The Beach House (a The Kissing Booth novella)

10: The Beach House

            “I was blushing,” I said, “because I’d embarrassed myself epically in front of a whole load of people.”

            “Yeah, I get that now,” he said. I stole a glance at him out of the corner of my eye; he looked so frustrated with himself, like he was still mad but didn’t want to be, like he didn’t want to talk about any of this stuff but wanted to tell me.

            “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

            I pushed my glass back a few centimeters. I leaned back a bit on my stool. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for. Of course I’d forgive Noah, I always did.

            “Elle?”

            “It’s fine,” I said, turning my head enough to give him a half-smile. “It’s okay. Forget it.”

            “Elle,” he said again, this time sighing.

            “What? I said, it’s fine.”

            “No it’s not. If it was fine you’d be smiling, or you’d be teasing me about something that involved the word ‘cute’.”

            Okay, so that much was true.

            “It’s fine,” I repeated.

            He sighed again. “Elle, come on, I don’t know what else to say. I said I was sorry. I explained why I was mad in the first place. I know I’m an idiot. C’mon, please? Look, I don’t want to go see Harvard and leave you here really mad at me. It’s gonna suck. You can be mad at me later. At least give me today.”

            I could have just let my resolve melt away entirely at that. Noah wasn’t the kind of guy who liked expressing his emotions, so you knew for certain when he did say something sentimental like that, he was being honest. And it was so, so adorable!

            But I was still mad.

            But he had a good point.

            But he’d been such a jerk.

            There were so many conflicting thoughts running through my head right then. He was right about one thing though – how stupid it was to spend this last day at the beach house being mad at each other. I had plenty of time to be mad at him when we were both back home.

            Then again, we only really had this summer. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what our plans were for the end of the summer, so it’d be stupid to spend time when we were back home being mad at each other then, too, but…

            I really, really had to work on making my brain shut up.

            Aloud, I said, “Fine. But this doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.”

            He grinned. It was mostly that rare, infectious smile that showed his dimple and that I loved so much, but there was a hint of his trademark smirk to it, too. Before I knew it, a smile was on my face too.

            “So what do you want to do now?” he asked. “We have all day.”

            My smile grew wider. “I’m sure I can think of something…”

            He seemed almost surprised when I went and bought eight sandcastle-shaped buckets and three plastic spades so we could join the sandcastle building competition. Lee was just as childishly excited about it as I was. And although Noah didn’t show it, I had a pretty good feeling he was enjoying it too.