18. LIAM
18
LIAM
Now
Natalie insisted that I walk Emerson back to her place when everyone was leaving. I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t.
Selfishly, I can’t help but feel the urge to spend time with Emerson and be close to her again like we used to be. See if she’s still the person I remember when we were. If we can still be them. Learn if there is hope for even a friendship.
Emerson, on the other hand, exudes that I’m the last person on Earth she wants to be around. I watch her leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, head tilted up, glaring at the ceiling.
She turns her head at the worst time. Looking over at us at the right (wrong) moment, Natalie holds onto my waist, standing on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek in a territorial way.
Emerson walks away.
“Make sure she’s okay,” Natalie tells me. I nod.
***
We take the elevator in silence. Outside of Natalie’s apartment, I turn to Emerson. “Lead the way.”
She spins toward the right and gestures her hand.
We walk in silence for three blocks. Before, the silence between us was comfortable. Now, the silence is meters between us.
“How have you been?” I break the silence.
“Good.”
“And work? ”
“Busy.”
“Are you feeling better? Your coworker said you were sick.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a director now. Promotion?” She nods. “No surprise there. Congrats, States.” My mouth lingers on her nickname.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. How is your mom?”
“The same.”
I thought I wanted whatever she would give me, but this is ridiculous. I need more. “I’ll take the hint. You don’t want to talk.”
“That’s not true,” Emerson seethes with her first sign of any emotion.
“Then what States? This has been a one-sided conversation. You haven’t said more than ten words. Talk. Talk to me, please,” I beg of her. There isn’t anyone else I’ve ever begged for, and this isn't the first time I’ve begged for her.
“I’m processing.” She exhales. “You, me, now Natalie? I’m trying to figure out how this happened. I thought we’d—never mind.” Emerson catches herself. She rubs her temples.
I blink, surprised she cut right to it.
“You thought what?” I ask her.
“It doesn’t matter, Liam.” She lets out a reluctant laugh. “None of it matters. I’m engaged—”
“I know,” I grunt.
“You’re with Natalie.” I hold off on the urge to correct her, unsure if now is the time to confirm or deny that. “Just if—If it did—”
“We’d be the ones together,” I finish her sentence. “States,” I plead.
“Don’t call me that. Not anymore.” Her movements halt. Standing completely still, her eyes shut, she takes a big inhale. Releasing the exhale slowly. Her chest, which was moving quickly, slows with each deep breath.
I don’t think her heart is racing for the same reasons mine is .
“I feel the same way,” I say earnestly.
Emerson turns her head to me.
I don’t know if I’m happy she’s even looking at me or if I wish she didn’t. Seeing the longing and hurt on her face and the color of her eyes has me screaming. Everything in me is screaming and fighting with her to speak. Give me the words I know she is holding back.
She opens her mouth, and all the hope in the world gets the best of me for a split moment. She blinks as if she’s resetting herself. Reminding herself of where she is, what recently occurred, and why we are what we are. Her eyes return to their standard shade, and she shut her mouth.
The moment is over; we are back to a nauseating silence.
It takes us another ten minutes to reach her building. Neither of us spoke another word to each other.
Stopping out front, Emerson turns to face me.
“This is me,” she says, licking her lips. “Thanks for walking me home. I guess we’ll be seeing each other around.” Her words are slow and punctuated.
“I’spose.”
Neither of us takes a step to go in opposite directions.
Taking a deep breath and eyes locked on Emerson, I pass selfish as if I’m passing go on a Monopoly board and reaching greedy bastard because I want more of her time, more of her. I want to forget that there are other people involved. Pretend we are still best friends, have a drink, talk, and laugh for the rest of the night—or eternity if I was allowed—just as we did that night in Lisbon.
A small part of me believes that she feels the same way.
I suspected it all night.
Even now, the frayed string between us, we are both pulling on it from opposite ends, hoping it’ll pull us together instead of finally splitting in half, unsalvageable.
I’m not ready to let go.
Not until I know. I have questions I need answers to .
But even if I get the answers—responses I’ll like or loathe—I don’t know if I’d be able to relinquish that small part of her I hold coveted. It’s not because I still love her; it’s because she was my best friend.
“Wait. Sta—” I catch myself before calling her States again. I don’t even know if I should use her name. She told me once that I was the only person to call her Emerson. Is that still true? But her name, Emerson, is sitting there. My mouth still knows precisely how it should form to say it because every part of me remembers every part of her. “Can I use your bathroom? Promise to leave then.”
Emerson nods.
We take the elevator to her apartment, floor twelve. As soon as we step off, her shoulders drop. She’s relaxed.
“Do you enjoy living in this part of the city?”
“I do. The neighborhood is nice despite the longer commute to work. Depending on the day, I bike or take the train.”
I follow behind her to her door. A chuckle escapes my mouth.
“What’s funny?” Her stare is pointed.
Is it wrong that I’ll take this irritated and perplexed version of Emerson over no version of her at all?
“I still think about how terrible you were trying to navigate the train the day we went to Lagos. You were insanely adamant that your side was in the right direction, just to be wrong and then have to sprint with your bag across the platforms.”
“Hey! It said Lagos, I swear.” Her laugh falls out, and I think my whole world stops. If it were humanly possible, I’d bottle up her laugh and open it every morning when I wake.
“Yeah, sure.” I smile at her. “At least you can navigate us home now.”
“I’m a lot better now. You know. . . the whole signs being in English really helps.” We’re both laughing now. I missed her laugh. It’s the type of laugh that takes control of your whole body. Mouth wide open, belly laughs. Terribly ugly, but I love it terribly. “Natalie is the one that’s terrible at it.”
The comment snaps us back to reality.
What even is this reality? One with her in it, so close yet further away than ever. She’s here, and I’m where? Drifting somehow parallel to Emerson, figuring my shit out with another girl? Emerson is finally in love with someone that isn’t me?
The answer should be easy. But it isn’t.
The answer should be us . But it isn’t.
We break eye contact, both looking down at the mention of Natalie’s name.
Luckily, we are at what must be her door.
I’m standing adjacent to her. Emerson digs in her bag for her keys, but I put my arm out to stop her. It lands on the door with a thud.
“Emer—”
“Why are you here?” she says breathily. Her back is to me, but I can tell she is fighting the same urge—an urge to ignore everything and fall back into us.
“Hayes Hotels now has a Chicago office. You would know that if you took the meeting earlier today.”
She spins around to face me. I take a step in front of her. My other arm comes up to cage her in from the other side.
“I meant right now .”
That’s an answer I’m not sure she’s ready to hear.
The entire walk home, I wished for her to say something. Anything. Curse at me, yell at me, put a spell on me, whatever—anything to show that she still cared. That somewhere deep down, despite what happened and the time between us, there is something still there. That Emerson struggled these past three years as much as I did because from where I am on the sidelines of her life, it sure seems as if she didn’t.
“Why are you here?” She asks again.
“Did you love me?” I ask her .
I catch her off guard with the question. It’s an answer to her question. To get what she wants to know, she has to give me what I need. I need to know if she loved me. Was what Chloe said earlier accurate?
“You lost the opportunity to know that. And it’s not fair to ask me this now, and you know that.” Emerson shakes her head. “If that’s why you wanted to come up, then I need you to lea—”
“Why do you never want to talk about this, Emerson? What are you so afraid of?”
“Afraid?! I’m not afraid of anything. We were friends, nothing more.”
“We were not friends, and you know it. I don’t kiss, touch, or think about my friends as I did you.”
“Okay, fine. We weren’t only friends! Does it make you happy to hear that? It shouldn’t because it doesn’t matter how I felt about you then. . . or now. I’m with someone else!”
“Stop rubbing it in.” The fact that ‘Emerson is engaged’ should be tattooed on my head given how many times I’ve been reminded in the past week about it. “Are you in love with him?”
“Don’t be cruel, Liam.”
Her hands come to the sides of her head. She runs them through her hair, pulling on it.
“Are you?” My mouth finds her ear. I whisper, hot breath trickling down her neck. “If you are, I’ll—I’ll be okay. I’ll be happy for you. It might make me a prick, but I can’t lie to you. There is a part of me that hopes you. . . aren’t.” I rest my forehead on hers.
It takes her a few moments, but she shakes her head. The movement moves my head with hers.
“Say it out loud, States.”
“I can’t,” she whispers, looking up at me through her lashes. Her face shows that the admittance pains her to say.
I pull my forehead away from hers.
“Figured.”
“What is that supposed to mean? You figured,” she huffs .
“Well. . .” Just say it. Just do it. “You can’t admit it now, and you couldn’t admit that you loved me then because it scared you.” The reins of my composure are about to snap. Her back is pressed up against the door, my arms still caging her in, but my body is closer to hers. Gravitating toward her with each word I say. “You were finally enough for someone. Unconditionally enough for me. So you pretended. You pretended we were some platonic fluffer of a relationship with each other. Pretended none of it mattered to you. Pretended the way I touched you didn’t burn through your entire body. Pretended you weren’t the person you’ve seen through my eyes. Pretended you didn’t love me.” My eyes close. I take a deep breath. Opening my eyes, I stare directly at Emerson. “I don’t believe after what we had, you are capable of turning around and having something greater with anyone else. Now, please. Answer. The. Question.”
“I already did.” Her voice is faint.
“Not that one. My original question.” It comes out as a growl.
I know the answer.
And I think I know the exact moment—not the moment I fell in love with her, which is wrapped around my bones like skin, even all these years later. But what I mean is when she fell in love with me.
We were in Tortola in the BVIs five summers ago. It was a year after we met and the second time that Emerson joined the boys and me for our summer holiday. We chartered a boat to take the six of us; Callum’s little sister, Audrey, and Beatrix came with us. Without my mum around, I needed the two predominant women in my life to meet the third. I was the one to insist on the girls coming with us.
Emerson was at the back of the boat, lounging on the leather couch-bed. Wearing a dark green string bikini that made her eyes greener. She was alone but watching us. It’s what she does best, a trait I don’t think many appreciate. The patience to be absorbent as a sponge. I always wonder what she is thinking in these moments. I never ask. It feels quite like I’m invading a part of her mind that I’m not sure she would share.
I asked her this time, though. I made my way to the back of the boat.
“What’s on that mind of yours, States?”
“Thoughts.”
“Yeah? ‘Bout me, ey?” She rolled her eyes at me.
“I’m always thinking about you.” An admission I didn’t expect.
“What about me?”
Emerson stands up, standing on the back of the bed. She turns around and gracefully dives off.
“Come in and find out,” she taunted me from the clear turquoise water. From where I stand on the boat, I can see her pulling on the strings of her bikini bottoms.
I slip my shirt over my head; Emerson fixated on me from where she treads. Her eyes darken as they roam my torso. Her bottom lip curled beneath her teeth.
A moment later, I’m in the water with her. A cannonball that decks her with a splash. We swam to a nearby shore together, tucked in a cove where the rest couldn’t see us. She slipped her bottoms into my pocket before hitting dry land. Emerson climbed on top of me while I lay on a flat rock with waves crashing over us. The sparkle in her eyes differed from all the others as she sank onto me. She leaned forward and whispered into my ear.
“How you could be my forever.”
That’s the day I knew she loved me. No matter if she never said it, I told myself she felt it.
I love that memory, but I get angry when I sit in it for too long. I let us both down by not doing anything about the emotions that were surging between us that trip—or any of our time together, for that matter.
She treaded water, waiting for me to join her. I tread in her past, afraid that I wasn’t the lifesaver but the weight that drowned her.
“Yes,” present-day Emerson finally confirms .
“I loved you,” I whisper painfully. “You know?”
“I know,” she whispers back.
“Did you?”
I know she knew. I said it repeatedly, hoping that words would speak louder than actions for once.
“Liam—” She’s pleading with me with her eyes. Silently begging me to put us both out of our misery right now by, I don’t know, leaving? Kissing her? Telling her that it doesn’t matter if she won’t ever love me and that I’ll take anything from her? I don’t know.
“Emerson—”
“You broke my heart.” I already knew this, but confirmation, hearing it come from her lips, it hurts. It’s a reminder that, at one point, I was almost the person to rebuild it.
“And you broke mine,” I say.