Noelle

Chapter 11

"Please!? I'm begging you! Begging!" As if to enunciate her point, Fen drops down onto her knees, folding her hands and giving me her most desperate expression.

"Fen, I really don't-"

"No! Don't say that! It would make me so incredibly happy if you would come! Wait! You can think of it as a late birthday present! You didn't get me anything."

I feel my face scrunching up in laughter at her response. "That's not my fault! Your birthday was months before I even moved here."

"Exactly. So you missed it. Real nice, Noelle." Fen tries to keep a straight face, but we both end up bent over in laughter. Alexander looks at us with a mix of confusion and amusement as he enters the shop, heading back to his office.

"Okay, you win. I can't argue with that."

Fen throws her arm in the air. "Hell yeah! I'll pick you up at seven, okay?"

Nodding, I grimace in mock pain. "I suppose that would be alright."

The door to the office opens, and we both look up at the sound.

"Fen, I just got off the phone with your brother. He needs you to pick up an order tonight and he says he'll pay you back when he arrives in town next week."

Fen groans, and Alexander ruffles her hair, smiling tenderly. "Now Fen, he is your brother." She rolls her eyes and tackles a stack of t-shirts that she had knocked off the table.

"You can leave early tonight, dear. They're calling for another blizzard, so I'm going to just shut down early tonight," Alexander says, turning to me.

I gather up my things and duck at the t-shirt that Fen tosses at my head. "See you later."

"Remember, seven o'clock sharp!" Fen calls behind me.

•••

That night, I lie awake unable to sleep through the thoughts swimming around in my mind. After trying and failing to fall asleep, I finally roll out of bed sometime after midnight and trudge out to the kitchen.

If I'm being honest, my thoughts are mostly centered around West. It's strange to think that for months all I could think about was finding my dad. Of course, that was before I'd met West and then begun to have all these feelings about him.

I'm not too naive to realize that I have feelings for him. I want things from him that I'm almost too embarrassed to even think about. He sets some part of me on fire.

But it's more than just that; something I can't explain. I feel safe with him. For a moment, when I'm next to him, things sting less. I don't find the thought of everything that brought me here quite as crushing.

Lately I've begun to really see him.

Like how his eyes look almost black when he watches me - and he watches me often - and how his tall body seems to tower over my petite form. And his hands.

I laugh and bang my head on the table. Of course the only part I remember about our embrace besides being pressed up against him is how his hands felt on my lower back. How they burned through my clothes. They're kind hands; have brushed my tears away on several occasions.

Great. Now that I've let all these thoughts out in the open, it is going to be incredibly difficult to see him without glowing with embarrassment. And it's hard to have these thoughts anyway, because an overwhelming thought has been circling in my mind for weeks. To him, I am just a friend. Someone in need that he rescued, because West is like that.