Page 76 of Holiday Interference
Just a silence I can’t fill.
My thumb hovers over the screen for too long. Then I lock it and toss it into my gear bag like it burns.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Noelle
I can’t feelmy toes.
Or maybe I can, and they just hate me for making them stand still this long in these damn heels.
Either way, I’m starting to regret everything about this plan—starting with the shoes, ending with the fact that I’m standing outside Cal Reid’s SUV like a woman in a movie scene she doesn’t have the right to be in.
The arena’s back entrance is quiet now, the crowd gone, the buzz faded. Just a few muffled thumps echo from inside. The kind that feel far away and close all at once.
My breath fogs in the air, nerves curling it tighter around my face every time I exhale. The warmth of it slips beneath my collar and disappears before I can hold on to it.
I should’ve brought gloves. Or a backup plan.
Or, at least the guts to say what I need to say without shaking in my skin.
But I’m here.
Wrapped in a coat that felt like a power move when I left my apartment. Now it just feels like armor I don’t know how to wear.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other. Try to find a posture that says I’m fine, this is fine, I do this all the time—wait by strange SUVs in the dark for the man who short-circuited my entire emotional nervous system in two days time.
No big deal.
My whole body is tight. That familiar sting, right beneath my sternum, hasn’t gone away since I left him that morning.
It’s become its own rhythm. Something I carry with me now. A beat between heartbeats.
I told myself over and over it wasn’t a breakup.
But God, itfeltlike one.
I still see his face when we said goodbye—kind and quiet and full of everything we weren’t saying.
When I walked out the door, I didn’t look back. I just couldn’t. Not without crumbling.
And I haven’t heard from him since.
But how could I? I didn’t give him a way to reach me. No number. No invitation. No sign that I wanted more.
Even though Idid.
Even though Ido.
Because I miss him.
The way he looked at me when I wasn’t talking.
The way his voice dipped when he told me to take what I wanted.
The way he made me feel like the bravest and softest version of myself at the same time.
I miss all of it. And I don’t even have his detergent scent to cling to because I stopped washing my clothes in it when all I did was stand around and snuff the fabric.
