“Heavens, Noah, what are you doing?” Beckett laughed when he entered the parlor some indeterminate time later and found Noah on his hands and knees, adjusting the fringe on the edge of the carpet.
Noah shuffled around and leapt to his feet. “Beckett, my friend,” he said, breaking into a huge smile as his heart filled with fondness. “I am preparing for your father and sister,” he said, racing across the room to him. “Everything must be in perfect order for them. Everything must beperfect.”
A slight pinch changed Beckett’s expression for a moment before Beckett shook his head. “Miss Taylor cleaned just yesterday.”
Noah ignored the comment as another idea struck him. “They’re coming for lunch, are they not?”
“They are,” Beckett confirmed, watching Noah anxiously.
“Then it is the dining room that must be made perfect for them,” Noah said.
He shot past Beckett into the hall, then across to the dining room. Miss Taylor was already there, setting the table for four.
“No, no,” Noah said, hurrying to take the handful of silver from her so he could arrange it himself. “I am certain there is nothing wrong with your way, Miss Taylor, but everything must be perfect. Perfect.”
Noah noticed vaguely as he moved around the table, changing the place settings and relaying the cutlery, that his hands were shaking. He ignored it as best he could, just as he ignored the aching sense that if he didn’t get everything just right for Beckett’s family, something terrible would happen.
“Could you help me, Miss Taylor?” he asked after dropping a fork, then bending to pick it up. “I’m afraid we cannot use this one.”
“No, of course,” Miss Taylor said, a bit too breathless. Noah wondered if the woman had an anxious temperament. She glanced timidly up at Beckett, who had stepped into the room, but now was merely standing watching Noah.
“Fetch another fork please, Miss Taylor,” Beckett told the maid in his kind, soft voice.
Noah smiled, proud of his friend’s sweetness, as he continued around the table, laying and then relaying the cutlery he had.
Beckett stepped carefully around the table and over to Noah’s side. “You don’t need to do this, Noah,” he said. “Miss Taylor knows how to set my table. It is only Father and Aurora who are coming, and it is just luncheon, not supper with the Vanderbilts.”
Noah snapped his gaze up to Beckett, momentarily indignant at his friend’s apparent lack of care. “Your father and sister are two of the most wonderful people on this earth,” he said, gaping at Beckett. “Everything should be perfect for them.”
Beckett frowned slightly. “You use that word, perfect, quite a bit. You do know that you don’t have to be perfect, do you not?”
Harsh whispers from the past seemed to fill Noah’s head all of a sudden. He remembered the way his mother had sneered at him while talking to her friends and saying he was her defective child. He remembered his sister shouting at him for accidentally smashing her porcelain doll’s head when he was miming dancing with the doll. He remembered Marcus’s relentless, crushing dissatisfaction with everything he’d done, all the acts of devotion, that had been intended to show his love.
“I have much to make up for,” Noah hissed, continuing to set places at the table, even though is hands shook more than ever.
They shook so much that he dropped another fork.
As he reached to pick it up, Beckett grasped his arms to still him. Noah jerked as if he’d been shocked with electricity, then stared questioningly at Beckett.
With a slow, steady breath, Beckett took the remaining forks and spoons out of Noah’s hands and set them on the table. He then took Noah’s hands and held them comfortingly in his.
“You do not need to do this, my friend,” he said, staring intently into Noah’s eyes. “No one expects perfection from you. My sister finds you quite wonderful just the way you are.” He paused a bit, then added, “So do I.”
The sudden urge to burst into weeping filled Noah. He forced himself to tamp it down, though. There was no point in turning into a watering pot in Beckett’s dining room.
“Thank you,” he said instead. His gaze darted to the table and the disarray of cutlery that seemed to be mocking him. “But I really must—”
His words were cut off as the doorbell rang.
“That will be Father and Aurora,” Beckett said with one of his soothing smiles. “Shall we go greet them?”
Noah did his best to smile at his friend in return. “Yes, that sounds…delightful.”
He’d been tempted to say “perfect”, but Beckett didn’t like that word. He would have to do his best going forward to avoid it. If he didn’t, something horrible would happen, he just knew it.
ChapterEight
It was alarming for Beckett to realize that he didn’t want to leave Noah alone in the dining room for the space of time it would have taken for him to follow Gardener to the door to greet his father and Aurora. Something was deeply wrong with his friend. The truth had been nagging at Beckett, like an itch in the center of his back where he couldn’t scratch, for days now, but the events of the Halloween ball had been the final straw.