The Kissing Booth: Unavoidable

Chapter 2 - New Friends

Elle's POV

First thing Tuesday morning at work, I looked up Lexi Hartman in the company directory. I can see from her picture in the directory that Lexi is pretty with blond, wavy hair and looks kind of familiar, I'm sure I had walked by her in the halls. Looking closer at her picture, I wondered if I had seen her before in some of the pictures Noah was tagged in at college. I saw a bunch of pictures of him online with girls at a party right before we broke up and I would occasionally look him up online soon after we broke-up, until I made myself stop because it hurt to see him too much. He didn't post much himself, but you could usually find him tagged in pictures with pretty girls. I found out the department she worked in and decided I would stop by and say hi during my lunch. I was still relatively new to the company and wouldn't mind making a friend.

I stopped by Aaron's desk first. Aaron was a year ahead of me in school and had graduated last spring. He loved the company he was working for and helped me get my internship there. We became friends not long after I started college at DePaul. Noah and I were fighting and in the process of breaking-up then and Lee and I were having issues too. I literally ran right into him on my way to class one day, spilling everything we were both carrying to the ground. As we helped each other pick up our stuff, we realized we had a class together. We hit it off immediately, he reminded me a lot of Lee. He took me under his wing and showed me around and introduced me to all his friends. I'm not sure how I would have survived the break-up without him. I feel bad, thinking of all the times I cried on his shoulder.

"Hey, Elle! Ready for another work week after that weekend?"

"I'm not sure I'm fully recovered from that accidental Noah run in, but I have a test in Advanced Marketing and a ton of work to get caught up on here, so at least I'll be too busy to think much about it."

"Do you want to go out to lunch with me?"

"I'm actually going to stop by and meet the girl Noah mentioned at lunch."

"Well, good luck with that. I hope for your sake that she isn't one of Noah's normal girls." We had extensive discussions on the flight home of the type of girls that I thought Noah would have been "friends" with after we broke up. That is, until Aaron caught the eye of our cute flight attendant, then we had extensive discussions of how said flight attendant looked in his uniform.

"I'll catch up with you after work tonight." I told him as I walked away.

"Lexi?" I asked when I got to her cubicle.

"Yes, how can I help you?"

"My name is Elle Evans. I started in the Marketing Department a couple months ago. I ran into someone who I think you know over the weekend, back in LA, where I'm from. Do you know Noah Flynn?"

"Noah! Yes, I know Noah. He's a sweet guy. My fiancé Darren had a bunch of classes with him and they were in a study group together. Hey, I was just getting ready to head to the cafeteria to get lunch. Do you want to come with me?" We walked to the cafeteria and started to fill our plates from the salad bar. "How do you know Noah?"

I thought about it for a second and decided I didn't want to get into all the details with this girl I didn't know yet, "We went to high school together." That's the truth, just a very small part of the truth.

"And you saw him this weekend? Darren said he had moved back to LA and is working like crazy. That doesn't surprise me, all he did was study at Harvard, well study and work out. We had to drag him out with us, just to get him out of the library or the gym."

"What? That doesn't sound like the Noah I know. He was at all the parties back in high school, always looking for girls." Not to mention, all the pictures he was tagged in after our break-up.

Lexi laughed "He told us that once, that he was a total player in high school, and we all thought he was joking. Then, he had way too much to drink one night when we were all hanging out in our apartment and he started talking, like more than I had ever heard him talk before. He told us all about the love of his life that he lost and how much she had changed him. Shelly, I think her name was. He only talked about her once, but the look on his face when he talked about her, was completely different than I had seen him before."

"Really? Did he tell you why they broke up?" I wondered how Noah had explained the break-up to his friends. I'm not sure I even understood what happened.

Lexi continued, "He didn't get into the details. Like I said he was wasted that night. He just kept talking about how fast things went bad and they weren't supposed to happen that way and he couldn't believe he screwed it all up. Anyway, that was probably way more than you needed to know. I've just never forgotten how he looked that night when he was talking about her. So, tell me about yourself."

I thought it would be a good idea to move off the topic of Noah, at least for now. We spent the rest of lunch talking about how I ended up in Chicago and how much we both loved our jobs. I found out Lexi and Darren are engaged and getting married soon. Lexi invited me to out for drinks with some of the other girls from work on Friday night and I happily accepted. I had a lot of friends at school, but now that Dad and Brad had moved back to LA, I found myself feeling lonely sometimes.  Aaron is around, but his position requires a lot of travel, so we don't get to hang out all that often.  Lexi and I started to spend quite a bit of time together after that. I caught myself trying to ask more about Noah several times but thought better of it. Lexi was awesome and we had become great friends and didn't want to complicate things by having her learn about my history with Noah.

As the weeks went by, Lexi and I became close and many of our talks were about Lexi's wedding. Lexi and Darren were getting married the last weekend in October and I was happy when Lexi invited me.

After what she told me about Noah, I started to think a lot about the break-up, running our fights and conversations through my head. I already had hardly been able to keep Noah from my mind after seeing him at lunch over the weekend. Could things have happened differently than what I thought at the time Noah first talked about taking a break? Was there more to it that we never had a chance to talk about once I blocked him?