Your Sweet Talk Always Was A Bit Much

Your Sweet Talk Always Was A Bit Much Chapter 10

            Noah drove us far out, pulling off the highway, and then off the country road onto an unpaved trail. Just when I thought the car couldn’t go any farther between the trees and brambles, the small trail stopped and opened up to a clearing perched on top of a cliff. Noah killed the engine and sat there wordlessly for a moment before climbing out of the car. I followed, staring at the view from the top of this small cliff. You could see the city in the distance, but between here and there was untainted nature.

            I pushed myself up onto the hood of the car, drawing my knees up and wrapping my arms around my legs. “It’s beautiful,” I said, finally breaking the silence.

            “Yeah,” Noah said quietly. “I think I came here when I was in the Boy Scouts, and I just recently remembered it. At least it stands up to my memory, I was afraid it’d be one of those things that as a kid you remembered all wrong.”

            I didn’t have an answer, and I didn’t need to reply. We just sat there, not touching, not talking, looking out in front of one another.

            Finally Noah broke the silence, sighing. “I want you back, Mads,” he said quietly, but confidently.

            I let out a deep breath through my nose.  I didn’t answer right away; I didn’t even look at him for a long time. I just continued to sit there, thinking. “How do you see that working out?”

            “I’m home again. We won’t be going back on tour until we have a new album, which will be awhile, since we haven’t even settled on new material. I just have some publicity stuff to do. We can start again.”

           I shook my head, smiling a little. “I go to school, Noah. And you’ll go to parties that I can’t go to. And we’ll end up the same way we always do.”

            “I won’t go to parties without you,” Noah promised.

            I let out a laugh. “Yeah, right. You have to do your publicity stuff, that includes parties.”

            “Then I won’t drink a drop of alcohol unless you’re with me.”

            I sighed. “That’s a stupid idea that’s bound to fail.”

            “No,” Noah said fervently. “I promise. I’ll be better this time. I’ll try anything. If that’s not partying without you, or not drinking without you, or not drinking at all, I’ll do it.”

            “That’s treating the symptoms, not the disease.” Just because we fought and did stupid things when he drank didn’t mean that if he didn’t drink everything would be okay. There had to be something more fundamental that made us react like that to one another.

            “But it’s getting rid of the symptoms so we can work on the cure,” Noah pleaded.

            “It’s not that easy, Noah.”

            “Why not?”

            I looked back out over the cliff. “What would we tell the guys?” I asked, changing the subject slightly.

            “Who cares what we tell them or what they think? This is about us.”

            “You seemed to care a lot about what they thought, back there,” I said quietly, bringing us back to what got us got here away from people in the first place. Apparently the guys, including my brother, had thought Noah and I had been having sex when I was just fifteen, to Noah’s outrage.

            He sighed angrily. “I can’t believe them. I didn’t think my best friends had such a low opinion of me.”

            “Guess all our worries about them noticing when we did start having sex were unnecessary,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

            Noah didn’t seem to find it funny. “I know I fucked up badly. It kills me every day. I don’t want people thinking I treated you even worse than I actually did.”

            I sighed. “We’re not compatible, Noah. Both of us take things to heart. And we’re both probably too selfish to be a relationship with each other. We make each other crazy and that consumes us and makes it hard to break free. But maybe we have to.”

            “I can’t imagine ever being together will anyone else,” Noah said quietly.

            I nodded in agreement. “That’s probably mostly because I’m the only really serious girlfriend you’ve ever had.”

            “I had a couple girlfriends in high school before you,” he said.

            “Yes, but you were never one for real emotional commitment.”

            He thought about it for a moment. “I guess. You’re the only girl I’ve ever loved.”

            “Ditto. Not that you’re the only girl I’ve ever loved, but you know what I mean.”

            Noah’s seriousness was evident by the fact that he didn’t even smile at my words, let alone tease me, which he usually would have. “You’ve dated besides me though,” he said bitterly.

            “I didn’t love Lex,” I told him quietly.

            “But you were together with him.”

            “Yes, we dated. I’m not really sure how it happened, it just did. It didn’t really bother me, but that was basically as far as I was really involved.” I probably shouldn’t mention Blake as anything more than a friend, I decided.

            Noah let out a deep breath through his nose. “Well, as much as I hate the guy and hate the idea, I have to give it to him, he has good taste.”

            “But I don’t?”

            Noah snorted. “You’re still in love with me. Good taste, maybe; good judgment, no.” It was odd how we both were so confident that the other was in love with us. Most people suffered from insecurity or a lack of communication about things like that, but that was never our problem. We loved each other, we just hurt each other whenever we were around one another.

             We sat in silence just looking out over the hill for a while, until Noah spoke again. “I’m really sorry, Mads. I never want to hurt you, but somehow I always end up doing it anyway.”

             “You’re a bad drunk,” I said wearily. “And I’m impatient and oversensitive.”

             “I know I should stay away from you. If I really loved you like you deserve, I would stay away from you, to spare you. I just can’t, though.”

             I shrugged. “Like I said, we’re both too selfish to be together.”

            We sat in silence for a while longer, watching the sun begin to set. “What do we do now?”

            I took a deep breath. This was hard for me to say. “I don’t think we should get back together. I’m not taking it off the table, but I think we just need to spend some time around each other without… without screwing with each other’s heads. No manipulations, no fighting, no bullshit, no sex. Just as friends, without hating each other or seducing each other. What do you think?”

            He thought it over. “I guess that makes sense. As much as I just want to be back together, I’ll do whatever you want me to. We haven’t tried just being friends in a long time. Possibly ever,” he frowned, trying to remember if we’d stuck to just being friends since we’d first gotten together. We hadn’t. “So let’s try.” 

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Any suggestions for directions for this story? The ideas that I have written out only go so far and it's been a while since I really thought about this plot.