I smiled, standing up and walking over to him.
“Need help?” I offered.
“Yes,” he said, flashing me a slightly embarrassed smile. He held out his bowling-ball encased fingers, and I pulled at the ball gently.
“It’s definitely stuck there.”
“I think so too,” he said, looking at me worriedly with the green eyes I loved. In my dream, this is the moment I get butterflies. But nothing happened now.
I grabbed my smoothie from the bench and turned around, sucking on the straw.
“What are you doing?” Noah asked, frowning.
I gave one last slurp, ignoring the brainfreeze, and there was a gurgling sound from the cup. I snapped off the lip, and wiped my fingers on the watery residue on the bottom.
“Give me your hand.”
Hesitantly, he reached his bowling ball hand forwards. I took it, and slowly, I wiped my smoothied hands into the finger holes.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. This is when you were meant to feel electricity. “You’re fingers should come out…right about…now.”
His fingers slid out of the holes in one smooth moment, and I allowed myself a self-satisfactory grin. Noah flexed his smoothie-covered fingers, smirking. He wiped his hand on a napkin, handing me one as well.
“Thanks. That was really smart of you. How did you know what to do?”
“It happened to me all the time.”
***
The rest of the date carried without a hitch and it was fun. But that was it – just fun. Okay, I know I had no experience, but there had to be more to a relationship than this dry, aimless conversation – right? We wore out most topics of conversation, including our old teachers from Kindergarten, some movies we both liked, which pizza topping was the best, and so naturally we stumbled onto the touchy topic of Nate.
Noah turned the corner of some road I didn’t recognize, that lead out to the highway. His car was pretty cool, I’ll give him that. It wasn’t a sports car, but it was a sweet ride. I leaned back on the leather-covered chairs, laughing at Noah’s stories.
“…and then Nate just carried on the speech, like nothing was happening,” Noah said, chuckling himself. “Even though, behind him, everyone was laughing at him.”
“He really did that?” I asked, wiping my eyes. My body was fully turned to his. “Nate really shaved that on the back of his head?”
“What can I say? He’s my brother. He learnt from the best.”
I snorted derisively. “Then how come he’s such a douche, and you’re not?”
His smile was gone. His knuckles turned white as his grip on the steering wheel tightened. Noah’s eyes turned glassy and unfocused.
“He’ll grow out of it.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Right,” I said, shaking my head.
“Ade,” Noah hesitated, glancing at my face. He was sounding serious for the first time tonight. “There’s such about Nate that you don’t know. He wasn’t always like this, you know. But…something happened.”
“What are you talking about?”
Noah sighed, looking back to the road. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
