Chapter 208
Chapter 208
Stella:
I sat down beside Zoe, careful to leave space between us.
"I'm going to need time to process this," she said finally. "I'm going to need to yell at both of you, probably multiple times. And I'm going to need him to grovel. Significantly."
"He's aware."
"Good." A beat. "I love you. I'm still extremely annoyed at you. Both things are true."
"I know," I said. "I love you too."
She pulled out her phone and typed something quickly, then set it down on the coffee table between us. A moment later, it buzzed with a reply.
"He's on his way over," she said. "We're doing this now. All three of us. Because apparently I'm the only person in this entire situation who believes in direct communication."
---
Noah arrived twenty minutes later, slightly out of breath from what had clearly been a very fast trip across campus. His hair was disheveled, his hoodie inside-out, and he looked at Zoe with the cautious wariness of someone approaching a potentially volatile chemical reaction.
"Sit," Zoe said, pointing at the armchair across from us.
He sat.
She looked at him for a long moment, and I watched her face cycle through several emotions before settling on something that looked like exhausted exasperation.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"I know."
"You're both idiots."
"That's fair," I said.
"I should be furious. I am furious." She leaned back against the couch cushions and closed her eyes. "But Emily spent an hour on the phone with me explaining why this isn't actually the disaster I think it is, and now I'm too tired to maintain peak anger levels."
Noah's eyes flicked to me, a question in them. I gave a tiny shake of my head—later.
"I need ground rules," Zoe said, opening her eyes again. "If this is actually happening—if you two are actually together—then I need to know you're being smart about it. No public displays. No campus gossip. Nothing that puts Stella's career at risk. Are we clear?"
"Crystal," Noah said.
"And you—" She pointed at me. "You tell me things. Important things. No more secrets that involve my family members."
"Agreed."
She stood up, smoothing down her blouse with the brisk efficiency of someone who had successfully negotiated a difficult deal and was ready to move on to the next item on her agenda.
"I'm leaving now," she said. "I'm going to Emily's, where I'm going to drink an entire bottle of wine and complain about both of you extensively. Tomorrow, we're having brunch—all four of us—and you're going to sit there and let me ask invasive questions until I'm satisfied that you're not completely insane."
She walked to the door, then paused with her hand on the handle.
"For the record," she said, not looking at either of us, "I saw this coming about six months ago. I just kept hoping I was wrong."
The door closed behind her with a quiet click.
Noah and I sat in silence for a moment, the weight of what had just happened settling around us like dust after an explosion.
"That went better than expected," he said finally.
"She hit you with a pillow."
"Could've been worse. She could've used the decorative one with the sequins."
I laughed, surprising myself, and he crossed the room to sit beside me on the couch. His hand found mine, fingers lacing together with the easy familiarity of something we'd done a thousand times before.
"So," he said. "Brunch tomorrow."
"Brunch tomorrow," I agreed.
"Think Emily's going to mediate?"
"Emily's going to take notes for her sociology research."
He grinned, and for the first time in hours—maybe days—I felt the tight knot of anxiety in my chest begin to loosen.
We'd survived Zoe. We'd survived the photos, the gossip, the near-miss with Title IX. We'd survived four years of hiding and pretending and carefully calculated distances.
Maybe, I thought, we could survive the rest of it too.
---
The next morning, my phone buzzed at seven-thirty with a text from my mother.
Your father and I are in town for a conference. Dinner tonight? We'd love to meet David.
I stared at the screen, my coffee growing cold in my hand.
Noah appeared in the kitchen doorway, hair still damp from the shower, and immediately registered my expression.
"What's wrong?"
I turned the phone to show him.
He read the message, his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. Then he looked at me, and despite everything—despite the absurdity and the timing and the sheer impossibility of the situation—he started to laugh.
"Your parents think I'm David."
"My parents think you're David."
"And they want to have dinner with us."
"Tonight."
He set down his own coffee mug and pulled out his phone, typing rapidly. A moment later, mine buzzed with a calendar invitation: Emergency Crisis Management Meeting Re: The David Situation.
"We have four hours until brunch with Zoe," he said. "Then we have the rest of the day to figure out how to tell your parents that David doesn't exist and also I'm dating their daughter and also I'm twenty-two and also I'm Zoe's brother."
"That's a lot of 'and also.'"
"It's a very complicated situation." He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around me from behind, chin resting on my shoulder. "But we'll figure it out. We always do."
I leaned back against him, closing my eyes, and tried to believe that was true.
Outside the window, the marina stretched out in the morning light, boats rocking gently at their moorings, and somewhere across town Zoe was probably already awake and making a list of questions for brunch, and my parents were checking into their hotel with no idea that the careful story I'd constructed was about to collapse entirely.
But Noah's arms were steady around me, and his breath was warm against my neck, and for this one moment—before the chaos, before the explanations, before everything inevitably got more complicated—I let myself have this.
Just this.