Page 64 of Finding Noah

“Meghan, please, we have more than enough food and not enough space for all the leftovers,” Mom begged. “We'd be happy to have you both.”

Still faking a smile, I coached my head into nodding encouragingly.

“Well, I can ask him,” Meg finally said, relenting with an uncertain quirk of her lips. “I'm sure he'll say yes though. We were just going to hang out at his place anyway.”

Hang out was code for fuck, and my plastered-on grin faltered a bit as I let go of a hot, angry sigh.

“Oh, great!” Mom exclaimed, beaming. “Dinner will be out around five.”

Yes, I thought as Meg thanked my mom graciously for the invitation. Great.

***

“Meg and Jack are here,” Dad said, sidling up to me in the living room's open doorway, a cup of soda in his hand.

“Fantastic,” I muttered sardonically, watching the room full of people chat and eat plates of food, balanced on their laps.

The crowd had grown significantly larger than what I had originally hoped for.

Mayor Fischer and her husband, Howard, had been invited at the last minute, along with Kylie O'Leary and Tess O'Dell, whose husbands were both currently on tour with their band, Devin O'Leary and the Blue Existence. Then Dad had bumped into Connor Jacobs and Kev Scott and asked if their families would want to stop by, as he put it, “to get some of this food out of my freakin’ house.”

And despite having way more people surrounding me than I cared to socialize with, along with enough kids to fill a Boy Scout troop, I didn’t mind. Actually, it was nice to feel appreciated and to have all these people show up with congratulations for me. It was something I wouldn't have expected years ago, when I was spending every day fucking up and goofing off, and to have it now was almost enough to move me to tears.

But I'd been hoping all night that Meg wouldn't come.

I had hoped she'd be too busy, that Jack would insist on staying home to screw around instead. And as much as I wanted to barf at the thought of his hands on her, seeing it with my own eyes was all the more terrible, and knowing now that they were here made me want to teleport straight to my room or another fucking planet entirely, just to avoid them both on the way up the stairs.

“She's a little older than you,” Dad muttered inconspicuously from behind the brim of his cup.

“She's twenty-six,” I replied, unsure of what he was getting at … and why.

“And you're twenty-one.”

“Okay?” I glanced at him from the corner of my eye.

“Just sayin', she might not be into younger guys. Especially ones she's known since they were kids.”

I furrowed my brow and turned to him. “Who says I want her to be into me?”

Dad plastered a you've gotta be kidding me look on his face as he lowered his cup. His eyes met mine. “Next time you're looking at her, I'm gonna take a picture. Then I'll show you, and you'll see what everyone else sees.”

My defenses dropped as my face fell. “What?”

“Bud”—Dad snorted, shaking his head—“you've had it bad for her for a long time, and we all fuckin' know it. And it's cool. I mean, it's an innocent crush, and she's a nice girl. But she's happy with this guy, and I'm just kinda wondering if it's time you maybe … I dunno … find another nice girl.”

I opened my mouth to speak, to lie and say I didn't have it that bad, when the very nice girl of my dreams appeared behind us. Along with the guy she was currently happy with.

“Hi!” Meg exclaimed. “There's a lot of people here.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “My parents went a little crazy, inviting people at the last minute.”

“I feel like the whole town is stuffed between a few rooms,” she said with a laugh. “I walked in and felt like Norm on Cheers—you know what I’m talking about? My grandma watches that show all the time. Anyway, I came in and everyone was like, 'Meg!' “

I chuckled, though I had never seen an episode of Cheers and didn't have any clue who this Norm she’d mentioned was. But I got the gist of what she was saying—she was popular around here, and everyone knew her name—and I replied, “That's what happens when an entire town loves you.”

She closed her lips and offered a shy smile, and Dad jabbed his elbow into my ribs, and Jack cleared his throat and raised his chin a bit higher, and I wondered what the hell I had said to set everyone so off-kilter.

“We all fuckin’ see it,” Dad had said.