For once, Noah didnât quip back, just listened for a while. He could understand the sentiment behind that last comment, especially. Things did tend to go weird sometimes, especially back in high school, when emotions were running high, and feelings were all over the place, all the time. Either way, he hoped that Jacob would get to see where it was all headed, or heading, and not be made to give it all up one way or another. Yeah, whoever that other person was he was looking for, Noah was starting to root for them big time. âI think itâs worth taking your time. Going into something too quickly always kinda ends with you not feeling all too hot about it.â Heartbreak wasnât a feeling he had known too much of, since he was usually the one moving on, before that could happen, but he did remember one or two instances, when he had been a teenager, where he had felt like the world was ending, after a relationship did. These days, he avoided them all together.
âI lived in Paris for a little over two years, and itâs a great, but also exhausting city. Whereabouts does she live?â He could understand how one could, or would, choose Paris over Eureka in Northern California, but at the same time, he did enjoy living and working here. âDo you see her often?â Jacobâs mother sounded quite lovely, especially her cooking seemed something her son was enjoying. If he thought about his own mother, all Noah knew was that she had left him on the doorstep of his fatherâs house, and only sporadically set foot in her sonâs life. Not that he much cared for her presence, after going so long without it. âAs long as you enjoy making food, and like experimenting with it, I think youâre fine,â Noah said in reply to Jacob calling himself a passable cook. âIâm half Brazilian and half English, but was born and raised in LA - so I have, but donât have much of an accent. I do speak Portuguese, but not because my mother taught me.â She had never cared enough, unfortunately.
âWhat video games do you like to play the most? Or watch on twitch? Itâs been a while, since Iâve had a controller or a gaming mouse in my hand,â he said with an easy smile. âHow does a cooking stream work, though? Do they just prepare food in real time? Do people cook along? Do they just comment?â Now he was really intrigued how it all worked.
"Yeah, high school is weird. You don't know what you're doing, you're a bag or hormones and an inability to process emotions, and you think you're the smartest person in the world," he laughed, sipping his drink as they spoke. "Or maybe that was just me." Seemed like a pretty universal experience though. He was happy to say he'd grown up a lot since then. It seemed like Luca had too. Maybe there was hope for the two of them yet, but... enough about Luca.
"Paris is a great city. I take it you speak French?" he asked. "Just makes things a bunch easier if you do. I like speaking French with my mom. Keeps me in practice." He hated going to Paris and feeling like that awkward American tourist, but his accent probably got a little rusty at times if he didn't use it enough. "We video call pretty often, and she comes into my streams if she can make it with the time difference and her work and stuff. Kind of have to be careful what I say sometimes," he joked, but his mom was pretty accepting and understood you couldn't judge people too harshly for casual dirty humor on the internet.
He liked that Noah was curious about Twitch, and he didn't mind that he wasn't well-versed in it, as long as he was respectful and didn't tell Jacob to go get a real job. "I play all sorts of games. I guess you could say I'm a variety streamer, but I've been playing the new Pokemon, gonna play the new Horizon Forbidden West when it comes out, I used to be cracked at Fortnite when it was really popular, Overwatch, Valorant, other shooters, story games, whatever I'm in the mood for. Cooking streams you just cook live, and interact with your chat. I guess some people might cool along with you, but I think it's mostly just hanging out."