The Kissing Booth: Unavoidable

Chapter 14 - Long Distance Again

Elle's POV

Noah and I spent a long time talking in bed the night before he left Chicago. Neither one of us wanted to go to sleep, knowing it was our last night together for a few weeks. Our relationship was finally on the right track and I was dreading having him leave the next day.

Noah was running his fingers through my hair while we talked. I was absentmindedly tracing his ab muscles with my fingers. "There are only two weekends before you're coming back to LA, maybe I could come back to Chicago one of them."

"Noah, the tickets would be so expensive to buy at the last minute." I knew the money argument wouldn't work with Noah, he never worried about money, but I had grown up watching what I spent and I felt like I needed to at least point out the cost.

"Shelly, you know the cost doesn't matter, if we get to see each other. I hardly spend any of what I'm making right now, it would be worth it to see you."

"I would love to have you come here, but I have finals coming up before my break, I can't have you around distracting me." As much as I wanted to see him, I really wanted to do well on my finals.

"Yeah, you're right. Lee is going to be home early on break, so I'm supposed to hang out with him the weekend before you're back, I probably shouldn't bail on him. Plus, I need to find out what I have to do to get to our Chicago office."

"Yes, we definitely want to make that the priority! Maybe then we won't have to worry about long-distance after the holidays! And I'm glad you're going to spend some time with Lee."  I was disappointed that we weren't going to be able to be together until Christmas but I was hoping the time would go by quickly. We had gone almost two years without seeing each other, but now I'm sad at the thought that I won't see him for a few weeks.

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Our long weekend together went by far too quickly and I was sad when it was time to take Noah back to the airport on Tuesday night. We held each other as we said good-bye and promised that we would talk often and would see each other soon when I went back to LA for Christmas. Noah told me that he would talk to his boss the next day about the possibility of a temporary transfer to the Chicago office.

After he left, we ended up talking for hours on the phone and on Facetime every night and texted throughout the day. I felt like we had fallen back into our relationship where we had left if off two years ago. We were trying to make up for lost time. We talked about everything from what was going on day to day to the things we had missed over the last two years to our memories of growing up together. We also had many conversations about when to tell our families about our relationship. I felt a little guilty about not telling everyone at the beginning, but it was nice for us to be able to keep it to ourselves for a little while. We were going back and forth between deciding if we should tell them at Christmas or wait a little longer.

We had always spent a lot of time texting and talking on the phone together. At first in high school, we were trying to keep our relationship a secret, and it was the easiest way for us to communicate without being noticed. I remember the text I got from him the morning after the Kissing Booth. I did mean what I said last night, Shelly. Are you gonna stay mad at me? Or the call he gave me the afternoon after our night at the Hollywood sign. We talked for hours that day and every day after that where we couldn't sneak off to see each other. Once Noah left for Harvard, we relied on texting, calls, and FaceTime to keep up with each other, even though things got rough for a while while we learned to balance our relationships with school, sports, and our other activities.

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A couple weeks after Noah went back to LA, I had a call from my Dad. A call from him during the week is a little unusual.