Chapter 8 #2
I expel a sigh, and Liam takes a couple steps backward, giving me space. We’d drawn dangerously close to each other despite carefully avoiding a single touch.
“Okay. Here’s me being serious.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “I had all night to think about this, and I’ve realized there are three ways we can expect this to pan out.
First, I could make you fall so madly in love with me that it’ll feel like you’re on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and I’m the only man with a ship for a hundred miles. ”
“Why does that feel like a threat?” I ask.
“Because it’s threatening,” Liam acknowledges. “To be in love.”
“What if we’re different now?” I ask.
His eyes glint. “I’m sort of counting on that.”
“And the heart breaking?” I prompt. “Do you promise to make a clean cut?”
I haven’t forgotten what he said yesterday about his inability to be a good partner. And whether Liam’s counting on it or not, we might be too different now to make this last past the summer, if that’s even something he’d want to try.
His gaze turns sad, mournful. “I can’t go into this with the promise that I’m going to break your heart, Paige. Obviously, I’m all too aware that it could happen, that I could be the architect of it, but it’s still not something I can intentionally commit to.”
“But if we aren’t good for each other,” I say. “If we come to the realization that we never would have been, even then. That we were right to call it off?”
“Is what you want to hear that the ending of us will be just as painful as last time?” Liam’s face sets like concrete.
“I want to hear that you’ll be honest,” I say tiredly. “I don’t want you to feel trapped, or like you need to lie to me to protect my feelings.”
His jaw rolls. “I swear to be honest if you do the same.”
“I swear,” I agree.
He moves the discussion along, but it isn’t lost on me that we didn’t really define what we’re swearing to be honest about.
“The second scenario is that you eventually realize you won’t ever love me the way you once thought you might have been able to. Maybe you get ninety percent there, and that’s as full as the tank gets. Which, I suppose, is a sort of heartbreak of its own.”
It’s a thoughtful assessment, however unlikely, since I can’t imagine my love for Liam ever capping out at ninety percent, but I nod and don’t refute him this time.
The air between us is crackling.
“Are you angry at me, too?” I ask.
“Are we angry at each other?” Liam returns. “Or is there a better word for it?”
“Aggrieved? Vexed? Irate?”
Liam blinks. “I’m certainly aggrieved that you forced me to cut myself out of your life. I’m vexed you still can’t say thank you for what I did—”
“And you can’t say sorry.”
“And I’m irate about that song you wrote because it’s the least fair thing I’ve ever heard, and I also want to listen to it on repeat for the rest of my life.”
Liam stares at me hard, then rubs both hands over his face, eventually knotting them in his hair. “The third scenario,” he says, words aimed at the ground, “is that we realize we are good for each other. That we were wrong to call it off. And rather than break your heart, I steal it instead.”
He looks at me and lowers his hands to his sides while the heart in question thrums. I’d be lying to myself claiming I never hoped he’d propose this alternative.
“Right now,” he says, voice low, “I think these three scenarios have equal chances of actualizing. There’s no front-runner. I’ve made my peace with the outcome being what it may, and if we’re going to do this, I want you to make peace with it too.”
Despite the loaded language and careful negotiations we’re navigating, it occurs to me that this is no different from the start of any relationship.
You fall in love, and your heart gets broken.
You don’t fall in love, and it hurts your heart in a different way.
Or you simply fall in love, full stop.
I asked Liam to break my heart, and he countered by saying we’ll have to roll the dice instead. Which is certainly the more authentic way to do this, and, as long as I am feeling anything, any real human experience, surely it will be worth writing about.
“I will be okay with any outcome,” I answer him.
Liam nods at me once, his eyes gaining rapid warmth, and moves back to the counter to whisk his eggs. We finish preparing breakfast in contemplative silence, then eat across from each other at a table near a sunny window overlooking the street beyond.
Liam takes a sip of his coffee and sets his gaze on me. “Why didn’t you ever call?” he asks. “I was—waiting.”
Out of nowhere, a tear stripes down my cheek. Something about his tone, those words, the idea that he was always on the other end of a line. “Because I thought of dropping out all the time,” I admit. “That feeling never really went away. And I was worried…”
“That I would have been disappointed,” he guesses, “if you had quit.” After a minute he whispers, “I wouldn’t have, Paige.”
“I wasn’t convinced of that,” I whisper back.
He nods, accepting this. “I need you to admit something before I agree to this.”
“Admit what?” I ask, my nervous system fizzing.
His stare is the edge of a knife at my throat. “Admit to me,” he says, “that I’ve been on your mind. That this reunion isn’t as impulsive as you’d lead me to believe. Admit you’ve thought about reaching out to me every single day since you graduated.”
I could deny it, but what’s the point? I’ve lost my opacity where Liam Bishop is concerned. He hasn’t lately been on my mind. He halfway owns it. Has since the first.
“I almost invited you,” I tell him. “To the ceremony.”
Hurt blankets him. “I would have been there.”
“I know you would’ve. But you also would’ve asked me what’s next, and I didn’t have an answer to that question yet.”
Liam scrapes a hand along his jaw. “As happy as I am that you found a way to come to me, Paige, it bothers me that you needed an excuse to reach out and it wasn’t just about reconnecting because you were ready.”
I was waiting.
“I think,” Liam goes on, “it’s a sign that something is still wrong here. We could try to solve it now, but I’m not sure that’s actually what’s best for your creative process. And given that you’re already writing about me, I don’t want to do anything to interrupt your momentum.”
“What do you suggest?” I quietly ask.
“We could … try to fall back in love before the hard conversations,” he says, in a tone like he’s convincing himself against better judgment. “We’ll just—put that reckoning off until we get more comfortable with each other.”
“Comfortable,” I repeat. “Are you currently uncomfortable with me?”
“In some ways,” he murmurs, eyes dropping to my neck. “In others, no. Don’t tell me it’s not the same for you.”
Liam’s right, of course. About needing an excuse to reach out, and about our comfort levels being undetermined.
His plan does make the most sense where songwriting is concerned, though it’s ass-backward in terms of how to healthily rebuild a relationship. I could fight him on it, but I’m not exactly eager to immediately rehash our worst days.
So, we’ll kick it down the road.
“Break my heart or steal it,” I muse, repeating his earlier sentiment.
Liam’s head tilts as he watches me across the knobby wooden table. A ray of light paints his skin golden. He nods.
“You and I will be … together.” I gulp.
“Three months. One summer. You come with me on the road. You sleep in my bedroom. You eat what I eat, and you go where I go.”
He’s thought about this. Strategized it.
“So, I’ll be a roadie.”
“Basically,” Liam allows with a small shrug. “But I do think the others we’ll be spending time with are musically inclined enough to help inspire you.”
Misha said she’d be going on Penelope’s tour. That’s at least one more familiar face.
“I’ll quit my job,” I say. “I have enough money saved up to cover my half of the rent over the next three months, and my own meals on the road.”
“My hotels and transportation are all expensed, so that’ll be no issue,” Liam says. “Anything else you might need, I’ll cover.”
I still. “Are you … well-off now?”
“I’m not rolling around in money.” He shrugs. “But I do fine.”
“So we’re not going to have to share ice-cream cones anymore?”
His face changes as he recalls the memory. He shakes it off. “One more thing.”
“Hmm?”
“No sex.”
Liam’s words pop like two small firecrackers aimed straight down each of my lungs. I can’t breathe for all the sparks.
Sex—physical intimacy—isn’t a factor I’d even considered.
Not that I’d considered it specifically wouldn’t happen. I just hadn’t considered it at all. Being with Liam and being intimate with Liam are two separate conundrums.
But now that he’s taken it off the table, I feel like something integral to my well-being has been ripped away.
“No sex,” I repeat.
“No physical intimacy at all,” Liam corrects. “I’m not even going to kiss you.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat, glance down at my body before I can resist it.
“Not that, Paige.” Liam’s tone changes. He stands up, walks over to the wooden bench I’m seated on. He straddles it but doesn’t touch me. “You remember what I said to you, back then?”
I flick my eyes up to his light brown irises. “I was made to your exact specifications.”
“Mm-hmm,” he rumbles, gaze dipping down to my collarbone, my breasts, my waist and hips and bare legs. “Still true.”
“Then what?” I whisper.
He lets a beat pass before he says—to my right kneecap—“It was intense, between us. For me, it was emotionally intense. Sex with you was … emotional.”
“And intense?” I joke.
Liam’s lips twist.
“Too intense,” I try again.
His shoulders curve in. Liam’s eyes move from my kneecap to my face. “Last night—touching your wrist outside your door. It was just a reminder of how much I…” His head shakes once. “The truth is, Paige, I don’t trust your intentions yet.”
My stomach buckles, but he’s being more than fair. I came to Liam Bishop after four years asking for something out of left field. He has every right to be on guard. To withhold parts of himself from me when he’s being so free with others.
“I don’t know if I trust my intentions either,” I whisper. “Because writing the best music I’m capable of means a lot to me. But so do you.”
“We’ll navigate it together,” he offers.
I nod.
“I have to leave a few walls up,” he continues. “For my sanity. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t be sorry about needing to keep your body private. It’s your body.”
And I really do mean it. But Liam’s caveat also pares open our different realities in a way nothing else has yet.
He’ll be holding himself back from me. I’ll be offering myself up to him.
If I’d only asked him to love me from the start, instead of asking him to break me, would that have been more honest? And is it horrible of us to consider that even if we crumble, he will still have re-earned my faith in him, and I will still have a pile of songs to remember him by?
“For now,” Liam murmurs, like he can hear my brain spinning, “why don’t we focus on the falling in love part?”
“The falling in love part is already working,” I manage throatily. “You make a really good breakfast plate.”
Liam smiles, a little sadly. “We should establish a baseline.”
I blink. “A what?”
“To track our progress. For the project. To see if you ever get to ninety percent or beyond.” When I only keep staring, he rolls his eyes and asks, “How in love with me are you today?”
I think on it, tilting my head. “One percent?”
“One percent?” Liam repeats, offended.
“Okay, like, eight percent, objectively. Due to, you know, our history, and current feelings and whatnot. Sorry, I thought you wanted a baseline!”
“Eight percent,” he says, “is a perfectly fine baseline.”
“Great. Eight percent it is.”
Liam’s eyes change, burnishing from brown to amber. “When the tour stops in New York, we should get VIP tickets to the concert for Maren and Zara.”
“Fine. Nine percent. Your competitive streak is showing.”
“Same thing for Candice and her fiancée in Chicago.”
“Ten, and you’re maxed out for the day.”
Liam laughs, and it sounds like my ribs are already cracking open. Wide enough for him to reach for my heart and pull it right out of my chest cavity for good.