Chapter 12 #3
I rubbed a hand over my jaw, already regretting showing up here. Callie wasn’t going to let anything slide tonight, not with the way they’d been looking at me since I walked in.
But before they could press, a loud knock broke through the apartment.
Callie stood, arched a brow, and pointed at me on their way to the door. “That knock won’t save you, Mr. Ortiz. We’re circling right back to Liam—”
They pulled open the door, cutting themselves off mid-sentence.
“Speak of the bear,” Callie mumbled under their breath as Liam Carter filled the doorway.
He was out of his work clothes, in jeans, an unbuttoned plaid flannel over a navy T-shirt that clung just right across his chest and shoulders. A soft charcoal cap sat backwards on his head, messy curls escaping at his temples.
“Hey,” Liam said, a little breathless like maybe he’d jogged up the stairs. “Got off early. My assistant closed up for the night.” His eyes swept across the room until they landed on me. “Sam.” He smiled then. Warm, open, and sincere. “It’s really good to see you again.”
And there it was.
That familiar, restless brightness in his eyes. The way his attention seemed everywhere at once, clocking Callie’s candle, the almost-empty wine glass on the counter, and the crooked picture frame that clearly hadn’t bothered them enough to fix.
Not scattered.
Not careless.
Just… busy.
Like his attention moved in constellations instead of straight lines.
Something in me tilted.
I’d seen this look before.
Not in my friends.
In my students.
Marcus, tapping his pencil like it was keeping time with thoughts only he could hear.
The way he’d jump into a story midstream, detour three times, then circle back like it all made perfect sense in his head.
The way he could lock in so hard on something he cared about that the rest of the world disappeared, and then, just as suddenly, drop it completely when the spark was gone.
ADHD.
The word surfaced without drama. Without judgment.
Just… recognition.
Liam did that.
All the time.
The half-finished stories. The sudden topic pivots. The hyperfocus on something that lit him up, followed by a cheerful, unapologetic abandonment when it stopped being interesting.
I’d always read it as Liam being Liam.
Big personality. Big energy. Big presence.
But standing there, watching him take in the room like a human radar dish?
It clicked.
Holy shit.
He wasn’t flaky.
He wasn’t careless.
He wasn’t inconsistent.
His brain just worked differently.
And I, a literal trained educator who specialized in noticing this exact kind of thing in teenagers, had somehow never clocked it in my best friend of five years.
That realization landed with a weird mix of awe and guilt.
How had I missed it?
Or maybe… I hadn’t been looking through the right lens.
Behind him, Callie turned to me with a cartoonishly slow widening of their eyes and mouthed OH MY GOD while pointing both hands at Liam’s back like a traffic director on tequila. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
Then a new flurry of voices spilled in from the hallway.
Elliott’s laugh carried through first, followed by Jules’s playful scolding about him walking too fast. Callie opened the door wider to wave them in, and seconds later Avery and Harper appeared with a bottle of wine and two grocery bags of snacks.
And just like that, the apartment was buzzing, full of warmth and chatter. But I still felt Liam’s eyes on me from across the room.
And Callie’s grin was impossible to ignore.
He always carried himself like he owned the place, his signature grin in place, sleeves rolled up, forearms on full display because the universe had decided I needed to suffer. He grabbed a drink from Callie’s counter, then, of course, dropped onto the couch right next to me.
I should have scooted over.
Should have shifted, made space.
But before I could even process the thought, his leg pressed against mine.
A slow, solid, easy weight.
And neither of us moved. Not even a little.
Across from me, Callie caught my eye, clocked the whole damn thing, and immediately mouthed, ‘OMG.’
I shot them a look.
They raised their brows higher, then gestured wildly toward my leg like it was some kind of spectacle.
I huffed out a slow breath, my lips parting as I barely moved my head. Callie silently responded with a nonverbal, ‘See what I mean? I told you!’ They then took a slow, victorious sip of wine.
I downed my drink like a sedative.
And Liam?
Liam just kept talking, laughing, oblivious to the absolute fucking crisis he was causing me.
Or maybe… he wasn’t.
The conversation flowed around us. The teasing, shared stories, half-drunk nostalgia. But all I could focus on was the point of contact between us, the warmth of him seeping through my jeans, grounding and unsettling all at once.
Liam was animated tonight, hands moving as he described some rowdy guy who’d tried to dance on the bar during last call. He was bouncing between details, hands moving, voice quick, already halfway into another anecdote before the first one fully landed.
And instead of feeling overwhelmed by it, I felt fond.
Because I knew this rhythm now.
I’d learned how to sit with it in my classroom. Let it run. Let it breathe. Meet it where it was instead of trying to force it into straight lines.
God.
Was this what Marcus felt like?
Trying to be understood.
Trying to exist without being told to slow down, settle down, be less.
My chest tightened.
Liam wasn’t “too much.” He never had been.
He was wired. Bright. Fast. Alive.
And somehow, that made me want to know him even more.
“Shirt off, cowboy boots still on,” Liam said, shaking his head.
“He told me the bachelorette party dared him, but then he tried to take my shirt off and got a whiskey sour down his pants instead.”
Callie snorted into their drink. “So, a typical Friday night?”
“I’m still finding glitter behind the bar,” Liam replied with a mock shudder.
“I’d trade you,” Callie said. “I had a walk-in last week who insisted her ‘usual’ stylist did a ‘shoulder-length angled bob with curtain bangs’ and showed me a picture of… like, Jennifer Aniston circa 2002. She left looking like she lost a fight with a weed whacker and still tipped me fifteen percent.”
Elliott chimed in from the armchair, a wine glass dangling from his fingertips. “Speaking of disasters, how’s your intro class going, Sam?”
I blinked. My mind had been spinning on a loop of Liam’s warmth, Liam’s laugh, Liam’s leg still touching mine. And apparently I’d tuned everyone else out.
The room had gone quiet.
Elliott stared. Jules raised a brow. Liam glanced over.
Harper, thankfully, broke the silence with a perfectly timed, “Girl, pay attention!”
I flushed. “Sorry. Long week,” I uttered, though I didn’t believe it.
Liam bumped my knee gently with his. Not enough for the others to pick up on, but it sent heat through me like he’d slid a hand under my shirt.
His smile was small, but he was studying me again.
Closer now. Like he knew. Or wanted to know.
And Callie watched all of it with a knowing grin that said they were already filing this away for later.