Chapter 006

Ivy pov:

The silence that followed was worse than any sound could have been. Noah stared at me, his face drained of color, his mouth opening and closing like he was trying to find words that didn't exist. The pen he'd been holding rolled off the table and hit the floor with a soft click that seemed impossibly loud in the stillness.

"Girlfriend?" he finally said, and the word came out wrong, foreign, like he was tasting a language he'd never learned. "Ivy, I don't…what are you talking about?"

My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. "Don't," I said, my voice shaking despite every effort to keep it steady.

"Don't do this, not right now and not when you promised me you wouldn't."

"Promised you what?" He stood up so fast the couch groaned, his hands going to his hair, gripping it like he could physically hold his thoughts in place. "I don't understand. I don't…when did I promise you anything? When did we even…"

"Three months, Noah." My voice cracked on his name. "Three months of sneaking around, of you telling me to keep it quiet until the season ended, of you showing up at my door at midnight because you said you couldn't sleep unless you'd talked to me first. Are you seriously telling me none of that happened?"

He looked at me like I'd slapped him. Not angry. Just lost. Completely, terrifyingly lost.

"I would remember that," he said, but there was no conviction in it. It sounded like something he was saying to convince himself, not me. "I would remember someone like that, I will remember you."

"Well, you don't." The words came out sharper than I meant them to, years of built-up walls cracking under the weight of humiliation.

"So congratulations. I guess I finally found out what I actually am to you. Nothing…a joke you got tired of."

"That's not…" He stopped, pressing the heel of his hand against his temple, his jaw tight. "God, my head."

I froze. "Noah?"

"It's nothing," he muttered, but his voice had gone thin, strained. "It's just a headache. I get them sometimes since…"

"Since when?"

He didn't answer. His eyes had gone distant, unfocused, staring somewhere past me at the wall like he was trying to read something written on it that only he could see.

"Since the game," he said finally, quietly. "Since the hit."

My anger stumbled, caught itself on something colder. "What hit?"

"Championship game. Three weeks ago." He said it slowly, like he was reciting something he'd been told rather than something he remembered living through. "I took a check into the boards. The coach says I was out for almost a minute before I came."

Three weeks ago. I did the math without meaning to. Three weeks ago was exactly when he'd started missing our study sessions, when his texts had gone from warm and constant to distracted and rare, when I'd told myself he was just busy, just stressed about scouts, just a boy with too much on his plate to bother replying to a girl like me.

Not busy but broken.

"You had a concussion," I said slowly, the pieces sliding into place even as my chest tightened with something between relief and dread. Relief, because maybe this wasn't cruelty. Dread, because if it wasn't cruelty, it was something far more frightening.

"They said I recovered." He laughed, but it wasn't really a laugh, more like air forcing its way out of him because he didn't know what else to do with it.

"Cleared me for practice last week. Said the headaches were normal. Said the memory stuff would pass."

"What memory stuff?" I asked, even though some deep, exhausted part of me already knew the answer.

He looked at me then, really looked, his green eyes searching my face with a desperation that hollowed me out.

"I don't remember things," he admitted, his voice dropping to something raw. "Not all the time. Not everything. Little chunks are just… gone. The coach thinks I'm hiding it because I don't want to lose my spot. My agent thinks I'm being paranoid but it's not paranoia if I genuinely can't remember whether I ate breakfast this morning."

"And me," I said quietly. "I'm one of the chunks."

He flinched like the words physically hurt him.

"I don't want that to be true," he said, and for the first time since he'd walked through my door, he sounded like the Noah I remembered…quiet, honest, stripped of the arrogance he wore around everyone else.

"Because the way you're looking at me right now, like I broke something precious, like I ruined you…I hate that. I hate that I can't remember why you matter, but some part of me believes you when you say I do."

I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know whether to hold onto the hope clawing its way up my throat or protect myself from the very real possibility that hope would get me nowhere.

"Prove it," I said instead, because it was easier than crying in front of him. "Tell me something…anything. One thing that feels familiar."

He closed his eyes, brow furrowed in concentration, and for a moment I actually believed something might surface. His lips parted like a word was forming.

Then he swayed.

"Noah?"

His hand shot out, gripping the back of the couch, and his face went the color of old paper. "I'm fine," he said, though he clearly wasn't. "Just…head rush. Happens sometimes when I…"

He didn't finish the sentence just as his knees buckled.

I lunged forward, catching part of his weight before we both nearly went down, my arms straining under him as I guided him to the floor instead of letting him crash into the coffee table. His skin was clammy under my palms, his breathing too fast, too shallow.

"Hey. Hey, stay with me." I patted his cheek, forcing my voice into something calm even as panic clawed up my spine. "Noah, look at me."

His eyes fluttered, struggling to focus, and for one terrifying second I thought he might pass out completely. Then his hand found mine, gripping it with a desperation that had nothing to do with a headache.

"Ivy," he breathed, and something in the way he said my name made my whole body go still, because it wasn't confused this time. It wasn't a stranger testing an unfamiliar word.

It sounded like remembering.

"The garden," he whispered, his eyes locking onto mine, glassy but suddenly, achingly present. "Behind the chemistry building. We used to…we used to sit there and you'd feed the…"

A fist pounded against my door, three hard knocks that made us both flinch.

"Ivy?" Anna's voice, muffled but unmistakably urgent, cut through the room. "Ivy, open up, it's important…it's about Noah, there's something going around campus and you need to see it before he does."

Noah's hand tightened around mine, his eyes still locked on my face, still holding onto whatever fragile thread of memory had just surfaced and I realized, with my heart in my throat, that whatever Anna was about to show me, it was going to shatter this moment completely.