Birthday Flowers | The Kissing Booth

45. Relief

A/N: Couldn't resist a brief time-jump back to Adam's party; apologies for any timeline confusion.

(Elle)

Noah's ex is giving me child rearing advice and there is no part of that sentence that would have made sense a year ago. I'm not actually sure it makes any sense today either, and yet here we are. Megan's really nice, and her stories about the summer she was a nanny for twins are hilarious and terrifying, but it's still just a little... weird. I know Noah said she'd seemed fine about everything when they talked at the last party, and I know they were long over before he reappeared in my life, but still. Weird.

Maybe part of the reason it's weird is that I've never had to do this before, to talk to someone Noah's been in an actual relationship with. Girls he's made out with? Sure. I've personally witnessed him kissing more of my high school classmates than I care to count, and I long ago blocked from memory which ones he did more than kiss. But that was different. The running joke then was that he'd never been on a second date, and while that might have been an exaggeration, it wasn't too far off. June claims he was trying to distract himself from his feelings for me, but I prefer to just... not think about it.

From what Abbi told me and comments Lee made, it sounds like Noah went back to those habits his last semester at Harvard, but he still never had an actual girlfriend then. Finding that out would have hurt more. A lot more, and that's why I'm glad I didn't know about Megan while it was going on. Even if Lee and Adam have both told me it never seemed serious, even if Noah himself has told me I'm why it never got serious, it was still clearly a lot more than a hookup. More than my own occasional forays into dating at UCLA.  For some short while, Noah was a little bit hers and that is not a pleasant thought at all.

And maybe that's the problem. Maybe I should admit that the very idea of Noah not being entirely mine, the idea that he was ever anyone else's, drives me crazy. Maybe that's why a very small but very loud part of my brain keeps looking for excuses to dislike Megan. Which is ridiculous, because she seems cool and she's been nothing but friendly to me. I tell myself to get over it, and after a few minutes it starts to work and I relax. I discover she rowed crew in college, and that she's got a little sister about Brad's age, and those are both safer topics, topics that don't force me to acknowledge that I absolutely cannot think of Noah as anything but mine. Now, then, and all the times in between, even when we weren't speaking. Because if I admit that, then I have to ask myself why I'm so reluctant to say so formally. And that is not a question I feel like addressing tonight.

~~~~

I've got a message from Dad waiting when my flight home to LA lands, cryptically telling me to look out for balloons. It's too cryptic, because I write it off as some incomprehensible Dad joke and head off to grab a cab before hearing my name yelled. There he is, holding a clutch of birthday balloons and a sign I'm pretty sure Brad made. 

"Dad? What are you doing here?"

"Did you not get my message?"

"Yeah, but... I thought it was one of your weird dad jokes." I admit.

"You didn't think look out for balloons meant you should look out for balloons?"

"Not really, no. That's not a thing people say. If you'd said Don't get in a cab, I'm here to pick you up, that would have been, you know, clearer."

"You used to enjoy surprises. Did you turn boring the minute you turned twenty-three?"

"Yes. Is this what getting old feels like? Is this how you got so stodgy?"