The Kissing Booth 3: One Last Time [SAMPLE]

Chapter Three

I'd thought the whole 'Berkeley vs Harvard' thing was bad enough, but this?

Lee sulked through the rest of our main course – and, to my astonishment, so did Noah. They both pulled faces and scowled and grumbled under their breath, stabbed at their food and cast the occasional glare at their parents.

They looked so alike in that moment that it was almost funny.

Almost.

Rachel, for her part, tried to keep the mood up. She tried to talk to Lee a few times, and, when that wasn't working, she talked to his parents with an enthusiasm that bordered on mania as she tried to beat past the silence that had settled.

I was still trying to get my head around it all.

Selling the beach house? I hadn't ever thought that would even be an option. It was the beach house. It was where we'd spent pretty much every summer of our lives. Some of my best memories had happened there. It was where Lee and I first swam without floaties! Where I got stung by a jellyfish when I was nine and made Noah give me a piggyback all the way back to the house. Where Lee got his first kiss, with a Latina lifeguard from upstate whose name none of us could remember now.

I glanced over at Noah, whose jaw was clenched. When we'd been growing up and Noah had suddenly got too cool to hang out with us any more, the beach house had been the one place where everything felt like it used to when we were still kids, where he'd hang out with us.

It was where we'd first drunk beer, snuck from a cooler one Fourth of July when we were thirteen – when Noah was starting to become a cool guy at school, breaking all the rules, but not so cool he couldn't include us in his little heist. (Although he had drawn the line at having us tag along to any parties he went to later on that same summer.)

They couldn't just sell. That wasn't how it worked.

Not for a place like the beach house.

It was so much more than just a piece of land, a bungalow with peeling paint and a dodgy pool filter.

My phone rang. A flash of guilt shot through me for not putting it on silent, but, instead of apologizing and shoving the phone back into my purse, I took the excuse to leave the table. 'I'm just gonna take this. I'll be right back.'

I tried not to run away from the sour mood hanging over our table.