Bad Decisions

•EIGHTEEN•

Silence once again filled the air around them in Aurora's car. The lights of the nighttime blared down on them, the streets almost empty now that it was past midnight.

They eased a stop at a red light, and Noah's eyes roved around the intersection, watching, waiting. For something. Anything.

Aurora couldn't say for certain what was running through Noah's mind as his hand slid from the gearshift to her thigh, his fingers curling around the curve of her leg until the tips were tucked under her. It was so easy to allow him to touch her now, like his hands had always fit so perfectly on her body. Like they were two halves of the same shape, and they came together in a perfect fit. She let her eyes fall closed as the light turned green, and the car moved forward in space, but she was stuck in her mind back at the red light.

She would guess that Noah was probably thinking about how they had just so recently come together again, after a lifetime apart, and how they had so, so much time they had to make up for, but they would certainly be cleaved apart once again, and sooner than he had probably hoped. This time being much more final. It made her feel forlorn, like she was slipping under the waves of a stormy sea to be lost from him.

She could feel a self deprecating smile twitch on her lips.

It was like they were Romeo and Juliet, star crossed lovers, doomed to die for each other, doomed to never have a life together. It was sad, really, how they had come together, and would come apart, again..

No, Aurora sighed in her mind. It wasn't sad. It was cruel.

She could feel all her meticulously laid out life plans finish crumbling in those moments of silence as Noah drove them to her apartment. How quickly her life turned upside down, how fast she gave into the loneliness she had held buried deep in her heart and let this man, who set her body and soul and heart ablaze after a lifetime of being frozen over.

And she had met him again all because of Noah and his vigilante movement against the company she worked for, the same company her father built, the same company that had destroyed her childhood, and by extension, her life. And his.

Silently, she swore she would destroy M.I.N.D Labs with Noah. She would fight for that destruction until her dying breath, and maybe she would get to see the destruction of it from wherever she landed in the afterlife, where she hoped Noah would join her once again.

Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes, and she could feel Noah's thumb rub a circle on her thigh, then another one, pulling her out of her silent reverie. The car turned into the parking garage of her complex, and Noah found her parking spot after the gate opened up for him.

"I can't stay here any longer," she whispered, letting her eyes open and focus on his hand on her thigh, and the dark lines of the tattoos that swirled on him from fingertips to wrist, and past his sleeve.

"I was thinking the same thing," Noah said quietly, and he pulled out a cellphone and checked it, tapping on the screen with one hand, his other hand left between her thighs, his thumb idly stroking a circle on her. "Our device was a success."

He shut the phone off and set it on his lap, and Aurora shifted, pulling out her own phone.

She had hundreds of texts, missed calls, and emails. Even as she cleared the notifications of panic, of engineers and security and doctors being pulled in, a new text popped up.

Noah leaned over the center console to peer at her screen, and she tilted it towards him so he could read it better. His face darkened as he read the text.

"You'll have to stay with me," he declared. "I'll have someone pick us in a few hours. You should leave your car here to make it look like you are still here."