all those romantic period tales of women walking or riding in a horse-drawn carriage through Hyde Park, with their chaperones… The buildings were elegant, old but beautiful and classy. Piccadilly was full of people: executives in suit jackets with briefcases, hippies in colored hats, tourists like myself, milling in crowds and admiring the lights of that street. Harrods fascinated me, even if the prices were mind-blowing, but I guess for people like the Leisters, it was no big deal to pay ten pounds for a chocolate bonbon.

My mother was as crazy about it all as I was, but she was more used to it because she and William had traveled all over. They’d gone to London for their honeymoon and then spent two weeks in Dubai. My mother was clearly on a different level from me: I could tell from how she reacted to everything we saw. I was constantly freaking out; even the dumbest sights left me slack-jawed. My mother laughed, but at the same time, I knew, however many places she’d visited, she felt incredibly fortunate.

The days passed, and soon we’d been away for almost two weeks. We still had France and Spain left, and I still had yet to share a room with my mother. It had been three days since I’d talked to Nick, and I’d always been able to do so from my private bedroom in our suite. But in France, they mixed up the reservation, and we wound up sharing not only a room but a bed as well.

“Do you like Paris?” my mother asked as she took off her earrings. She was already in her pajamas, while I was wrapped in a towel, my hair still dripping, after just coming out of the shower.

“The city’s gorgeous,” I responded, putting on my underwear. I turned to the mirror where my mother was brushing her hair, and I could see her eyes linger for a second on the scar on my stomach.

I shouldn’t have stood there without anything on in front of her. I knew she got sad every time she laid eyes on the evidence of the time I’d almost been killed. Bad memories were surging up in her, I could tell, and I wanted her to be happy again, to think about something nice before she started blaming herself for something that wasn’t her fault.

---