Chapter Fifteen
Maggie
Icaved.
I told myself I wasn’t going to be the one to contact Liam first. I told myself I was going to give him space. I told myself that I would let him come to me in his own time.
But it had been two weeks of silence on his end, and I knew the longer I let him keep his distance, the easier it would be to maintain it.
So, I decided, after the game was over I’d follow Cassie right down to the family lounge where we’d wait for Liam to meet her. He wouldn’t yell at me in front of Lily, even if he wanted to. And he couldn’t kick me out, considering I could be there for Brody just as much as I was there for him.
And I was done with letting him shut me out.
At least Cassie had no such qualms with me.
“Why are you smiling at me like that?” I asked her, suspicious by the freakishly ecstatic way she kept glancing over at me.
Instantly, she reddened.
“I’m not.”
“You’re not?” I scoffed. “Are you telling me that look on your face right now isn’t a smile?”
“I always smile,” she retorted, using her high-pitched lying voice.
“You do always smile,” I agreed, “but you don’t always look like the clown from It when you do.”
She gasped, looking horrified while Lily giggled in the seat beside her.
“You agree with me,” I leaned across Cassie to coo in my niece’s face, “don’t you, Lily?”
Lily covered her mouth, rosy-cheeked and giggling as she looked up at Cassie’s pouting face and then back to me.
“Tell your Auntie that I look perfectly normal,” Cassie urged her, tickling her stomach.
Her little body squirmed under her mother’s fingers as her eruptive laughter filled the air, garnering the attention of other people seated nearby.
“You can’t resort to tickle threats to get the answer you want, Cass,” I sighed dramatically.
“You’re funny, Auntie Maggie,” Lily said, blonde hair matted down by the pink noise-canceling headphones sitting on top of her head. “I was sad ’cause you didn’t come to my house anymore.”
Welp, that was enough to drain the energy out of the entire arena.
It was true—Brody and I would stop over a few times a week to have dinner with them, or hang out or something, but since the fight with Liam, we’d gone from one hundred to nothing overnight.
I didn’t stop to think that Lily might be wondering why.
My heart clenched.
“Aw,” I grabbed her hand across Cassie, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy, Lil. I promise, everything will be back to normal soon. Auntie just had a lot of work to do that was keeping her away.”
“I think Daddy’s sad you’ve been gone, too,” Lily said gravely.
I doubted that. Liam didn’t need me. He’d never needed anyone. And now that he had his family, it would be all too easy to let me fade out of his life. To be one of those siblings you only saw at holidays.
Well, I wasn’t going to make it that easy for him.
He was my brother, goddamn it, and that was a role you couldn’t just walk away from.
Or could he? Would he? Did he want to?
For the first time in my life, I wondered if the damage I’d done had been too great to undo. If Liam and I were at a point that we couldn’t turn back from.
He didn’t need me. I knew that. The problem was, I still needed him.
My sweaty boyfriend was trying to suffocate me.
Forcibly stuffed into the crook of his neck, I tried to push Brody off to no avail. It was hard to escape when your boyfriend had more than a few inches and about a hundred pounds on you.
“Get off,” I shoved his arm, even though the scent of him post-game wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d have him believe.
“Not until I get a kiss.” He puckered his lips at me threateningly.
“I can’t kiss you when you’re covered in sweat,” I protested, pushing his face away, even though I knew and he knew that I always relented.
Sometimes I just wanted him to work a little for it.
“You guys are adorable,” Cassie cooed, standing beside us in the family lounge. “The most beautiful couple I’ve ever seen.”
“Are you tearing up?” I squinted at her, knowing her well enough to notice the telltale sign.
While I was distracted examining Cassie’s tear ducts, Brody took the plunge forward to plant a kiss on my lips. I shot him a look when I saw the smug satisfaction written on his face.
“No,” Cassie lied, dabbing at her eyes.
“Yes, you are.” I frowned. “You’re being weird again, Cass. What’s going on?”
Brody stiffened, and I turned to look at him in question when I saw he was silently shaking his head at Cassie.
Also weird.
Why was everyone being so weird?
“Is there something I should know about?” I crossed my arms across my chest.
“I was just about to ask the same question,” Liam’s voice sounded behind us.
“Mommy’s crying,” Lily offered up.
“I can see that,” Liam answered, moving over to her side instantly. “What happened?”
In one fell swoop, he scooped Lily up in one arm and draped his other around Cassie’s shoulders in a protective gesture, shooting me a scathing look as if I might be the one responsible for making his notoriously emotional wife cry.
And to be fair, I guess I was, though I still couldn’t figure out why.
Brody clocked the look at once and tightened his own hold on me—a show of solidarity that I was enormously grateful for.
I knew I could fight my own battles—especially with my brother—but knowing Brody was right there beside me gave me the courage to do anything.
“Liam, I was hoping we could talk—”
“Can’t.” Liam said shortly, eyes apathetic and distant.
It made me want to scream.
“I really think we should.”
“Not now, Maggie.”
How was it possible that I was a thirty-year-old woman, that I was a lawyer who literally excelled at verbal debates, and yet I couldn’t form a single sentence under the weight of his detachment?
“Please,” I felt myself tremble.
“Liam,” Cassie looked up at him, frowning.
He looked down at her, and then back at me and let out a measured, controlled breath.
“Maggie, I get that you want to talk, but I’m telling you if we have this conversation now, it’s not going to work out the way you want it to.”
“Why can’t you just forgive me?” I asked.
“Why can’t you give a shit about what I want for once?”
“Bad word, Daddy.” Lily frowned, looking impossibly like Liam as she did.
“Shit.” He repeated, then winced. “Shoot. Sorry. Shoot.”
He kissed the top of Lily’s head and handed her off to Cassie.
“You guys go wait in the car, I’ll be right there.”
“Take your time, we can wait,” Cassie urged, hopefully. I loved her for that.
“No,” he shook his head. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
He kissed her cheek, sending her off with such gentleness so he could turn his attention back toward annihilating me.
As soon as his family left, Liam’s face turned to stone once more, the only emotion radiating through him being the rage lurking in his eyes.
“Liam, man,” Brody said on my behalf, “you gotta give her a chance.”
“No, I don’t have to.” Liam retorted coldly. “Why do I have to give her a chance when she thinks she can create messes in my life and fix them all by a half-assed apology?”
“I’m right here,” I said, furious when I felt my own eyes starting to water.
“Why would I talk to you when it’s clear you don’t listen to a damn thing I have to say?”
“Why are you so mad? I made a mistake, but no harm was done. You don’t have to see him again if you don’t want to.”
“I didn’t want to see him ever, but you forced me into a situation I didn’t want to be in. Do you know how shitty that is to do to someone, Maggie?”
“I know,” I gritted out.
And I did. But this couldn’t be the mistake that ruined us. I couldn’t lose him because of what I was trying to gain—because I was trying to fix our family.
“It was stupid,” I admitted. “I get that now. I understand that things can’t be what I wanted them to be.”
“No, that’s the problem, Maggie.” Liam countered. “You don’t get that. You think you can have a hand in every situation, but that’s not how life works. You can’t expect everyone to do what you want all of the time.”
“Liam—”
“You’re selfish, Maggie,” Liam said. “You always have been. You’ve always only cared about what you want.”
“Watch it, Liam.” Brody’s voice spat out harsher than I’d ever heard it.
But even though he was holding me up, I felt myself shrinking from Liam’s words.
Was he right? I hadn’t been trying to be selfish. I just… thought I knew what would be good for him.
“You keep dumping shit into my life that I didn’t ask for, and until you learn to stop, then I can’t have a relationship with you.”
“What? Shit like Cassie?”
“Don’t talk about Cassie.”
“Because that’s one of the problems I dumped into your life, isn’t it? And that turned out okay—”
“This is the shit I’m talking about,” he bellowed. “You never know when to stop! You need to learn to stop crossing fucking boundaries.”
“All right, enough!” Brody shoved Liam’s chest, standing between the two of us as if we might charge each other at any moment. “Clearly, the two of you need to take some space.”
“Thank you,” Liam sneered sarcastically.
“Stop being a dick, Liam.” Brody shook his head, tone heavy with disappointment. “She’s your sister.”
“Yeah?” Liam said. “Well, you can deal with her now. I have to go home with my family.”
The words pierced me sharper than an arrow. What was he doing? Disowning me as his sister? Confirming my fears of being replaced by the family he chose?
It wasn’t fair. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch him.
I let out a sigh so desperate it nearly turned to a gasp as I watched Liam turn on his heel and leave, door shutting behind him with a thud that felt permanent.
Brody pulled me into a hug, holding me against his chest with an intensity that I was sure was the only thing holding my broken pieces together.
Liam was gone. Cassie had been mine, my person, my best friend—and I knew she still was, but now even she belonged more to Liam than she did to me. Another loss that I couldn’t come to terms with.
Brody was the only one left on my side. I felt it in the way he held me, and the careful way he wiped the tears from my face. I felt it in the way he drove me home, holding my hand the entire ride as we sat in the silence of my mistakes.
He was here. He was real. He loved me.
But some part of me wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be long before he got tired of it all, too.