He laughed and caught it, tossing it back onto my bed. I shot him another glare for waking me up so early, grabbed my bikini and a pair of shorts, and went into the bathroom. I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep now, but maybe a shower would wake me up properly.

I checked that both doors to the bathroom were shut; the only lock was on Noah’s door, and it had never worked properly. We had a very simple system—if the doors were shut, the bathroom was occupied.

The bathroom wasn’t big anyway, but with Lee’s hair products scattered everywhere and my toiletries laid out neatly, plus Noah’s few things thrown down anywhere, it seemed very small and very cluttered. I shoved Lee’s stuff to the edge of a shelf to put my clothes down.

I had just lathered up my hair when I heard a door open. I sighed sharply through my nose and stuck my head round the shower curtain, shampoo trickling down the sides of my face. “Lee, I don’t care what time Rachel’s coming. Your hair gel can wait till I’m not in the—”

Noah took one look at me and started laughing.

“I so need to take a photo of that,” he chuckled, indicating my annoyed face and lathered-up hair.

“Oh, shut up.”

“What’s the matter, grumpy-pants? You don’t want me to join you?” He smirked, making a show of starting to take off his T-shirt.

“Noah! Stop it.”

We wanted some time alone together at the beach house, but it wasn’t easy. Sure, his room might be right there next to mine, but the walls in this place were thin. And that didn’t exactly scream romantic or sexy to me. Not with my best friend and his parents around.

“Stop what?” he asked, undoing his belt now, still grinning at me.

“You are not doing a striptease in the bathroom,” I hissed at him, blushing and disappearing back behind the shower curtain to rinse my hair. “So not fair. Remind me why we thought we could handle not having any time to ourselves here?”

“What’s the matter, Elle? Need a cold shower?”

I told him to shut up again, smiling when I heard him laugh. It was maddening to be so close to him all the time and not really be able to…do anything. It wasn’t even easy to find somewhere else to sneak off to. And after our narrow escape near the pool the other day when his parents came back early, I was not about to risk getting caught again.

When I stepped out of the shower, towel wrapped round me, I found Noah finishing up cleaning his teeth, his hair looking tidier than it had a few minutes before. I knocked my hip into him to nudge him out of the way so I could get to my stuff.