Chapter Thirty-Eight

                                    

                                          
Vacation mode set in, and Noah and I almost lost all sense of time. Minutes became hours became days, and we lived in snapshots. A really good meal. Swimming naked, soaking in sunlight. My whole body succombing to a shiver as Noah dragged a fingertip down my spine in the midnight dark of the treehouse.
                          
And orgasms. A lot of orgasms. I mentally flipped back through the snapshots on our last night, as we left Noah's family's house and walked back through the meadow to the treehouse, and it felt like a montage of orgasms. Noah wrapped his arm around my waist and leaned into me as we walked. I couldn't help wondering why we were allowed to do whatever we wanted here, but back home we were interrupted whenever Decker Lord could manage it.
                          
When we were brushing our teeth, taking turns spitting toothpaste into the golden sink shaped like a lotus flower, I asked Noah, "Why doesn't your dad cockblock us here?"
                          
"Probably because this is the safest place for my family," Noah said. "Dad probably feels like nothing bad can happen here."
                          
"What is he afraid of?" I asked. "Me corrupting you?"
                          
Noah scrubbed his toothbrush extra hard around his molars as he thought. A little line formed between his eyebrows. It didn't seem like he was going to say anything, so I took a guess.
                          
"I think he's afraid of you telling me the truth," I said. 
                          
Noah bent over the sink. He spat, rinsed his toothbrush, and swished water around his mouth. When he straightened, he met my eyes in the mirror wearing an expression so close to a smile, but so veiled it drove me mad. We were looking right at each other, we were inches away from each other, and we had spent most of the week having sex, but I felt, in that moment, like we barely knew each other.
                          
"You're so close," he said. 
                          
But that was it. Conversation closed. We went to bed, Noah cuddling against my chest while I ran my fingers through his hair, until we got riled up and kicked off the blanket and Noah's hand plunged into my boxers and we went for it. For a while, I forgot about anything aside from his body—his mouth, his throat, his stomach and hips and thighs. Once we were finished, though, the distance between us stretched much further than the space between our bodies on the bed. Noah drifted off to sleep, and I listened to his heartbeat as it coasted from frantic pounding to slow thudding. 
                          
I couldn't sleep. All I could think about was Noah and his fear, and what I could maybe do to ease it. 
                          
Close to midnight, I made up my mind. I carefully climbed over Noah and reached for the vial on the bedside table. 
                          
It tasted like crisp, fresh water—like sweet nothingness. It was barely a full mouthful, so little liquid that after swallowing it, I felt kind of disappointed. That's it?
                          
But shortly after swallowing, after I felt the liquid trickle down my throat and settle in my stomach, I felt them. Them—they seeped into my bloodstream, flowed through the cockles of my heart and the pathways of my brain and began to know me.
                          
Eventually, they settled back in my bloodstream and asked, what now?
                          
I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. I thought, make me a room where we can tell the truth. One Decker Lord can't enter.
                          
Please, I added. Because it always paid to be polite.
                          
Once I had articulated that wish with clear words in my mind, I wondered what the next part would feel like. Would I feel all tingly? Would I be able to feel the bots working to construct something for me? Or would—oh.
                          
I opened my eyes. Across the room, light filtered in around a door in the opposite wall that hadn't been there before. I carefully disentangled myself from Noah and tiptoed toward it. I took a deep breath and turned the doorknob, stepping inside the room.
                          
It was my studio.
                          
It was an exact replica of West Vancouver Arts Academy's recording studio. Here was the control panel, here were the two computer monitors, here was the chair I had been sitting in for the past four years, its aged corduroy upholstry perfectly rendered. Here was the glass, and beyond it, the soundbooth and microphone and the stool whose legs were full of scratches from all the times it had been knocked over in there. I sat down in my chair like a captain returning to his ship after a long absence. The control panel in front of me bore the same patterns of plastic rubbed smooth from my wrists, as did the computer's keyboard. I opened the top drawer and saw my jumbled collection of pens, scraps of paper, and random equipment parts I kept there just in case.
                          
It was home.
                          
I sat there, in what was essentially the same room I'd spent so many hours in since I was fourteen, realizing for the first time what it meant to me. This was what the bots had built when I asked them for a room where the truth could be told. My throat burned with tears. That was exactly what I wanted it to be, when I first took the job of A/V Club president. That was all I wanted, in the work I did there and before. I had strayed in that mission before, but it was the pursuit of truth that had put me on the right track again. I had gained the courage to cast off the lies, the partisanship, the agenda, and go after the truth once more. 
                          
And the truth had led me to Noah.
                          
The door behind me creaked in that oh-so-familiar way. I turned and saw Noah walking in, wrapped in a blanket, barely fazed.
                          
Noah looked around the room. He didn't know every nook and cranny like I did, but he smiled as if he was meeting an old friend again.
                          
"You dosed," he said, sitting in Josiah's usual chair.
                          
"I asked for a room where we can tell the truth. They recreated the studio exactly." I pulled out the drawer. "Right down to the contents of my junk drawer."
                          
"You already built a space for truth. They didn't reinvent the wheel because they didn't have to. But it's not about the room, Riley. It's you and what you bring to it."
                          
"What do I bring to it?"
                          
"Warmth. Safety. I feel like... no matter what I say, you'll listen to me and you won't judge me and you'll... you'll trust me," he finally finished. 
                          
"Why wouldn't I trust you?"
                          
"Because I'm going to tell you some things about my father that might scare you. I need you to trust that I'm not like him. Not in any way."
                          
"I already believe that."
                          
He nodded. "I know."
                          
Noah drew the blanket tighter around his shoulders. His eyes searched the control panel, as if the knobs, buttons, and sliders would tell him something vital. When they didn't, he looked up at me. I got the message; he wanted me to give him permission.
                          
"Start at the beginning," I said.
                          
"I think I want to start with a story."
                          
"Works for me."
                          
"My mom told me this story." Noah thought carefully for a moment before he said, "I don't know how else to start it, other than 'once upon a time.'"
                          
"Then start it that way."
                          
Noah smiled faintly and said, "Once upon a time, there was a girl..."