He looked like a prince who stepped out of a storybook. Handsome and charming and hung. The holy trinity of traits for a fairy-tale prince. Noah had it all. I couldn’t even dream of a man who would compete with him.

That’s when it hit me. Hard and fast, just like Noah’s thrusts. It slammed into my brain, pushing aside everything else, the words tattooing themselves across my heart: I’m in love with Noah.

The words bubbled back up to my lips, forming on the tip of my tongue. Before I could get them out, Noah came over for another kiss, pressing his body back against mine. He wrapped his arms lazily around my shoulders, nipping on my bottom lip and looking up into my eyes with that same possessiveness from moments before, but softened somehow. As if his eyes had taken on the velvet qualities of a rose petal plucked straight from my garden.

I let the moment take us, getting lost in the comfortable silence, happy to just hold him and kiss him and feel his heart beating against mine. This was all I’d ever wanted, a love that made you feel like you were on top of the world, even higher than the mountain you were currently standing on. Noah gave me wings, invisible but powerful enough to carry us both into the sky.

I couldn’t hold it back anymore. The emotion grew in me, a seed sprouting and thriving, pushing up through my throat and nearing my mouth. I had to tell him. Had to let Noah know how much I loved him.

A series of vibrations threw us off, the thin silence between us getting severed. It startled Noah, who jerked backward, looking at the still-shut door. We both had towels around us, so no one could tell we were naked, but maybe it wasn’t Noah’s friends who scared him.

“Who the hell is texting me this late,” Noah said, going over to his phone.

Before he even picked it up, I already knew it would be bad. An icy chill slipped into the space in my chest that was fiery hot only seconds before. Dread wrapped around me like a thorn-covered vine, snapping tighter the moment I saw Noah’s face blanch, fear making his eyes bulge as he read whatever messages had landed in his inbox.

27. Noah Barnes

27

NOAH BARNES

The world spun on its axis. I went from feeling on top of the world one moment to being crushed underneath it the next. As if the sky had flipped and the ground had fallen in all around me. I started to shake, so much that Jake took the phone from me, reading the words that sent me on a terror spiral:

“I SEE you didn’t listen to me. You must really not love Jake, HUH?”