Page 58 of The Secret Of Us

I stare out of the window at it, not letting myself look too closely at Izzy anymore. She turns her head to see what I’m looking at and then pulls me up so I’m standing over her. She twists in her chair to face the window and nudges me to lean on the desk close to her. We gaze out at the starry sky together for what seems like a lifetime. The silences with her are never uncomfortable. Instead, they bring me a sense of peace, a quiet moment for just the two of us, where I can forget this entire thing is meant to be fake.

“Does that one have a name?” I ask her, pointing to a faint cluster of stars.

“That’s Ursa Major,” she says, and I feel silly for not remembering it when she already told me before.

“Is there a constellation you want to see that you can’t from here?”

Izzy keeps her eyes focused on the sky, but I want to see them when she answers. I turn my head slightly to take in the profile of her face.

“Not a constellation, but I really want to see the northern lights,” she says wistfully. “All the pictures are so beautiful, I can’t imagine how pretty it is in real life.”

“You’ll get there one day. I’m sure of it,” I tell her. I really hope she does. I hope that in the future, Izzy can see every star and sight she wants without any worries.

She moves her attention away from the stars and onto me, catching me looking at her. There’s a sadness in her eyes that seems to match my own.

It hits me again. I want to tell her how I feel because I know it’s more than just a small crush. I like her a lot. I want this thing between us to become real. I want us to stop pretending we can’t see what’s right in front of us. And I think she wants that, too.

But something stops me, some tiny voice in the back of my head that reminds me we made a deal to end this before exams. We’re both going our separate ways once school ends. There’s nothing substantial tying us together. If we do decide to give this a real shot, what’s the point? What’s the end game? I’ll just leave this place more broken than I arrived, and I can’t do that to myself. I can’t do that to her either, so I shove those feelings down, pack them away in a locked vault.

“I should get back to my room,” I say, even though the delusional part of my brain wants to stay. I want all the time I can get with her before this year ends.

“Yeah, it’s getting late,” she says as if she’s only just realised, even though we’ve been sitting watching the stars for nearly an hour now.

I stand up, take my hand away from hers, and miss the weight of it immediately. I look at her one last time, the moonlight making her look like she’s something from a dream, and then I walk toward her door.

“Goodnight, Izzy.”

“Night, Noah.”

I don’t look back at her as I open the door and leave, another crack forming in my heart.

21

IZZY

Hoppingaround my room is not a fun way to start the morning, but whoever is knocking at my door hasn’t seemed to realise that.

I hold on to the wall as I make my way over, my jumper bunched around my neck with the sleeves dangling behind me. My skirt isn’t even zipped up so it falls down my thighs with each hop and I have to yank it back up.

I open the door expecting to see Amelia or Chloe, but instead, I’m greeted by hazel eyes and a kind smile—a smile that falters as soon as Noah moves his gaze from my face and realises that I’m half dressed. He spins around, clamping his hands over his eyes as he stutters out an apology.

“Sorry. I should have said it was me.”

I don’t have the energy to be embarrassed about Noah seeing me like this. I fix my clothes, zipping my skirt up at the side and putting my arms through the sleeves of my jumper.

“You can turn around now,” I tell him, and he slowly rotates his body, hands still covering his eyes. I lean against the wall and reach up to pull his hands down. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see how you were,” he says, putting his hands into his pockets.

“You could have texted me.”

There’s no reason for me to question him so much when he just wants to check in on me, but something changed between us yesterday. I want to know if he felt it too, or if it was just my painkiller-induced haze.

“I know. But I’d rather see you in person.” He pauses for a second, weighing his next words. “And I wanted to walk with you, just in case.”

“In case…?”

“Just in case.”

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