The Kissing Booth: New Love

Chapter 37

Noah

I had been relieved when Elle showed up at our house with Lee after school. I mean, obviously things had gone well between us the night before.  But for some reason I worried that the weirdness would come back between us and she wouldn't want to spend more time with me this weekend. I kept imagining that today might be the day that Marco convinced her that she belonged with him.   Marco occupied way too much time in my mind for a guy I never met.

I never worried about any of these kinds of ideas last year, I hate that I've become this person who is jealous and worried about another guy in Elle's life.  I always thought I wasn't the jealous type.  I was always fine with Elle hanging out with Lee and all her other guy friends.  Then as soon as I was thousands of miles away from her, everything changed.

Everything felt so normal when I sat down for supper with my family and Elle. It was like so many suppers of my childhood, making me realize how homesick I had been. I knew how much I missed Elle and my Mom, and I suppose even my Dad. But I think I had even missed Lee joking around and giving me shit.  As great as it was to sit around the dinner table with my family, I was on a mission to fix things with Elle this weekend and I we needed to talk. As soon as we could, I took off with Elle, nervous about what was coming. 

It had been easy enough to pretend like everything was okay between me and Elle tonight.  We always had a buffer of other people around us to pretend in front of.  Once we were by ourselves, thought, it felt weird keeping up the act.  The drive to the Hollywood sign has been somewhat quiet, with Elle trying to keep up a steady stream of stories about her and Lee with awkward silences in between. I did my best to respond in the right places with a laugh or a nod of agreement but wasn't good for much more than that. I was too busy going over and over in my head what I wanted to say to her, what I needed to tell her. The last thing I wanted was to come all this way to repair our relationship and say the wrong thing to ruin it. 

I had promised Chloe earlier in the day that I had reviewed the lecture notes she sent me and would be ready for the quiz we were supposed to take next week on that material.  Truthfully, my mind had been on Elle far more than it had been on the cell structures I was supposed to be learning about.  Even once my parents got home, after the hugs of excitement at my surprise homecoming, when I had to answer their endless questions about what I was doing home and why I hadn't told them I was coming, my thoughts of this talk with Elle were never far from my mind.

I was relieved when we parked and Elle didn't feel the need to fill the silence while we made our way to our spot. Once we were settled on the blanket, looking out on the view that had literally taken my breath away the first time I sat here, I took a deep breath to start this conversation.

"Listen, Shell, I think we both know that we need to talk about our relationship." I started before my phone buzzed with back to back texts. I watched Elle glance down at my phone, and saw a flash of something in her eyes. I hadn't seen that in her before, was it fear or anger? I wasn't sure. I looked down and saw that it was two texts from Chloe, her name clearly visible on the screen. Shit. If Elle looks upset from seeing Chloe's name on my phone, Chloe must be right.  Elle knows more about what is going on here than I realized.

I held up my phone in front of me. "Shelly, I'm an idiot. I should have talked to you about this long ago." I saw the hurt flash in Elle's eyes. I worried I needed to talk fast before she shut down on me. I unlocked my phone and handed it to her.

Elle looked at me in confusion. "I don't understand, Noah."

I went on, while Elle looked down at my phone in her hands, still confused. "Chloe is a friend. There's nothing going on between us. I didn't see what she sent, but you can look at it. You can see anything she sent me. I don't want to have secrets from you anymore."  I let her keep holding the phone but I tapped on the screen to pull up the texts Chloe sent me as I talked. "Chloe is my Biology lab partner and she's saved my ass . . . she helped keep me from failing out of Harvard."  I had to force the last words out. Even though I knew I had to tell Elle everything, I hated to admit this to her.