Page 47 of When the Stars Rise

“You play dirty.” He advances farther into the room and points to the skirt of my dress. “Is that the little La Perla set I bought you?”

He’s talking about the cream satin trimmed in black lace panties that Imighthave flashed when I crossed my legs. And I might have worn them for him tonight. Noah has a thing for deceptively sweet lingerie.

I give him a coy smile. “Maybe.”

Noah turns on the video camera without further comment and asks his first question, all business now. “Which artists have influenced your music?”

I reel off a list of names—Lana Del Rey, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, and the Beatles. “But my biggest influences have been Dean Bouchon and Shiloh Leroux.”

He asks me a few more questions, all easy answers. What’s your favorite food? Tacos, sushi, and Texas barbecue. Favorite color? Purple.

Favorite place? “The beach. At night,” I add.

He gives me a long look. “The beach, at night,” he repeats, biting his lip. “Any beach in particular?”

I shrug. “Any beach will do, but I prefer remote, uncrowded beaches. There is one beach in Hawaii that I’m particularly fond of.”

He chuckles under his breath and swipes his hand over his mouth. “White sundress, little white bikini,” he mutters. “Another first,” he mouths wordlessly.

Because I gave them all to you.

I smile because I like knowing that we’re both thinking about the night we had sex in a hidden cove on a beach in Maui.

People always say that sex on a beach is overrated but that’s only because they’ve never had sex on a beach with Noah.

He has a knack for making everything more fun and I remember feeling especially wild and reckless that night, theskirt of my dress around my hips, bikini bottoms lying on the sand. Head thrown back, legs locked around his waist and my nipple clenched between his teeth as I rode him on a red sand beach under a full moon.

Afterward, we were lying on the beach, limbs entwined, my heart tucked into his breast pocket where he promised to keep it safe, and he said, “I carry you everywhere, you know. Even when we’re a thousand miles apart, I still see your face in a crowd. You’ve always been the only one I see.”

He made me feel so beautiful. So special. So loved. And I couldn’t imagine anything ripping us apart again because we were so in love.

“What’s your best childhood memory?” Noah asks, changing gears.

“I have so many great ones.” I narrow my eyes, thinking about it for a minute. “Okay, I’ve got it. It was summertime…”

“As all best childhood memories were.”

I nod. “No school. All those weeks of freedom stretching out before us.”

Noah grins. “Plenty of time to get into trouble.”

“Funny you should say that. So my best friend and I were around seven. His stepdad built him a treehouse in their backyard, and we spent a lot of time there. But of course my friend wasn’t content to use the ladder to get up and down. He always had to climb the tree to get up and getting down… that was a whole other story.

“He would either swing from the rope pretending to be Tarzan and when he got as high as he could, he’d jump. Or he’d just jump straight from the treehouse to the ground. And when you’re seven, that’s a long way down. But I wanted to try it. I figured that if he could do it, so could I. But when it came time to do it, I was scared, and my best friend knew it. So he said, ‘Don’t look down. Look up at the sky and just jump. I promise I’ll catchyou.’ That was a big claim for a knobby-kneed seven-year-old boy, but you know what? I believed him. I trusted him so much that I did it without a second thought. I jumped.”

I grin, still proud of myself all these years later.

“And what happened?” Noah asks with a smile. Just as if he doesn’t know.

“It didn’t exactly go as planned,” I say with a laugh. “My friend was waiting for me at the bottom as promised but instead of catching me, I knocked him to the ground and landed right on top of him. He broke my fall like a human safety net.” My eyes meet his and we both smile at the memory. “He was my soft place to fall.”

“Always,” he says quietly, his face so sincere that I know he believes that. But like so many things with us, what used to be true isn’t true anymore.

“Moral of the story. He’s always been the boy who wanted to fly, and I was the girl who wanted two feet on the ground.”

Noah presses his lips together like he doesn’t like that response, but he doesn’t comment. “Next question. What’s your biggest fear?”

Brave question coming from him. I’m sure he already knows the answer, but I give it to him anyway. “I have a lot of fears, but my biggest one is losing the person I love most.”