Noah steps out of the bathroom fully dressed, and his hair, still wet from his earlier shower, hangs over his eyes, leaving me unable to read his mood.
“Did you call her?” he asks.
“No.” I pause. “But what if I did?”
Noah shrugs then leans his back against the wall. “Then you did. I don’t claim to understand, but I promised you back in the spring that I’d stand by you. I’m a man of my word.”
He is. He always has been. “But you don’t agree that I should call her.”
“Not my decision to make.”
I shift, uncomfortable that Noah’s not completely on my side. “I’d like to know you support me.”
“I support you.”
“But you don’t approve.”
“You need to stop looking for people’s approval, Echo. That’s only going to lead to hurt.”
My spine straightens. “I didn’t ask for a lecture.”
“You asked me to be okay with you contacting the person that tried to kill you. Forgive me for not setting off fireworks. You want to call her, call her. You want to see her, then do it. I’ll hold your hand every step of the way, but I don’t have to like seeing her in your life.”
His words sting, but they’re honest. The phone slides in my clammy hands. “I won’t call her today.”
“Because that’s your decision,” Noah says. “Not because you’re trying to please me.”
We’re silent for a bit before he continues, “I called the Malt and Burger in Vail. They can fit me into the schedule this week. If I want in, they can give me the walk-through of the restaurant this evening.”
A sickening ache causes me to drop a hand to my stomach. A week. We were supposed to travel back to Kentucky today. We were going to take another route so that I could try new galleries. But Noah has this need to find his mom’s family. He desires a place to belong.
Just like me.
If he wants to search for them, I can’t be the person standing in the way. “You should ask them to schedule you.”
“What if my mom’s family is bad news? Why would I want them in my life?”
“I don’t know.” It’s a great question. One I deal with daily. Maybe if we go, Noah will finally understand my struggle with my mother. “Let’s do this. Let’s go to Vail.”
Noah cuts his gaze from the floor to me. “This means you’ll be giving up visiting galleries on the way back.”
It will. Granting him this can cost me my dreams, but I’ve had enough time, and I guess I’ve failed. “There are probably galleries in Vail.” Hopefully.
“We’ll stay in a hotel the whole time. I’ll pay.”
“Noah...” My voice cracks. “No. I’m fine with the tent or I can help pay—”
“Let me do this,” he says, and the sadness in his tone causes me to nod.
“So we’re still heading west,” I say.
“West,” he responds.
Noah
My head pulses with the same speed as the cursor on the computer at the Vail Malt and Burger. Champagne hangovers suck.
“Clock in as soon as you walk in, and clock out the moment your shift is done and this is where you put your orders, you hear me?” The manager of the Malt and Burger is in the process of explaining to me the way “his” restaurant runs. He’s a six-two, two-hundred-and fifty-pound black man who, like the other managers throughout the summer, thinks he’s the only one that uses the system of sticking the paper orders over the grill. Two words: corporate policy.
“Got it,” I answer.
“You hear me?” he asks with a wide white grin. “It doesn’t leave the grill until it hits one hundred and sixty degrees.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Food poisoning’s a bitch.
He slaps my back and if I wasn’t solid, the hit might have crushed me. “Good. Called around about you. Hear you’re a good man. We get a lot of travel employees through here, and you aren’t the only fresh face working this week. I expect you to pull your weight and not miss a beat, hear me? Otherwise, I’ll put you out.”
Loud and clear, and it’s going to be a long week if he says that phrase as much as he has in the past thirty minutes.
“So we’ll see you tomorrow?” He uses a red bandanna to wipe the sweat off his brow.
“Tomorrow.”
We shake hands, and I let myself out the back when the drive-through worker yells that the headset shorted. Vail’s cooler than Denver, but not by much and because of that, I walk in the shadows of the alley.
“You were too serious-looking in there, you know? Surely a year can’t change someone that much.”
I glance behind me and notice a girl with short black hair and wearing a Malt and Burger waitress T-shirt leaning against the brick wall next to the Dumpster. A cigarette dangles from her hand and as she lifts it to her mouth, the ton of bracelets on her wrist clanks together.
“Do you know me?” I ask.
She releases smoke into the air. The sweet scent catches up and for the first time in months, the impulse for a hit becomes an itch under my skin. The chick’s smoking pot.
“I know you, Noah Hutchins. I know you very well.”
I scratch my chin as a dim memory forces its way to the surface: pot, beer, her naked body and the backseat of my car. Shit.
“Mia,” I mumble. She introduced me to the employee travel program. Last fall, she trekked across the country working for different stores, and for two weeks while she had stopped in Kentucky, we traveled down each other’s pants.
“You remember my name. I’m touched.” She extends the joint to me. “Our last encounter started this way, too, which works for me. I just got off shift and if I remember correctly you had a killer backseat.”
I shove my hands in my pockets. “I don’t have my car.”
“You don’t?”
“We took my girlfriend’s.”
She chuckles then takes another hit. Mia’s silent as she holds the smoke, then studies me while she blows it out. “Never thought of you as boyfriend material. Pegged you to be like me.”
“Guess you pegged me wrong.”
“Guess I did.” Mia smashes the small remains of the joint between her fingers, and it disintegrates as it falls to the ground. “Did you move here or are you visiting?”
“Visiting for the week.”
“What a coincidence—so am I.” She releases the same sly grin she gave me moments before going down on me last year. Twenty bucks the girl knows what she’s doing now just like she knew exactly what she was doing then. “Tell me about your girl.”