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PROLOGUE
It happened on a Tuesday.
Noah was still in shock that he was actually at a university, let alone a university two thousand miles from home. There had been a time in his life when he didn’t think he was ever going to get out of Savannah. Not that he didn’t love it there, but sometimes—even with the ocean bracketing him on one side and the rest of the country on the other—he felt like he was surrounded by four walls that were constantly closing in.
He supposed that grief did that to a person. Not just losing his parents but the grief his mother brought with them when they moved to the States. It was fresh off the heels of his father dying, and she’d spent all her days clinging to Noah and his infant brother, making him swear in his little voice that he would never, ever leave her.
And then she left him.
It took him until high school to feel brave enough to step outside the bakery walls, and it took him until the last half of his senior year—damn near too late to even apply for school—to decide it was something he needed to do.
And in spite of the vicious look Adam had given him when he’d gotten his acceptance letter to school in California, he was happy. He was thrilled.
He felt free.
“Who is that?”
Noah looked up at the one single friend he made—his freshman roommate in the dorms. They didn’t live together anymore, but Chris had stuck around, which meant something to Noah. His anxiety had aged him into a crotchety, eighty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old’s body—complete with joint pain and an intolerance for people’s bad attitudes.
It also didn’t help that he was socially awkward and a raging virgin with zero hope that he’d ever rectify that because the only meetups he ever attended were services at the Hillel on Friday nights. It wasn’t pathetic—except well, it sort of was, and Noah was just ready to accept that about himself.
He’d die a virgin, working at his bubbe’s old bakery in Savannah, and he’d have to live vicariously through Adam, who’d made it his life’s mission to be everything Noah wasn’t.
Noah bit his lip, following Chris’s line of sight and eventually settled on a guy he most definitely recognized. His name was Adriano Moretti, and at first, Noah had known him as the TA in his ASL 4 class. And now, thanks to a viral email that had swept through their dorm building, he knew him as Sylent—the amateur porn star.
And the guy had the nerve to just be sitting there at the café like the entire world—including Noah—hadn’t seen him screwing some undergrad into literal oblivion.
Noah had watched the video like sixteen times before rutting into his sheets and coming all over them, and he’d only just managed to get himself in order and pretend he was asleep before his roommate had come home.
His ears felt hot, and he swallowed thickly. “Uh. Why?”
“I feel like I know him,” Chris said.
Noah bowed his head and stared down at his croissant. “He was in that video everyone was freaking out about.”
“Vide—oooh. Shit.”
Noah sighed. “Yeah.”
“Well, he keeps staring at you. Do you, like, know him?”
Noah’s heart gave a heavy thud against the inside of his chest, still refusing to look up. “There’s no way he’s staring at me. He’s the TA in my ASL class, but I’m a thousand percent sure he has no idea who I am.”
“Cool, cool, cool. Well, he’s coming over here right now, so…”
Noah had just enough time to look up before Adriano was literally at the table. ‘Hey,’ he signed, flicking the salute off the top of his forehead.
For whatever reason, Noah always forgot everything he’d ever learned about ASL when he stared into Adriano’s eyes. His hands trembled as he tried to pull himself together. Why did he have to be so awkward? ‘Hi. What’s up?’
Adriano’s smile was soft and warm. ‘I wanted to invite you to this Deaf event on campus. I know Prof P. wants everyone to attend one this semester, so I thought it might be fun.’
‘Will you be there?’ Noah asked, then promptly wanted to chop off his own hands.
But Adriano just smiled. ‘Yeah. Come find me tonight? It’s at Heller Hall. Nine o’clock.’
There was no way in hell Noah ever left his building after six, but he felt a sudden burst of courage. ‘Okay. I think I can make it.’
‘Cool. Save me a dance.’ And then he was gone.
