Page 43 of Sucker Love (Sugar Pill Duet #1)

I lean towards him. “Noel, no. You were just a kid. It’s not your responsibility to save her.

” He’s still far too young to worry about this sort of shit.

I couldn’t imagine—or I could, maybe. I could conjure up all sorts of awful things, now that I had glimpsed that window into his life, his past. Were they as awful as reality?

I think he’s done the best he could, the right thing, with what he had. To survive; to thrive, even. Half a semester out from graduating, promising future ahead of him. And he’s done it all himself. Skill and determination—all his .

“Then whose responsibility is it?” He erases the spiral with a sweep of his palm and looks at me. There’s no anger, no sadness, no nothing. He is blank, defeated almost. “Because no one else gives a shit. Someone has to care.”

I hesitate. “Your father?”

“Never knew him. Doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned.” His voice is barely audible over the chill wind and the sound of the waves, the cries of gulls that wheel overhead. “I didn’t want you to see any of that. Or know it.”

I reach out and touch his leg. “I’m alright, Noel,” I tell him. “It’s you I’m worried about. There has to be something we can do for your family.”

Noel shakes his head. “It’s my problem, not yours.” His hair falls into his face as he turns it away, hiding it from me. “I’m sorry, Luca. I really am. For this. For...everything.”

We are both quiet for a long moment, my fingertips tracing the seam of his pants just inside of his knee.

I wish that there’s something I can say or do to make things better but I don’t have the words.

There is just the horror and sadness, the confronting nature of his shame and my desire to ease it.

He’s closed off to me right now, building his damaged walls back up and pushing me out.

Walls I’d spent so much time infiltrating, trying to know him.

I don’t want him to hide from me. I want to know, the way I have since the night we met, everything about him. All I can think is to reciprocate that vulnerability, show him my throat the way he was forced to show me his.

I lay back against the sand and ignore how it immediately leeches all of my warmth, makes me break out in goosebumps beneath my jacket, and fold my arms behind my head.

I stare at the twilit sky. “I don’t live far from here, you know,” I say.

“Or, well—I used to. I guess not anymore. Demi’s going to buy me out of it. ”

Noel’s doodling in the sand again. “Did you grow up here?”

“Nah, Watertown. Big house with my parents and my yiayia and my papou, and my aunt and uncle and all their kids were just down the street. Big Greek affair. So typical.” I smile faintly.

“Went to Greek school with my cousins every week, church with the whole family every Sunday—we were always in each other’s hair. ”

“What a nightmare,” he says, but his voice is wistful.

I want to hold him close while I tell him this story, but I know I won’t be welcome.

He’s gone reserved, cold, doing that thing he does where he can vacillate between emotions and demeanors with a rapid intensity that is liable to give me whiplash.

I keep my gaze fixed to the emerging stars.

“I loved it when I was younger,” I say. “Couldn’t imagine life any other way.

Thought I’d grow up and have a big family just like that—not that I have any siblings, my mom couldn’t have any more kids after me.

But I thought I’d have them, lots of them.

And then I got older and things changed.

After my mom passed when I was fourteen?—”

“Sorry,” Noel says abruptly. I look over at him, meet his gaze. “I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you didn’t.” And despite the almost twenty years that had passed since, I still get a small lump in my throat anytime I talk about her. Which wasn’t often. Not nearly often enough, not for how close we were.

“How did she?—”

“Ovarian cancer. By the time the doctors caught it, she was really far gone. Dead in four months.”

He lies down in the sand on his side, facing me. “I’m sorry,” he says again, softly.

I nod and swallow. “Dad was so different after that. So much colder. Meaner. Like his life lost all meaning. By then Papou and Yiayia were gone, too, so it was just us in that big house. And I guess because he had nothing else to focus on, he targeted me. Laid whatever hopes and dreams he had at my feet. I had to be better, smarter, more successful. Do everything his way, or there would be consequences.”

When Noel tugs on my arm, I let him take it, hug it to his chest. I think he says my name, but it’s a whisper, lost on the wind.

“When I was twenty-two, I still lived at home with my dad. I was seeing this guy named Arin,” I say.

“I’d been dating him for a year. I guess he was my first serious boyfriend, but, y’know, I never told my family for obvious reasons.

There was this weekend our house was supposed to be empty.

Dad and Uncle Drew were supposed to be up in Maine for the weekend—I don’t even remember why anymore, but I was going to have my house to myself.

And then he just showed up and walked in on us. ”

Noel pushes his cold face against mine. I feel his eyelashes fluttering against my cheek.

“It was so bad. ” My voice catches. “It was so fucking bad. He beat the fucking shit out of Arin. I thought he was going to kill him. When I finally pulled them apart, his face was a pulp. Dad cut him a check to disappear, and he did. I never, ever saw him again.”

“Oh, Luca.” He rubs his cheek alongside mine. It’s damp, I realize. Mine is. “No.”

“Dad told me that he’d rather have a dead son than one who was a faggot, and I believed him.

I believed I couldn’t ever be with a man, not for real, not in a meaningful way.

I was—I am still scared of him. I couldn’t really be me.

I could just rebel in these stupid little ways.

Become a tattoo artist like I really wanted, instead of going to college.

‘Ruin’ my body—oh, he fucking hated that.

Still does, still makes his little comments about it.

Dates with other men, flings, whatever, creeping around in the dark, hiding for my life.

I toed the line as much as I could without ruining everything.

But shortly after that he introduced me to his friend’s daughter, and. ..”

“Everything fell into place.”

“Exactly. I thought, now I can just be happy enough . Happy enough is good, right? Happy enough is more than a lot of people have.” I close my eyes, just for a moment.

“We didn’t fight about it, really, even though we were both miserable.

We liked each other too much to fight like that.

I would’ve just kept going like that forever.

Just forgetting about a life with any of those things, because I was fucking scared .

Demi was the one brave enough to pull the plug. ”

“Would you go back, if you could?” His voice is quiet, breath warm against my ear. “If you could do it over, make things right with Demi—or any other girl—would you? If you could do that forever?”

It’s an earnest and honest question. Would I go back, if I could do it all over again and somehow do it correctly?

Would I take happy enough over the uncertain yet infinitely deeper potential of now?

To be the person who much younger me thought I’d be by now, with that big family I dreamed of, my own children calling my dad papou and going to Greek school and church with all of my cousins’ children?

Would I take all of that—and give up this?

Noel, who has shown me just how far two people can plumb the depths of intimacy and trust, through whom I learned that passion and love are not mutually exclusive.

He is proud, he is intense, he is wounded—and he is beautiful, wild, a tempest, a car crash; awe-inspiring in his capacity for destruction.

A force of nature that is devastating and raw.

But it’s not just that, because that would never be enough. It’s the everything else.

It’s that clever mind of his, like a steel trap: quick-witted, infuriating, laconic, creative, all in equal measures.

It’s the way he can pick himself up and go on, no matter how badly someone’s stomped him down—even if that someone is himself.

It’s how he’s built himself up from absolutely nothing, despite a childhood bereft of all the love and affection and good things that he deserves.

He is here, and whole, and he’s never needed the validation of a single person in his life to get this far. He did it himself.

I adore him, all of him. Everything that makes him Noel, from his highest highs to his lowest lows, and everything in between. I adore him.

I love him.

I roll onto my side to face Noel, snaking my arm beneath him and around his waist as he slides his leg carefully over my hip.

I rub my nose against his. “I wouldn’t trade you for anything,” I tell him.

“That’s the real question.” He’s shaking his head, but I still him with my hand, cupping his face.

“ You are the question that drives me, Noel.”

His gaze is wide, saucer-like and fragile. “Am I?” he whispers.

I study his gorgeous and imploring tawny eyes, burnished gold rimming pupils blown wide by darkness and desire both. My fingertips trace his cheekbone back to his ear, where I hook the errant strands of his hair. “Yes,” I whisper back. “You’re everything to me.”

I kiss him fiercely, my prickly boy, my stunt girl, and his lips part beneath mine with a sigh.

We make out like a couple of teenagers as the light fades from the horizon and the night engulfs us in crushed velvet.

And when I do take Noel home at last, I make love to him the way I’ve been wanting to for so long. Without pretense or games. It’s just us. Just each other.