The Thing About Three

chapter eleven | important people

"YOU'RE BEING AWKWARD," Noah's voice called out from behind me. I jumped in my spot in front of the open door of the break room fridge, whirling around.

"What? No I'm not," I told him, shutting the door.

"Yeah, you are," he affirmed. "You've been avoiding me since your shift started."

"No, I have not." Except I totally had been, acting like I was one of America's most wanted with how often I'd been throwing glances over my shoulder and hiding behind random objects whenever I heard his voice.

"Claire, I saw you duck behind a car in the shop earlier when I walked by," he revealed, an eyebrow raised as if challenging me to refute his claim.

I frowned. "Okay, yeah, I have been avoiding you," I admitted. "I just—I kind of don't know how to act anymore."

"Just act like yourself," he suggested, crossing the room to lean up against the stretch of counter to the right of the fridge. "It's not like this is some big deal or something."

"But this is a big deal! I mean," I lowered my voice to a whisper, "you like me."

"Yeah, and?" he asked, seeming nonchalant.

"And I don't know what to do now."

He sighed, pushing off of the counter to stand in front of me, his hands coming up to cup my shoulders. "You need to stop overthinking this, okay? It's not like I'm asking you to be my girlfriend or anything, it just means that I think you have a great personality and I find you insanely attractive, so don't think too much about it. And remember that I'm not a boyfriend kind of guy."

His words put me in a weird limbo state, where the excitement he had evoked inside me was canceled out by my disappointment.

He wasn't a 'boyfriend' kind of guy? I thought. What the heck did that mean?

Except I kind of knew what that meant. It meant that he didn't like having a girlfriend. He liked to be free and date around without any attachment, which was exactly what he did back in high school.

"Okay," I told him, "I'll try and stop being awkward about it."

He kept holding onto me, staring into my eyes. "Alright, but you do understand what I'm talking about, right? About me not being a boyfriend type of guy? That means that I don't want anything serious with anybody. I'm telling you because I don't want you to—"

"I got it," I cut him off. "Really, I understand."

He stared at me for a few seconds before nodding to himself and dropping his hands from my shoulders. "Okay." And then he was back to his normal self. "Alright, Champagne, time to get my hot self back to work." He patted my arm before walking toward the door.

"The only hot one around here is me," I teased, trying to get back to my normal self, too.

That made him turn around, smiling big as he walked backward. "There she is," he commented before spinning back around and throwing open the door to the shop.

I smiled and got back to work myself, making calls and helping Dallas with a few things. Everything seemed like it was going fine as I worked, but fine flew right out the window when a cherry red Miata pulled up and a stranger hopped out.

Do you ever just know that someone is going to be important to you just by looking at them? Like, you haven't even spoken to them, and know absolutely nothing about them, but somehow you just know they are going to mean something to you?

If you haven't experienced this, I think that's totally normal, because I went eighteen years before experiencing it for the first time and never experienced it again.