Nochelle - Our Stories

D E N T I S T

~Season 7~ Hunger Games Spoilers ig

The first thing Richelle remembers about Noah after she has wisdom tooth surgery is that he's uncharacteristically good at catching glasses of milk. And, yes, it's a strange fact to remember about her best friend, but there's something about his cocky smirk that makes Richelle want to become this clumsy slob that he can save from spilling drinks everyday.

She's far too type-A to change her whole personality for that (it was very unrealistic), and now her dentist knew all of this as well.
She had absolutely no filter, this was not going to end well.

Whilst Michelle settled in LA, the rest of their family were staying with her, leaving the house empty—bar Richelle—and absolutely nobody to watch over her in her post-op drunken state.

Enter, Noah.

All of her other friends were busy with dance and getting ready for Nationals and Jacquie had just moved away, so he was her only option. (Plus, he was the only one who she would actually let see her looking like a chipmunk.)

"And you know, he's so nice, and confident, and those reflexes... there's just something about them, I can't stop watching! And, by the way, he has really nice hands. Ugh."

"You must really like this guy, huh?" the dentist asks, adjusting the ice packs around her jaw.

"Course!" Richelle blurts, face half numb from the anaesthetic. She can't feel her lips or chin very well, prodding at them to test her theory. "Where is he?"

As the dentist eases Richelle into a wheelchair, she hears someone laugh from behind her.

"Right here. You ready to go?" Noah jingles his keys between his fingers before wheeling Richelle outside and helping her into the car. She's quick to speak as she climbs in, still clutching her bag of instructions and goodies.

"No, no, I wanna drive!" Richelle insists, words slurred and she reaches from the passenger seat to the worn steering wheel. Her limbs are gangly, and she tilts forward as she attempts to take control.

Noah raises an eyebrow. "No offense, but we could actually die if you do that. Plus, even in your sober state, I'm a better driver than you, you barely passed the test."

"Uh-uh! Not true!"

He laughs. "I figured you might want something to distract yourself with, so I brought you one of my mum's dusty books."

Richelle elbows him. "Are you hating on books? Just because you have the reading age of my six-year-old brother."

"Nope," Noah says, turning the keys in the ignition as he hands Richelle the dusty book jacket. "It's just that you have a lot of hobbies in common with my mum. Wonder why."

Richelle falls asleep with her cheek against the car window within fifteen minutes, although the ice packs circled around her head help cushion the blow. Hearing someone who just had dental surgery snore is something else, Noah thinks. He deftly avoids all the potholes on the way home, swerving lane to lane. Richelle only wakes up when they arrive at her house, slinging an arm over Noah's shoulder as she makes her way up the drive.

"Thanks," she whispers, making a crooked beeline for her bedroom.

"Anytime."

Noah laughs once he flips through the book, sitting down in the Nolet's kitchen. It'd fallen in the crack between the shotgun and the car door, and most of the pages are dog-eared: any page that was divisible by seven in fact. No wonder.

Richelle's his no-nonsense best friend, normally as serious as they come, and she's basically high as a kite. It's kind of like seeing her drunk, not that she's ever actually been drunk (her body's a temple), so this is probably as close as he's ever going to get to seeing it in the flesh—sleepy and without a filter over her speech. Every thought she has is coming out, which he guesses is why she was murmuring something about milk on the way home.