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Aurora Hart was the sun that I gravitated to. Ever since she’d arrived in Lakeshore, I’d barely looked twice at another girl.
Because all I saw was her.
Call it fate or kismet or the universe’s strange way of telling me it was time to grow the fuck up. It didn’t matter. There were only two time periods in my life now.
Before Aurora.
And after her.
I wasn’t about to add a third.
“No,” I said.
“N-no? Seriously?” She recoiled. “It’s not your decision to make, Noah.”
“Sure it is. Fifty percent of it, at least.”
“What part of you left me on the side of the road after blowing so hot and cold that I got ice burn, don’t you understand?”
And there it was.
The elephant in the room.
The one thing I never wanted to admit to her or anyone else.
But if she was going to trust me, if she was going to give me a chance to make this right, I had to give her something.
“My old man is an asshole.” A shuddering breath rolled through me. “The worst kind. He called me last night when we were at the movies. Timothy Holden never calls me. It threw me for a loop and dredged up some stuff I try hard to keep buried. I didn’t want you around the fallout, so I bailed.”
Her brows furrowed as she looked at me. I wondered if she knew that no one had ever looked at me the way she did.
Girls looked sure, but they didn’t look. They only saw Noah Holden, the hockey star. The fuckboy. The guy who didn’t date or get too close or take life too seriously.
They never looked past all that surface-level shit because they didn’t care.
But Aurora looked, and I was so fucking desperate to know what she saw.
“Say something,” I said, my voice raw with vulnerability.
I’d never put myself out there, not for anyone.
Only her.
Fuck.
I was in too deep. It was too quick. Too fucking complicated. But I didn’t care because the second she said she couldn’t do this anymore, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I wanted a shot at something real with her.
“Tell me about your dad.”
“I… fuck, Aurora. I can’t. Ask me anything but that. Please.” My voice cracked, the shaky foundations of my life in Lakeshore threatening to fracture open.
“Fine,” she conceded. “Where did you go after you left me?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “To a bar. Ordered a vodka on the rocks and told the guy to keep them coming.”
“You were pretty wasted.”
“Shortcake, I was toasted. But you looked after me.”
