The Fifteenth Representative by Hilla Dagan (fiction novels to read .TXT) 📕

decided—right then—that I wasn’t going to give up on Noa. And not giving up on her was not an easy thing. More like a never-ending marathon. She could keep you high and dry in ways you wouldn’t believe.

Once, we were in her bedroom, and she was working on her computer. I was busy lying on the bed, next to her. That was one of the times she kept me dry. As in, no fucking. Let me tell you. She’s crazy. A one-of-a-kind nutcase, that one, I swear.

She told me she’s always the one giving advice to her friends regarding relationship issues, and that she basically tells them all to give the men blue balls. If you could have been a fly on the wall when we had that conversation… honestly, seeing it would be the only way you could end up fully believing me.

Let me explain.

The moment she said the word blue, giving it substantial and frankly a ludicrous amount of weight, I saw her realize that she, in fact, had given it away much too quickly. It was then I realized that I was in deep shit. And I was. Big time.

There was a lockdown.

And you can’t be more than two kilometers away from Noa and be in a lockdown.

Being so close is detrimental to the whole male species.

It went from disturbing to an advanced case of psychosis. Advanced and escalating. That day, when we were in Hedera, she wore this kind of… I don’t even know how to accurately describe it to you. I’d never seen something like it in my life. I’ve no idea if it was some kind of pajama, a towel, or a pajama towel, maybe even a Halloween costume… I truly have no idea. No one had ever opened the door for me while wearing something like that. Not any girl nor other creature.

It was this bodysuit made of flannel, in the shape of some sort of Smurf… or something. The shock of it erased the memory from my mind. I swear. The towel thing even had a cap. Maybe she wasn’t a fan of leaving the shower with her hair wet. She has hair to die for. I always snag it accidently.

You see, men stay children, no matter their age. You pull the hair of the girl you like when you’re a child, and you pull it too when you’re supposedly a grown up. It’s always been like that, right? You have a crush on a girl, you pull her hair. At least until fourth grade—then if you keep doing it you get sent to the school counselor. I’ve never pulled another girl’s hair on purpose, and even with Noa it’s only ever by accident.

It had something to do with Smurfs. I’m sure of that, at least.

Anyway, she walked around the room, with those tits and that ass of hers, and I’d been dried out like a raisin for two months already, and I said to her, “Oh, now I get it. The blue balls thing… it’s from the Smurfs, right?” I could see she was dying to laugh—though she held it back. It only made her more motivated, too. She’s so hot though, she could come along naked for all I cared.

In the end, she let it go after months of torture. I thought I was about to die. I swear.

I had to find her. I would lay the world to waste, but I had to find her.

I’d go with two months of only kissing her—and three months with no sex with her is not far from the way I felt about now… that’s a joke. That comment would have made her glare at me. Even that’s a beautiful thing to see. What can you do—some women are just annoying that way.

A good friend of mine who heard about Noa once told me that I wouldn’t be so tethered to her if I managed to think about her logically—the way I do with other things. He told me it was the game—the game she played so well—that turned me on, and that all I needed was to get out of the continual loop I was caught in. If I ever did, I would be thrown so far from the centrifugal force of the twists she put me through that I’d finally start questioning what the fuck I’d been doing with her for so long.

On the one hand, he was right. On the other, he couldn’t be farther from the mark.

You can’t judge relationships from the sidelines. You can never know what truly goes on there. Only the couple know—and we’re not even really a couple.

I’m such a shit. I ruined her life with the things I put her through. She was a kid, and the things I did…

The cellphone ringing jolted me out of my thoughts.

“Eran.” It was Timothy. “Eran, everything’s fine. It’s the Australians. They identified her at the airport from when she visited here in 2009. They still don’t know anything. Tomorrow morning someone will go with you to the embassy to get her out. Everything’s fine.”

I felt every muscle in my body simply give way.

Chapter Fourteen

That morning, the alarm clock woke me, and lucky it did. I would have slept two days straight if I could. Though I never could sleep through two days… I was only being ridiculous.

Four AM. Well done me.

Now all I needed to do was get myself organized, get a cab and be on my way to Canberra. It’s an almost three-hundred kilometer drive to the embassy and the go-to guy Timothy arranged for us. The guy from the Israeli embassy. The one who’ll get Noa out. At least now I knew Noa was okay and with them, so I was relatively calm. I still didn’t understand from what little information Timothy gave me what they even wanted with her. Were they simply suspicious? Still, the important thing was that they weren’t on to anything. The ballet show was only a few days away.