Noah and Leigh Oneshot

Noah and Leigh

Noah couldn't, for the life of him, stop smiling. Maybe it was the suspicious, sultry smell in the air that was some form of carcinogenic smoke but certainly not that of a cigarette, or maybe the waitress had slipped something into his coffee in the cafe earlier, but regardless of the cause, his lips were caught around a smile. It curved lazily around his face, stretched, and settled in for the night, making itself at home.

"You're rarer than a can of dandelion and burdock//those other girls are just post-mix lemonade."

Noah knew it wasn't pot or alcohol making him giddy, but another recreational drug - Leigh. She'd injected herself into the crooks of his elbows and was running havoc round his brain; squirrelled away in a corner typing furiously on a laptop, or tucked affectionately in a bay window somewhere in the labyrinth of his mind rereading Wonder with a chai latte clasped in one hand. Noah was high off the girl in the library.

"You see giant proclamations are all very well//but our love is louder than words."

He'd never felt anything like this before - love, I mean. Sure, there were people he loved, but never before had he been in love with someone. He'd never wanted (needed) anyone to love him back before. He'd only had one girlfriend before - if you could even coin her relationship to him a 'girlfriend' - and that was due to the persistence and, frankly, thickheadedness of his friends who insisted on setting him up with a girl they'd met in the pub, but nothing came of it. He may only have had one girl to compare her to, but, through the exchange of notes, books and favourite quotes, Leigh had already made far more of an impression than the other girl. She gave him a new appreciation for love songs, a new understanding of dilemmas on the most basic of television programmes because the love forced into the words (thrust there all too often by cripplingly atrocious acting) held out it's hand and pulled him in, warm in an embrace that would last at least as long as Noah did.

"We didn't have to fall in love//we could have climbed down slowly."

Every afternoon, once he'd finished the assignment or book specific to that day, and was satisfied with the progress being made with Leigh, he left the library with the taste of the sun in his mouth and the sound of his own elation in his ears. Previous to meeting with her, he'd cursed his own bad luck - he was haunted by past conversations he'd barrelled his way through, leaving his dignity and confidence as the casualties. Girls had never exactly fallen at his feet, and he'd always accounted it to his vocal filter - that infernal machine that jammed and clicked and crunched when he was in full bullshit mode, yet swelled and wove resilient chains around his throat when a half-decent conversation lulled, preventing him from continuing it, thus ensuring that a very awkward and unnecessary silence followed. It was only now that he wondered whether it was not bad luck that prevented him from forming a relationship, but premonition.

"Every now and then the stars align//boy and girl meet by the great design//could it be that you and me are the lucky ones?"

Maybe it was his subconscious steering him from dates that would never come to fruition, from girls that would eventually tire of his limited conversational skills, and directing him towards the library on that afternoon after school, rather than the desk in his bedroom, here to Leigh. Fate? No, he'd never quite believed in that; but somewhere in the archives of his mind, had something triggered the voice up there into thinking, "Yeah, y'know what? There's someone out there that I'm more into, and I'm gonna hold out for that."? Cause, yeah, Noah could dig that theory. Whatever it was, he was glad that he'd had those years of inexperience - it allowed him to discover things that maybe he wouldn't had he had tonnes of girls before. With Leigh, he noticed everything: the faded birthmark on her neck, the small crescent scar printed onto the back of her right hand, the constellation of freckles dusting her arms - he saw them all. He saw them and gently chewed the memories, savouring the taste.

"Come to my house tonight//we can be together in the nuclear sky//and we will dance in the poison rain//and we can stay a while in heaven today."

With Leigh curving helter-skelters in his thoughts, he made his mind up. He could no longer bear the thought of her name without first adding the prefixes of "my" and "girlfriend". He was going to text her later on in the evening, when they fell from the obligatory questioning of the day's itinerary into the milky way of insignificant post-death theories or lottery-ticket-bought dreams into the mind of a millionaire or the swapping of each other's fears, and he would ask her out.

***

A.N.

Hi! The songs which the quotes are from are in chronological order here:

1. Arctic Monkeys - Suck it and See

2. Bloc Party - Sunday

3. Spectator - Upset Boulevard

4. Lana Del Rey - Lucky Ones

5. Suede - Stay Together