Chapter 1
Lewis
Iwas a fucking mess. My heart raced, I had sweaty palms, and possible heart palpitations.Couldyou get heart palpitations because you were about to see the only boy you ever truly loved again after a decade of regularly stalking, uh, researching his social media profiles?
I palmed the steering wheel and forced a deep breath into my lungs.
Some might call the feelings I had nursed for Noah Bright for over ten years an unhealthy obsession. I just called it love. When he shared on his profile that he was coming back to Scotland I was sure I’d have a heart attack.
Maybe I should try to work on my cardiovascular health or just hide at Lone Fox Distillery until he leaves again.
Yeah, that would have been a great idea had I come up with it a week ago and not just while I sat in my car waiting for Ollie to get back with his younger brother.
Why on earth did I agree to drive him to the airport to pick up Noah?
Gods, I sucked. Of course I’d said yes. Ollie was my best friend.
I took another steadying breath and wiped my hands on my jeans. How would it feel to see Noah again? He was still so pretty, that much I knew.
He had aged, of course, but fuck, so had I. And, unlike me, Noah aged like fine wine.
We weren’t teenagers anymore and maybe that was a good thing. It was bound to be less awkward. Although I didn’t know if he still hated me for driving off every single person he had dated in school.
He probably does.
I mean, I hated myself for how I’d behaved back then. I had spent the last year apologising to every person I’d been an asshole to in school.
Ollie never brought it up. He hardly ever talked about Noah anyway, only when he texted him, which was about once every couple of months.
I found it a little odd that Ollie seemed to forget that he even had a younger brother until a message from him popped up onhis phone. But perhaps he found it weird how intimately I kept up with my bhai.
Roy and I loved each other. We regularly talked on the phone, and I kept up with his socials, his companies, and, of course, his fiancée Kat. I adored her and had done so from the moment I met her.
I checked my watch to see how much time had passed while I’d been lost in thought. Five fucking minutes.
Damn.
I slouched back in my seat and rubbed a damp palm down my face. My insides churned with nerves.
Maybe I should get out of the car and just do laps of the car park to blow off some of the restless energy?
It had rained heavily in the night and the ground was dotted with puddles. A steady drizzle misted the windows of my truck, and I didn’t think looking like a drowned cat would add to my appeal.
Why the fuck do you even care how you look?
Every single guy Noah had ever shared on his social media had been, well, definitely not like me.
He did date guys from other species, like that slender Chinese Dragon shifter with a silly little mustache and the most gorgeous teal scales I had ever seen and an Austrian guy who had been covered in black feathers from the neck down. Both had been slender, bordering on the verge of lithe. Not a single one had ever been even remotely in my height and weight range.
You’re not his type.
Noah had stopped featuring all of these guys eventually and had never addressed any break-ups. But they had lookedhappy, at least for a while. As much as it had hurt to see him like that with other guys, I had never been able to stay away from Noah’s socials.
I rolled my eyes at myself.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to be happy. I did! It just sucked to see him building a future with someone else. Some part of me clung to the idea of Noah and me and rejoiced when yet another one of his boyfriends had disappeared from his feed.
I bumped my head against the headrest a bit harder than necessary. My mum had always insisted that I had a good heart and maybe I did, but the rest of me was questionable at best.
