Page 53 of Noah
“Where’s Lila?” Sadie asked. “Should we wait for her?”
“No,” Anna scoffed. “She’s with Rivers. We won’t see her again until they’ve got their little nest set up.”
The three of us laughed at that, because it was both adorable and annoying. Lila and Rivers had been insuperable since he went running after her to Nashville and promised her the world. They were, these days, the music industry’s It Couple, and the press couldn’t get enough of them. I had trouble being mad about it, no matter how sick it made me. Rivers had been the sweetest kid around, but had some pretty severe baggage from what his mom had done to him, and what happened in the foster homes he went to. I’d watched him grow darker and darker when he went into the music industry, and at one point Noah and I had thought he was a lost cause. I’d wondered if anyone could save him.
It turned out all it took was one sunshine girl from Nashville who was too stubborn to quit on him. Taylor had hired Lila to pretend to date Rivers to rehab his image, and Lila had, as usual, taken things three steps too far and fallen right in love with him, then decided to save him. He’d fought her, of course.
But I didn’t think Lila had ever fought a battle she didn’t win. She was too fucking good at being right.
“They’re lucky to have found each other,” I said. “Rivers never would have survived without her.”
Anna and Sadie, of course, didn’t know that. They hadn’t seen Rivers before Lila came around. That was reserved for the boys and me.
We slid into the booth we’d chosen and started looking at the menu, but were interrupted by a flood of reporters suddenly coming in. The moment they saw me, cameras started flashing and people started shouting questions.
“Molly, what’s going on with Noah? Are you two a couple now?”
“Weren’t you friends when you were young? Is there a conflict of interests here?”
“What about your parents, Molly, did you ever find them?”
Wait, how the fuck did they know about my parents?
Janette, I realized. She’d told them I was an orphan. God, even my boss was selling me out to the press.
I hated this. I didn’t like being the one they were after. I’d never sought the spotlight, and it didn’t fit. That was Noah’s job. Where the fuck was he, and why wasn’t he taking any of this heat?
At that moment, the man in question came crashing through the front doors, one hand holding his phone to his ear and the other holding Whiskey. I didn’t think they would allow the puppy in the restaurant, but no one seemed inclined to stop him. Maybe it was because he was shouting into his phone.
“Well, do something about it! I’m on a tight timeline. I don’t have time for you to fuck around.”
I opened my mouth, shocked at that sort of demand from him. It was so un-Noah-like. He generally had other people doing his dirty work for him. But he looked different now. Like a boss. And for the first time ever, he didn’t have a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He looked like my Noah, but like he’d had some sort of glow-up.
He also walked right past our table without even looking at me.
What the fuck? Why did he look so happy, and why was he ignoring me? I’d heard he was in trouble too, but he looked like everything was great, and like he knew exactly what he was doing. It infuriated me. I was over here trying to figure out how the hell to navigate things and he was, what, already booking his next date or something?
The only good thing about it was that the press immediately turned and followed him, as if they figured he would do something more exciting than me.
Typical. All so typical. I needed him and he was bailing on me again, while the press automatically assumed he was more interesting than me.
I was a sitting duck, trying desperately to get out of here, and he was nowhere to be found.
Had I made the decision to leave him first? Yes. That didn’t stop me from being angry that he was being his usual, flakey self. I needed him and he was too busy with his own life to notice.
Some hero. Some best friend.
31
NOAH
Iglanced at my watch again and groaned. It was already 9, and I was still waiting on calls from a couple people. This was infuriating. Sure, it was past office hours on a Tuesday night, but what did that matter?
I had a girl’s entire future—and past—to worry about.
Surely someone could finish a DNA test more quickly with stakes that big.
It didn’t help that I had about fifty other things on my mind at the same time. Our shows lately had been amazing, but the record labels hadn’t shown up the way they were supposed to, partially because of our—my—reputation. I’d thought we were past all that with the Rivers and Lila story, but evidently we weren’t. And I couldn’t exactly get us our new deal if there were no labels around to listen to our pitch. Even worse, the guys weren’t giving me much to work with. Rivers was too obsessed with Lila to listen to me, and I wasn’t even going to try to get Matt to pay attention. That boy, who had never been able to settle down and take anything serious, seemed to have found his match in Anna. Hudson, the only one I would have thought immune to the charms of a girl, had been making eyes at thenew opening act since she came on tour with us, and was also no good. Not that he ever talked much anyhow.
