RIDING AWAY

CHAPTER 14 - Goodbyes...

I was fast asleep that night when some noises in my room woke me up. I sat up and turned the light on. I rolled my eyes when I saw that they had been made by a very drunk Noah.

I was mad. No scratch that! I was livid.

What the heck was he doing in my room after the way he'd treated me today?!

"I think you got the wrong room..." I pointed out coldly when he began to undress in front of me.

He ignored me and I burst out laughing in spite of me when he caught his foot in his shorts and stumbled down the floor noisily.

"F*ck!" He groaned from the floor.

"Are you ok?" I asked him once I'd recovered from laughing my head off at his spectacular fall.

"Not thanks to you..." He mumbled before slowly standing back up and slipping under the covers next to me.

That was enough to shut me up and remind me of everything that had happened today but he looked pretty bad.

"I'm so drunk..." He mumbled, confirming my diagnosis. "Everything is spinning around me..."

I knew what he needed so I went to the kitchen to get him a tall glass of water and some crackers. On my way back, I also grabbed a couple of ibuprofens so he wouldn't feel too hungover the day after.

While I was gone, he'd sat up with his back to the headboard and he grimaced when he looked up from his lap.

"Still spinning?" I questioned, before handing him the crackers and the water. He nodded. "Drink and eat some of those. They're going to settle the contents of your stomach and stop the spinning..."

He stared at me long and hard before following my instructions.

"I'm sorry..." He muttered half an hour later, his voice still slurred. "You shouldn't have gone in, though..." And I understood he was talking about that morning in Papara.

"Noah, you've been polar cold since our talk about your Mom's arrival..." I pointed out with a raised eyebrow. "I honestly couldn't care less about how you feel about me getting some whitewater practice..."

"Turn the light off..." He sighed and slowly slid into a lying position.

I did as he asked me but didn't lie down next to him.

"I wouldn't choose you if my mother decided she didn't like you..." He admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. "It has nothing to do with the way I feel about you..." He added a few seconds later. "Our Mom is an all or nothing kind of person. If she decides she doesn't like somebody, the three of us have to stop seeing that person..."

"That's wrong..." I couldn't help but mutter.

"That's how she is..." He countered as if there was nothing he could do about it.

"But why do you think she won't like me?" I hated how vulnerable I sounded when I should have still been mad at him.

"It's not like that..." He hurried to say. "Sometimes she doesn't know the first thing about somebody but she blacklists them anyway..."

I frowned.

"So why do you accept it so easily?" I asked, my heart suddenly feeling heavy.

"Because along with my brothers, she's all I've got..." He replied and I had the feeling the heaviness of our conversation had sobered him up a bit because his voice didn't sound so slurred any more.

"She's all I've got..." I repeated his words in mind. It sounded so simple when put like that, and yet so much was at stake.

"Why did you open up in the first place, then, if you knew her arrival could potentially put an end to what we talked about last night? Why not wait and see how tomorrow would go?!"