“You’re too young,” my mother said to him, and the irony of her words was not lost on me. “You should not even be thinking of marriage.”
“I’m not thinking of it. And I’m not not thinking of it. When I meet the right girl, I’ll be down on one knee.”
Jewel rolled her eyes. “You always make me laugh, Hayes.”
“I’m not trying to be funny,” he said, but he was smiling too. He could egg her on in a way that no one else could, probably because their relationship was so clear. There were lines, they had roles, and everything was neat and orderly. She did enjoy dispensing relationship advice to him, though. She seemed unable to resist tinkering in the romantic life of a young, single, eligible New York bachelor.
“Okay, Mr. Not Funny Man. Why did you end it with Mica then, if not for her clinginess?”
“Let me get this straight. Clinginess is the only reason I should have ended things with Mica?”
“You admit she was clingy?” Jewel countered. The agent and the writer—both used words as weapons.
Noah shook his head. “Mica was a fine girl. But marriage never came up for either one of us, because we had different ideas of what makes a relationship work.”
“What makes a relationship work then? I’m dying to know,” Jewel said. “Shared interests? Common beliefs? A little humor?”
“That, and someone who knows all the lyrics to Chess,” he said with a wry smile, and I forced myself to hide a crazy grin. I’d told myself my crush was over. I’d almost tricked myself into believing it. But inside I thrilled at the words. I knew all the lyrics to Chess.
Jewel laughed loudly at his remark. “Oh, you win. You win this round. You and your show tunes. You know Kennedy is a Broadway baby. She loves all musicals,” my mom said on the way to the kitchen to refill her wine.
When she reached the other room, I look up at him, meeting his inky-blue gaze. “Now at least I know. I know him well,” I said in the smallest voice, almost under my breath.
Noah straightened his spine and stared at me with wide eyes. I gripped my pencil so hard I thought it would break.
“What did you just say?” he asked softly.
I shook my head. I wouldn’t repeat the lyrics from the bittersweet ballad from Chess. I couldn’t admit that much. But I could let on that I shared the same interests. “It played for two months in 1988,” I said, and my heart was in my throat. My insides were spinning. I was sure my feelings were tattooed across my face, living, breathing ink marks with arms reaching for him.
“And hasn’t been revived since, much to the chagrin of musical theater diehards everywhere,” he said, and his eyes sparkled.
“Yes. Much to the chagrin.”
I returned to the equations on the page, but they were drunk lines in front of me, weaving back and forth. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t speak. It was too much intoxication for me.
Noah
Something about the way she said those lines from Chess sent the temperature in me ticking up a few degrees.
They were the match that lit the flame. They made me see all the possibilities of us.
It was the sweetness in her voice, with a sliver of hopefulness too. I wanted to be unaffected by it, to let it slide right off me, like a thousand comments about a thousand things do every day. But she wasn’t like my every day business life. She was the beautiful young woman I couldn’t take my eyes off of whenever I went to Jewel’s home. I knew better; of course I knew better. But tell that to the stupid heart that was banging around in my chest. All from the simple fact that we liked the same obscure musical.
My kryptonite.
I couldn’t resist tossing back the next line. Low, under my breath. Jewel couldn’t hear me. She was in the kitchen and I was in her dining room, playing with fire, but ready to be burned.
“Wasn’t it good?”
She looked back up from her paper. I watched her swallow. Nervously. I did the same. I was dancing near some kind of line in the sand. “Wasn’t he fine?” she said, sharing another line.
“Isn’t it madness?” I said softly, going next.
She exhaled, and her cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink. Then, in a whisper, she said the line that followed: “That he can’t be mine.”
My heart pattered far too much in my chest then, and I was sure I should lock it up and tell it to never act that way around a seventeen-year-old girl again. But I didn’t do that. Because she wasn’t false or fake or angling for something. She was, quite simply, the girl who liked the same things I did.
A few days later, I bumped into her in Central Park on my morning run. I wasn’t looking for her, but I wasn’t unhappy to see her when she rode past me on her bike at dawn and called out my name as I ran. She squealed to a stop, and I pulled up short too.
“Who would have thought you owned something besides pants and perfect business shirts,” she said, looking me up and down, her green eyes hooking me.
I tried to keep it light. Keep it safe. “Can’t burn off all those cookies wearing a dress shirt,” I joked.
“But of course,” she said, then pressed her sneakers back into the pedals. “I should make more cookies for you.”
Cookies. She was talking about cookies. But she was also talking about more. She was residing in that place where we weren’t agent and client’s daughter. Where we were friends, where we were a guy and a girl. I let myself forget who she was. I let the ties that bound us fade away.