Toothpaste Kisses

Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

To say Noah wasn’t a cocky bugger the next few days would be a lie. Every day after his birthday I would come back to my room to either find Noah with his team mates being obnoxious or to find the room empty to where he would come home tipsy. It was like one of those shitty cliché stories written by thirteen year olds where the main boy is on a high twenty-four/seven.

It was crap, really.

Not that I cared what he was doing. I spent the evenings in the dance studio with Ben and Darcy; Darcy yelling at the two of us whilst Ben led the way around the scratched studio floor. The only time it actually annoyed me was when I couldn’t ignore his shit, when I walked through the door and had to listen to his bullshit.

It seemed to become a bit of a schedule, really; go to school, go to the studio, go home and get dissed by Noah, tolerate it and go to bed.

Again; it was crap, really.

I opened the door exactly a week after Noah’s birthday party – and birthday – to find Noah sitting on my bed with a bottle of beer in his hands. I hadn’t actually seen him drinking, he never brought the bottles into the room; he only walked in drunk. Because of how he had been the last couple of days we hadn’t really been talking but when I saw him at that moment my resistance crumbled.

“Hey,” I sighed as I dumped my bag down at his side and slumped down at his other hip.

“Jodi!” he cheered, throwing his arms over me in a sloppy, one armed hug.

“Hey, Noah,” I sighed as I pushed his arms off me and leaned against the wall to watch him.

“You already said hey,” he laughed as he slapped my cheek softly in an affectionate way. We fell into silence as he kept stroking my cheek. “I haven’t seen you a lot,” he whispered, I turned to see he was pouting up at me.

“You’ve been too busy with the big bad eighteen year olds,” I mumbled. His thumb stopped stroking my cheek and he got up to stare me in the eyes.

“That’s not true,” he replied. “You could have stayed in the room with me, you just decided not to.”

“Shut up, we both know you like the thing of being able to do what you want now. You like it that you can go to clubs and leave the kid at home. Thing is Noah,” I sighed as I ran a hand across my face, “I’m nearly sixteen, I live thousands of miles away from my family and so I have to act like an adult most of the time. If you leave me here I don’t give a flying shit. I can cope on my own.”

“What would you do if Max and I aren’t here?”

“I can do stuff, I can write, I can go to Ben and practice for the comp. I don’t need to be tied down here,” I mumbled.

Hurt crossed his face as he looked at me. “You’d rather spend time with Zombie Boy than with me?”

“You’d rather spend time with a bottle of Budweiser and some scantily dressed girls than with me,” I threw back, not giving him his desired answer. At the moment, I guess I would prefer to talk to Ben than Noah, mostly because Noah was being a dick all the time.

“You’re always my first option,” he mumbled.

I froze. “What?”

“Yeah, I would rather be with you than you be with Ben.”

“For God’s sake, Noah!” the sympathy I had seconds ago rolled away and anger took its place. “I don’t know what you problem is but Ben isn’t a threat to my virtue.”