Page 18 of Love Hollow at Last
“I only want to deal with Grace,” she said abruptly.
He shook his head.“Aya, why not me?Couldn’t we just have a conversation?”
“No,” she said shortly, and she pushed the pie to one side.“Look, I don’t know what I’m going to do about this festival.But just thinking about it is making me angry.The one strategy I had was this amateur photoshoot in the rain, and it seems like I almost killed my best friend trying to get a good angle.”
“That sounds like something Chen would do,” said Noah, but his grin faded as he saw that Aya was crying.
“Look,” he said, reaching for her hand.“We don’t have to talk about it.I promise.But can I stay?”
“Sure,” she said, too shocked to remove her hand from his grip.Eventually, she had to, daubing at her tears with her sleeve.
Noah got up then returned with napkins.“One minute,” he said.He came back with two steaming Styrofoam cups of tea, a carton of milk, and three sugar packets.
“I did rinse your tea bag,” he said.“But since it’s the second brew, it’s not going to have as much caffeine.So let me know if you want another cup after this.”
She gave him a grateful smile.Since most of the people she’d grown up with were not Japanese, the custom she’d learned from her family of “rinsing” the tea leaves before steeping them in hot water was considered strange.One of her pet peeves was paying a hefty sum of money for a cup of tea with old leaves that hadn’t been rinsed.She tended to drink coffee for that reason but figured that Noah had probably made the right call in avoiding the hospital coffee.
“Why did you bring a carton of milk?”she asked.“Are you on a calcium kick?”
He shook his head.“Low-quality tea,” he said, apologetically.“It’s chai too.Plenty of milk and sugar will make it slightly better.Good thing you have pie.”
She instantly felt her lack of manners.“I’m so sorry,” she said.“Do you want some?”
He shook his head.“I’m on a cleanse.There’s a photo shoot in a month.The label guys wouldn’t even want me to put sugar in my tea, actually.”
Aya looked disbelieving.“And you’re staying with your family right now, even though you’re on this cleanse thing?”
He gave her a smile, but it looked sad.“Yeah, Dad can’t stand to see me diet.Mom objects on principle, but as long as I’m cooking, she’s less pushy about what I eat.”
Aya smiled.She’d always remembered that about the Kato family.Though the grandparents and parents took on most of the cooking on weekends, each child had been responsible for one weekday meal from a fairly young age.Noah had always cooked on Tuesdays, generally chicken curry rice, his favorite.Aya, whose mother never let her do anything in the kitchen, always found the arrangement rather shocking.
She found herself unable to eat her pie.As it turned out, sitting with someone who was on a work-mandated diet killed her appetite.
“Aya,” said Noah, and she snapped back to herself.
“Hmm?”
“You didn’t kill your best friend,” he said, “or almost kill her.”
She took a sip of the tea, willing herself to calm down.“I was the one who got her out in the rain,” she said.“If not for that, she wouldn’t even be here.”
“Typically, healthy young people don’t have severe lung problems after getting a little wet during a storm,” he said.“I’m not a doctor, but even I know that.”
“Well, she was fine before,” snapped Aya.“So obviously I didn’t intend for this to happen, but you’re not talking me out of what I saw.”
Her phone began to buzz.
“I have to go,” she told him.
She didn’t turn around to see whether he would finish her slice of pie, but as soon as she left, she wished she had taken it with her.
16
Noah
Noah saw Twyla as he was leaving the hospital.He wanted to stay but decided he wasn’t going to do any good sitting in the cafeteria.Maybe he could get into his makeshift studio and record a few ideas.He always tried to do that when he was waiting for something to happen.
Twyla was sitting in her car in the parking lot.He could hear her music playing, as her windows were down.She liked country but only old-school country, and she loved to sing along.Her singing was terribly off-key, but thanks to all her dancing, she had a fantastic sense of rhythm.The song she was singing along to was some old ballad about driving back home at midnight, and Noah couldn’t help noticing it was a fairly accurate description of his situation—except the heartbreak, of course.Noah just sang about having a broken heart.He wouldn’t know what that was like in real life.
