by Becky Wicks
'You should do the Shimmer interview,' I say without even thinking. 'ASAP. And you know what? I have photos that no one else has of Noah Lockton, right? I have photos of Noah Lockton that these assholes will never have. We can make you look like the most awesome human on the planet.'
He lifts a hand to his stubbled chin as a smile lifts one side of his perfect mouth. The idea is already making my heart beat faster. This could be great for both of us. Mostly for Noah, obviously, but also because I seriously do have material that would cancel out anything the paps could ever take. I have over fifteen years' worth of photos of Noah Lockton.
'If it's an image they want, we'll give them an image,' I say. 'What about the time we worked with the homeless people? And the charity gigs you played...'
'You're a genius,’ he grins, flashing me the smile that still makes my world turn and something deep inside me start fizzing like a pill in a can of Sprite. 'I'll talk to Denzel.'
Poultrygeist is worse than it sounds. We hooked the laptop up to the giant TV so the evil chicken is running about, at least fifty inches wide. I'm half watching it, half ignoring Cooper's name flashing up on my phone every ten minutes, half planning out how I'm going to pitch this exclusive to Marianne on Monday. But roughly forty minutes in and after two more beers to calm him down, Noah falls asleep with his head on my shoulder.
I try not to move. I don't want him to move. The familiar smell of him, the thickness of his big, warm arm against mine, the feel of his soft breath on my bare skin makes my throat go dry. When he lets out a small sigh and snuggles down with his head on my lap I freeze even more.
All I can do is look at him; at his tattoo, the hole in his ear where he got it pierced; at his angular jaw and cheekbones. I can't actually believe how good-looking he's gotten. I mean, I always saw it, obviously, but now that his image is starting to flicker on a million surfaces whenever I walk around the city, it's kind of hard not to notice just how hot he is. And how much harder it is for me to be normal.
My fingers twist in his curly hair. Noah Lockton scares me without even knowing it. It started when I was eleven, up in the tree house, when he dangled that stupid strawberry lace in my face and snuck up on me until his actual lips were on mine and all the breath was leaving my body.
'Surely you know what a kiss is?'
I remember the walls closing in, the heat of the summer on his skin, the way his shirt was open like a tent around me as he leaned over my body. My sundress was rising around my thighs. I was screaming inside for him to kiss me, but at the same time I knew he shouldn't. We weren't Peter and Wendy, we were Noah and Chloe. We were best friends, forever. We were everything.
I turned my head, swallowed hard, almost choked on the lace. When I finally dared meet his eyes it felt like I was seeing him in a whole other light. With that one movement - him crawling towards me, pushing me backwards on the mattress -- and with him just messing about, playing his part, being Peter Pan, it was like the Noah I'd always known had been stolen by a frickin' fairy and a new one had taken his place. We should have chopped the tree house down right then and there.
'What's going on?'
My eyes flash open and I realize I must have drifted off for a second. I didn't hear Jayde come in but she's standing here now to the side of the couch, looking at Noah's head in my lap and my hand still in his hair. His ripped, strong arm has twisted around my waist and his nose is a millimeter from my crotch. I shift, causing him to stir, but he just tightens his arm around me like a python.
'Hey, Jayde, I didn't hear you come in...'
'Clearly not,' she retorts and before I can even move she's throwing her purse on the floor, shaking Noah by the head, grabbing his hair.
'Hey!' I shout, pushing her hand away. 'Leave him, Jayde, he's sleeping!'
'Noah, get up!' she orders, ignoring me.
'What're you doing?' Noah sits up groggily, detangling himself from me.
Jayde's hands are on her hips. 'What are you doing? Do you make a habit of passing out on other girls' laps? Couldn't you have gone to bed?'
He blinks at her, like he has no clue what she's talking about. He probably doesn't. 'Jayde...'
'We're watching a movie!' I say, pointing at the red-horned chicken now spewing green stuff over someone's face, but she's not looking.
'You don't answer my calls all day, you don't even call me back and I come home to find you snuggled up to her!'
'I have a name,' I say. My fists are clenched now. My arm is still touching Noah's. I get up, go to turn the TV off, yank the cord out of my laptop. I can feel her eyes stabbing my back the whole time.
'It's been a shitty day, Jayde. I don't need this,' Noah tells her, standing up, 'and neither does Chloe, I'm sure.'
'Oh, that's right,' she spits, 'whatever Chloe needs is your priority, I forgot. Fucking hell. You know what? I've been on my feet since five o'clock, I don't need this either.' She turns on her heel and stomps up the stairs. We watch her go. Noah shrugs at me and I do the same, but we both know she kind of has a right to be pissed.
'Think I'll go to bed,' he tells me wearily as a door slams above us.
'You probably should,' I say.
But he stands there for a second, looking straight into my eyes like he wants to say something else. My heartbeat's increased and I feel a bit exposed in my thin camisole and bare feet. I'm eleven again and I've just grown breasts and Noah's looking at me like I'm an alien. No. We're back in the tree house. I'm hot. I need air. I hug the laptop against me and he nods, as if finalizing something in his head. Then he turns and heads up the stairs.
I'm too wound up to go to bed.
I walk to the window, slide open the door and step out onto the balcony. The stars are barely visible thanks to all the streetlights, but the Manhattan night is cool and buzzy and feels good settling on my skin. I've only been outside a few minutes, only just brought my laptop out and put it on the table when I hear footsteps behind me. Jayde's standing in the doorway holding a fresh glass of water.
'Noah tells me there's nothing going on,' she says. 'Chloe, you have to tell me. Has anything ever happened between you two?'
'Don't be stupid,' I snap.
'Because you look...' she pauses, '...close. Not even a kiss? Ever?'
'Never.'
The lies come out of me easily. She's standing here all tiny and blonde and suspicious in one of Noah's shirts that kind of makes me feel sicker and I know I should just keep on lying. But I press my lips together, force myself to meet her eyes.
Eventually she sighs in annoyance and turns on her heel, but my mind is spinning memories now like a washing machine.
13
I'd just turned seventeen. I'd been photographing a tea-party at Alyssa's house for her kid sister and a bunch of rambunctious five-year-olds and the hot summer sun had burnt my bare shoulders, making me wince every time the camera case rubbed against my skin. I remember the call coming through on my phone, the word 'Commander' flashing up on the screen.
'Chloe, come home,' she sniffed when I picked up.
'Mom? What's wrong?'
Alyssa was shooting me questioning looks as her sister bashed her about the knees with a beach towel and I remember thinking maybe my mom had been watching Oprah re-runs, or missed a trick on her cross-stitch and sewed her fingers together, or anything other than what she said next.
'It's your dad, Chloe.'
I ran without looking back. I ran so fast my camera strap pretty much rubbed my red skin raw across one shoulder and when I got to my house, Noah's mom Anne was already there and the Commander, powerless, was sitting crumpled on the couch. Scrunched-up tissues were scattered around her. An untouched mug of tea was on the coffee table next to a half stitched picture of Bambi. Her face was twitching and red and her eyes were wet, pink pools as she looked up at me. My camera fell to the floor. I knew. I just knew.
'His heart hurt, baby,' she sobbed, breaking down again, collapsing against Anne. Both of them were crying. The room was spinning. I
don't remember making it upstairs but I must have done, somehow. I slumped against my bed and just sat there between two giant swirls on the cream carpet, falling apart.
He's dead. He's dead. He's dead because his heart hurt.
It didn't make sense. It made no sense that one minute he was here, and the next he wasn't. My dad. My amazing dad who let us help him build the tree house; who took me to Disney World because I dreamed of becoming Princess Jasmine; who loved Noah and Jack like his own adopted sons because he never had one. They only had me.
Everything hurts for me too, now. I could die like this.
It turned out my dad had an aortic aneurysm. He was telling the cab driver whereabouts in Denver to go for his next appointment and the next minute he was slumped in the back because his heart hurt and no one even knew it was breaking down. I didn't know that at the time, of course. I never moved from the carpet as the swirls on it blurred into one before me. We used to pretend they were islands. Noah wasn't allowed on mine and I wasn't allowed on his.
My cellphone was ringing off the hook. Cooper, then Noah. Anne came upstairs, tried to get me out of my room but I couldn't face it. Mom would need me later, when I was stronger. Eventually I caved in, reached for the phone. He picked up straight away. The only one I wanted.
'Are you OK?'
'Can you come now?'
'I'm at the airport, Chloe, hold on, OK?'
Hurry up, I thought as I heard the chaos of JFK in the background. Hurry up before my heart breaks and my head explodes and I can't ever get up from the floor.
I was in the tree house by the time he arrived. It was well after midnight but the feeling of my room closing in around me and the sound of my mom sobbing downstairs had me fleeing into the night and scrambling up the ladder. I uncovered a bottle of vodka Noah hid up there, unscrewed the cap and swigged and swigged and swigged until I couldn't see straight. I'd never drunk a drop until that night.
I remember hearing Jack's SUV leaving to go get him. I remember hugging my knees in the glow of the stick-on stars, silently counting the ninety minutes of nothingness it took to bring Noah back to me from Denver. My lungs were heaving with every creak of the ladder as he climbed up. My throat was burning.
Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.
'Chloe?'
I could only just make out his face through my tears; his crazy hair, the red of his T-shirt. I heard his voice breaking as he uttered my name. He scrambled towards me, pulled me against him on the mattress, crumpling up the sheets as we fell into each other. My arms flung themselves around his shoulders and as he squeezed me, burying his face in my neck, dropping kisses everywhere he could reach, it stung and I remembered the sunburn.
I liked it - the pain - how that and the vodka sent my mind elsewhere for a moment, away from the fact that my dad was gone.
'Oh, baby, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,' he said, over and over as his fingers stroked the tears from my cheeks; nineteen-year-old Noah who'd barely ever touched me. Apart from the almost-kiss when I was eleven, he'd barely held my hand unless I'd reached for his first. He'd beat up other boys for me. He'd bash their cheeks blue if they touched me, but he never did.
'I don't know what to do,' I slurred as he muttered sssh, sssh, and when he met my eyes I saw his were watering like mine, carrying the moonlight in from over the mountains behind us. It calmed me for a millisecond but not much more.
'Chloe, we have to go back to the house,' he told me, but I couldn't move. 'I'll go, I'll get some more blankets,' he said and when he went to pull away, a fear I'd never felt before made me clutch for both his arms.
'Don't leave me again,' I said, scrambling across the mattress. 'Noah, please, I need you.'
'OK, it's OK!' He fell back down then, took my shoulders, then my hands and I watched his biceps tighten; the black bottom half of his guitar tattoo. The colors on it blurred the more my eyes clouded over. 'I'll stay with you, Pan, I'm not going anywhere, I promise.'
His lips were so close, his breathing ragged like mine. He swiped at his eyes and reached for me again and maybe it was the vodka, maybe it was the pain but I couldn't help my actions; I literally couldn't stop the insanity before it started. I crushed my lips to his and in a second our hot tears were a salty sheen on our cheeks and noses and we were falling horizontally onto the mattress, into a different world.
His breathing was heavy as he kissed me desperately, circling my tongue with his, pushing deeper, then biting my lip, responding to my every move. All the while he was crying with me as I struggled to stay in the moment. His muscles rippled in his back as I scratched my nails across his hot flesh and tore at his shirt, needing more of him. He smelled of airplane and tasted of gum. He clutched at the belt on my denim shorts, yanked the buckle undone.
'I need you,' I begged him as his lips found mine again and I helped him shake off my shorts. I did the same for his jeans, knocking the wall so hard in my hurry that glow-stars fell to the floor like a meteor shower. In seconds, more of our bare flesh was touching than ever before and even my heart, pounding its way out of my heaving chest wanted to be naked.
He broke our kiss. 'You're drunk,'
'I don't care!'
He didn't take off my underwear. He sat up, pulled me on top of him so I was straddling his solid waist, grabbed my head in his big hands for a moment and searched my face. I could see he was asking me if we should stop. Years passed as I saw us playing, laughing, singing, fighting and now... what the fuck? A lightning bolt of reality struck my brain but the sparks shot off into my blood before anything made too much sense. I was on fire, suddenly. I needed to keep burning else I'd die, I knew it.
I pulled his head to me with one hand, reached down for him beneath me with the other. I found him so hard for me that I gasped and as he kissed me with a fever I gripped him tighter with my legs until my crotch was pressed against him; until the only thing rooting me to reality was the feel of this brand new part of Noah.
Touching each other everywhere, drinking each other in, rolling with our limbs entwined it felt like we were riding some crazy fucked up fairground ride. When he let out a groan, pulled the fabric of my underwear aside roughly and pushed hard into me, I clutched him tight with all the strength I had left.
'Chloe,' he cried out, grabbing my hips, my sunburnt shoulders, moaning as I sped up and slowed down and sped up again, pulling him harder and further into me with every thrust. I couldn't stay steady. The knowledge of what just happened in my world kept hitting me like waves of a tsunami. Again and again they blasted through me till all the pieces of myself were driftwood in my body and the only thing I could do to feel whole was to keep on crashing into Noah.
When he came, he came so hard I could feel his orgasm jolting through me, too, almost becoming my own. I buried myself in the feeling, the sweet surrender to nothingness that saw the horror of the day fly out of the tree house for a nanosecond, leaving only love. Only us.
Only us.
14
Noah
'This, mate, is fucking brilliant,' Denzel shouts, blasting through the studio doors like a cannon. He waves Shimmer magazine around the room and my producer, the infamous Mickey Warrington stops what he's doing on the mixing deck to look up.
'I gotta say, I was dubious when you asked for this Lockton, but you've hooked up a fucking winner here. I'm already getting calls from people wanting more info on your soup kitchen stunt -- I hear an army of fans have gone down there in your name and asked to help. You're inspiring people, mate. You're inspiring people like some... some sodding saint! This is fucking gold. Good job. Love this photo too, by the way.'
Denzel slams the mag down on the desk, jabs a finger on a shot of me holding out a bowl full of watery tomato broth at a crinkled homeless man. He's grinning and waving a spoon like I just force-fed him laughing gas or something. Chloe shot it perfectly, even though I look like a douche. My hair's so long it's covering my shoulders and I look skinnier than I ever remember being. Thank Christ I discover
ed the gym. And scissors.
'This Chloe chick, that's her name right? She's a whiz with the old camera,' Denzel muses as Mickey reaches for the mag and scans it, twizzling his beard between two fingers. 'It's like she's been papping your entire life, mate, did you know you were gonna need these shots some day, or what?'
'She's just really talented. We've done a lot of stuff together,' I say, and he winks at me.
'Say no more.'
'Nice work,' Mickey agrees. 'Retarded kids, too. Nice touch.'
'They're not retarded,' I correct him. Jesus. The photo they're looking at now shows me playing guitar and singing for a crowd of kids. It was a gig at the Anchor Centre for Blind Children in Denver. Think I was about seventeen. The headline reads Noah Lockton -- an angel in disguise!
They went all out for the exclusive. It's a four-page spread. There's even a shot of me with my arm around aunt Madeline, attempting to do the eye-high kick she mastered when she was younger. Rockette to Lockette is the caption below us and I smile at the photo of her ageing face. I told the mag all about her -- my famous, exciting aunt. How much she inspired me, made me long to live permanently in New York and be a star, like her.
I need to go visit her soon. I should take Chloe. Mads loves Chloe. Fuck, everyone loves Chloe, even Denzel now. And everyone at Shimmer thinks the sun shines out of her perfect ass.
Marianne, the editor, and the features writer who had on earrings made from fake plastic pineapples fed me soda and Pringles and more obnoxious colored candy than I could take when I went into the offices to talk to them. I spent almost an hour in a room with so many psychedelic patterns and photos of a polished Justin Bieber in it, I thought they'd slipped acid into my Coca Cola. They kissed my ass while Chloe rolled her eyes behind their backs. Teen mags are fucking weird.
Denzel's folding his arms now, smiling mysteriously. 'The midweek chart positions just came in by the way,' he says. 'Congrats. You're number two.'
My stomach knots for a moment. In the same second I'm thinking two things. The first is holy shit, I have a record in the charts, and it's number two! The second is holy shit, just number two? I thought it was tipped to go in at number one?'