I accomplished it, a whoosh noise happened telling me it was sent, the phone sounded in my hand, making both Josette and I grin at each other like schoolgirls, but my grin deepened when I saw Noc’s name above a little bubble that was underneath my little bubble.
Be right there, sugarlips, it decreed.
Ah Noc.
My Noc.
A goodness I earned.
The best there could be.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, I was not thinking such kind thoughts about Noc.
I was grinding my teeth.
This was because he was laughing his arse off, doing it carrying me to his vehicle, with me wearing brightly-colored, flimsy, weightless pieces of nothing that looked like the footwear Josette had been wearing since she donned this-world clothes, except much less substantial.
I had been shuffling along, rather gracelessly (to my utter despair), holding my shoes and my bag, until Noc took pity on me and swung me up in his arms.
He didn’t take that much pity considering he did it as I’d mentioned, laughing his arse off.
Apparently, after a pedicure was complete, you either had to wait some time for your varnish to dry or you were to arrive in footwear that would not demolish the efforts your pedicure person put into making your feet look better than they ever had. Something you’d paid no mind to all your life. Something that seemed, from the moment the last brush of varnish went on, crucial to existence.
This bringing of the appropriate footwear being something I did not do.
Noc walked me out to his car, opened the door while still carrying me, and ducking us carefully to avoid slamming us both into the roof, he deposited me in my seat.
Through this, I had ignored his existence, a difficult task considering he was carrying me, but one I pulled off with aplomb (in my estimation), until that moment when I could no longer do so since he placed his hand on my jaw and forced me to look at him.
He was still laughing.
This meant I began glaring.
“We’ll get you some real flip-flops for the next time you go to a spa,” he said, continuing not to put the slightest effort into quelling his mirth.
“I’ve been in your world not but two days and I still can say with some authority I am not a flip-flop person,” I announced haughtily.
His waning laughter burst forth yet again and he felt, for some reason, the need to kiss me even while allowing the full force of his hilarity to continue to flow.
This he did.
When he ended it, he was only chuckling.
Regardless of the fact that his laughter tasted lovely on my tongue, I was still glaring.
He took in my glare and that made him no less amused.
“Will it help if I say you look cute, even shuffling like an invalid?” he asked.
“No…it…will…not,” I snapped.
Noc. Still no less amused.
“How about if I tell you, three hours ago, someone asked me if you could get any more beautiful, I woulda said it was an impossibility, but I’ve been proved wrong?”
“How about if I tell you, if you remove yourself from my vicinity, perhaps I’ll no longer wish to kick you somewhere unpleasant?” I returned with false sweetness.
“Is it vanity, baby?” he queried, now only grinning, which was no less annoying, “Or pride?” he finished.
“It’s both,” I admitted the complete truth without embarrassment.
He shook his head, the grin remaining in place. “That’s my girl. Someone says you’re cute and beautiful, you get pissed. Or in this instance, stay pissed. Someone asks if you’re vain or prideful, you claim that without a second’s delay.”
“It’s true.”
“It is, I’m sure,” he returned. “But you’re still cute and you’re definitely fuckin’ beautiful.”
I decided that was a good time to share something important.
This I did.
“I think, with this conversation, that it’s clear that even you, who I hold dear, cannot cajole me out of a pique by saying lovely things. That even for you, my piques, as they always have been, run deep and are lasting and require me having time to fume before they naturally die away. So I think that you need to kiss me, but do it swiftly, then exit my vicinity, drive me and Josette somewhere in order to feed us and do that immediately.”
“Even me,” he said instead of doing as I asked.
“Even you,” I confirmed.
“Even me.”
Something in the way he said that pulled me out of my irritation and fully into that moment.
When I arrived at that moment I saw that Noc held no humor. He was looking into my eyes, his shining with a light so beautiful, my soul lit in such a way it felt it would never go dark again.
“Even you,” I whispered.
He held my gaze and worlds could have collided. Millennium could have passed. Stars could have fallen from the sky.
Nothing could have intruded on our moment.
After some time (I fear, rudely, a good deal of it), a subtle clearing of her throat brought our attention to the fact that Josette (wearing flip-flops and having some experience in them so she had no issues) had followed us and she was currently sitting in the back of Noc’s vehicle.
This broke the moment, causing Noc to lean in, touch his mouth to mine, but after he’d done that, instead of doing the rest I’d demanded, he put his mouth to my ear.
“All my life, thirty-eight years, only you,” he whispered there before he promptly moved away and closed my door.
With frozen body but shifting eyes, I watched as he walked around the front of his car, what he’d delivered in my ear settling with the flutter of butterfly wings around my heart.