Chapter 31
July, Four Years Ago
We come crashing down thirty minutes after Liam gets back to Knoxville.
Later, I’ll replay those thirty good minutes and wish we’d managed forty-five.
I’ll compare them to the last half hour we spent together in his hospital room in Nashville. Hand massages, ordering takeout options for his mom (who had gone off to pester the doctors), recounting for Liam his funniest lines from the day before to lighten his mood.
Before I left him to make the drive home for my next shift, Liam had looked at me lucidly and said, “I’m sorry about the I love you thing.”
I smirked, but my heart was thrumming. “You remember that, huh?”
It was only thirty-six hours past his confession, but still.
He scratched lazily at his chest, grinning. “Every word.”
“Hall pass.” I shrugged casually, though my emotions were the polar opposite of casual.
Liam arched an amused brow. He lifted my hand to his mouth, and his words came out slowly. “I don’t need an I-love-you hall pass, Paige. I’m only sorry for how unromantic it must’ve been for you. And I promise to do better next time.”
I froze then, catching his gaze. “Next…?”
“And I promise to be sober next time.”
That’s what I replay in my head on a cruel loop after we’re over. The all-encompassing look in his eye that said I love you, and soon you’ll hear it and believe it at the same time.
Our final day, Liam gets off the Greyhound from Savannah, where he’d flown with his mom from Nashville and spent the last week resting up.
I meet him at the bus stop, my heart raw on his behalf.
I fuss over his sling and ask how he’s feeling and when he laughs and looks at me with a shine in his eyes and says, “Fuck, Bristol, I missed you,” I hold his free hand and walk him to my car and drive us straight to an ice-cream shop because that’s what feels right.
Our texts and calls over the week apart have been heavily dominated by medical updates, but now that he’s here and on the mend, I want to show Liam that not everything has changed.
We’re still us, I still want him, and if he says he loves me, this time I’ll say it back, and we’ll figure the rest out together.
He’ll finish his senior year of college, and I’ll stay here in a one-bedroom apartment until he decides what’s next.
I’m here for you, my heart whispers, though sometimes, even in my own mind, it sounds more like I exist for you.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Liam says, his hand squeezing mine as we walk across the verdant grass in World’s Fair Park. He aims me a wide, happy grin.
It’s that you love me, I think, but I say, “I’m listening.”
Liam stops us, turning to face me, still smiling. “I did something, Paige.”
I laugh softly. “You did something?”
“Yeah.”
I tilt my head, looking up at him with amusement. “What did you do?”
Liam kisses me through smiling lips, tasting like chocolate and peanut butter and also my whole fucking world. We get lost in it for a moment, but then he pulls back, eyes shining, and pulls his phone out of his pocket.
“Dear Miss Lancaster,” he starts to read, every word tinged with his smile.
“I’m delighted to offer you a spot in Belmont’s songwriting major this fall.
Your tracks were impressive for a novice, and I have to say, I’d love the opportunity to teach you.
The scholarship information is attached.
Thanks again for the application. See you in class. ”
It doesn’t even compute at first. I’m not certain he spoke in English. I’m almost positive I’ve never heard the words songwriting or scholarship or major in my life.
“What,” I say dumbly.
Liam holds my shoulder with his unstrapped hand. “You got into a songwriting program, Paige. At Belmont, no less.”
My brain is hurting. “But I didn’t apply for that.”
He laughs freely, like I’m cute. “I know. I applied you for it. They were advertising a scholarship opening in the program for a first-generation college student. I guess there’s a lot of nepotism and they were taking some heat about it,” he says.
“You got the spot, Paige, and the tuition’s paid for. You won’t have any debt at all.”
“You sent them my songs?” I ask, my muscles seizing. “The recordings you have on your phone—that’s what you sent them?”
His smile begins to falter, though he’s clinging to it, still thoroughly happy. “Yeah, well, they wanted some samples with the application, so I—”
“What about, like, my high school transcript, and my Social Security number?” My voice is shrill now. “How’d you get that?”
“Zara,” he says, swallowing. The smile finally vanishes. “And—well, I think Maren’s the one who actually…”
My hand goes over my mouth, tremoring. Every cell in my body is in crisis.
“Paige.” Liam’s voice is hesitant, gentle. Like he’d use with a toddler. “This is a really good, really cool thing. That professor called you impressive and said he would love the opportunity to teach you. Did you hear that part?”
Over the sound of your betrayal? my brain screeches. Nope!
“You got my sisters involved in this?” I ask. Because surely my ears aren’t working right. Though my brain is pumping memories forward like a film reel.
Otherwise you’ll end up like Folly
What are you planning to do now?
Figure out where we’re going
For the record, I think that’s a shame
The first stage of grief—denial—draws to a close.
And anger floods me.
I’m thinking of Maisy, our biggest fight, that embarrassing poem the entire school got to read because she went behind my back and published it. Everybody learned how sad and pathetic I felt because my mom decided I was her last straw.
I forgave Maisy for that too easily, too quickly.
The shaking in my limbs stops. I go almost deathly still. “This is the biggest breach of trust,” I say, voice low, “that I can possibly fathom you having done to me.”
“To you?” Liam blinks, then wets his lips. “Paige, I did this for you.”
Tears smart in my eyes and my head goes side to side.
Why would I want to be alone in the ocean if—
“No,” I say, voice cracking. “You did this because I’m not enough for you unless I’m aspiring to some goal other people can see and hear.
It’s why you corrected me in front of your family when I told them I was just a waitress.
Because I’m not enough for you otherwise.
Not enough for you, not for Evan, not for Maren, not even for my own fucking mother. Not enough, not ever.” My voice breaks.
Hurt slams into him, visibly, painfully, and it makes me even angrier. Why does Liam get to feel hurt by that?
“You think I’m capable of imagining you that way?
” His voice gets sharper with every word.
“Not enough for me. Not enough? I could scour the planet for a better experience than being with you over a million years and never be satisfied. I would give up all other sound in an instant before I’d give up the sound of your voice.
Your taste. Your feel. The fucking sight of you.
I’m out here imagining our future—all I’ve done for months is think about our future—and you think you’re not enough for me? ”
“Is it conditional on that?” I shriek, pointing at his phone. “Is our future conditional on me becoming the version of me you want?”
He shakes his head. “There’s no—there’s no version of you I’m looking for. I’m just looking at you as you already are. And you deserve more than a boyfriend who lets you bury what you love more than anything. I’d be no better than Evan.”
“Evan never betrayed my trust!”
“Neither of us believes that,” Liam mutters.
Evan and I never fought either, I think privately. Even and I never felt either.
Now, I feel everything.
“Well, Evan never buried anything,” I snap, knowing I’m losing ground the more Liam’s logic teases out. “You’ve just unearthed things I never asked for.”
“Only your vitality,” Liam says. “Only something you love and are really fucking good at that’s also vital to your whole personality as I know it.”
I sputter. “Can you even see how unhealthy that is? That if you wrap up your whole being into one thing, if you lose it, you’ll be—”
Nothing.
My eyes flick to his cast before I can resist the urge. Liam notices.
“At least I never lied to myself,” he murmurs, “about how much it meant to me.”
I swallow. “There is a difference between lying to myself and protecting myself.”
Liam pockets his phone and rubs his hand over his eyes.
He gazes out at the park, then focuses back on me.
“When you first played me ‘The Pitcher,’ it felt like you were gifting me something. A little piece of your heart that sewed itself to mine. And it was like—” Again, he looks over my head.
“Like you made something that was as much for me as it was for you.”
I nod my agreement, terrified where he’s going with this.
“The act—the act of sharing it,” he chokes out. “It bonded us. That song made me feel connected to my own life and all the people in it in a way I couldn’t have ever processed or experienced on my own.”
I sob into my hands, conflicted beyond measure.
“You have to keep sharing it, Paige. It’d be a crime to cut yourself off from the possibility of giving other people the same feeling your music gave me.”
It comes to me then, what might be the biggest difference between me and Liam.
His passion was selfless. Half of Liam’s own enjoyment of the game of baseball came from other people’s love for it.
My passion is stingy and narrow and ungenerous. I coddle it, obsess over it, suffocate it. I’ll give it a small gasp of oxygen and then lock it in a dark room.
To protect it, I reason with myself. Letting other people have a piece of my heart will warp the passion out of it, surely it will.
My gaze flashes back to his sling.
Liam can’t grasp that I have the capability to do something but won’t, and I can’t understand why he didn’t protect himself when he still had the chance.
“Stop looking at my arm like it’s a metaphor, Paige.”