Sophia #2
He turned me around and took my face in both hands — big enough that his fingers slid back into my wet hair — and said it against my mouth.
“I do.” Then he kissed me, deep and wet and in no hurry about it, one more time.
“Drink that while it’s hot,” he said, when he finally let me go. “You let it go cold every single time.”
“I do not—”
“You do.” And he was already moving — the stairs, the front door — a minute later his truck turned over and pulled out, and left me standing in my own hall with my mouth still warm and the rest of me a good deal less composed than it had been a minute before.
I drank the coffee while it was hot. Mostly to spite him.
I was two-thirds down it and smiling like a loon at my own wall when somebody knocked.
It would be Steph — we’d had brunch on the books since Thursday, and she runs early on the mornings the baby has her up before the birds. I pulled the door open with the loon-smile still on me, already halfway into a hello.
It was Liam.
“Oh.” The smile rearranged itself into something more careful. “I was expecting Steph. We’re having brunch.”
My brother stood on my porch in jeans and a faded UT tee, no jacket, no badge — just Liam, out at my cottage on a Saturday morning, and a shade sheepish about being caught at it.
He came up the step and into the open doorway, and I stayed put in it, the door wide at my back and him not quite over the threshold.
“Hey. I, uh.” He scrubbed the back of his neck.
“We didn’t see you out at the ranch on your days off.
Like usual. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay. ”
“I’ve been busy.” True, and the whole of what I planned to say about it.
He nodded, slow. And then his eyes went — just for a second — past me and across the road, to the drive where a truck had sat twenty minutes ago and didn’t now. “Saw your neighbor pulling out when I rolled up.”
“Are you spying on me?” It came out faster and harder than I’d meant it to.
He huffed a laugh. “No, Soph. I happened to roll up the exact second he was leaving. Swear to God.” The laugh went. “What’s going on there?”
“He’s a friend.”
Liam’s face changed. The easy slid off it and the careful came up underneath, the Ranger choosing his ground. “Do you know who that is? That family?”
“Of course I know who he is. He lives across the road.” My back was all the way up now. “What is this about, Liam?”
“You don’t know everything I know.” Low. Like he was holding something back. “I’m saying be careful. That’s all. Be careful with that one.”
And for the first time in forever, I didn’t soothe it. I didn’t make myself small and fine and manage him back down off my porch the way I always have.
“Liam. I love you. And I need you to not do this. I am a grown woman. I do not need you running plates on my friends, and I do not need you going all Ranger on a man who has been nothing but kind to me.”
He was a great deal more than a friend — I knew that the way I know my own pulse — and I was not about to hand my brother that fact on my front step on a Saturday. That part was mine. For now it stayed mine.
“I’m trying to look out for you.” The rough came up under the careful. “That’s the whole job, Soph. Always has been.”
“I know it has. You can stop carrying it like it’s the only thing keeping me upright.” It was sharp — the closest thing to a fight the two of us had had in years, both of us dug in, the air on the porch gone tight as a wire.
That was when Steph came up the path — Dottie’s bag in one hand, the other under the full curve of her belly, well into her third trimester now and walking like it. She took one look at the back of her husband, one look at me, and the whole of it landed.
“Liam Walker.” From halfway up the path, calm as a Sunday and long past arguing with. “What are you doing?”
“Steph—”
“No.” She reached the steps, set the bag down, and put herself on the porch beside me, easy as walking into her own kitchen.
“You are standing on your grown sister’s porch doing the exact thing you swore to me you weren’t going to do.
She’s thirty years old. Who she lets into her life was never yours to approve.
” Not a raised word in it — she has never once needed to raise her voice, and it is one of the great unfairnesses of my life. “Butt out. Let her live.”
Liam dragged both hands down his face, the way men do when they’ve run out of argument and the woman in front of them is right. He let the breath out slow, and looked at me, and the fight went out of him all at once. “I love you, sis. I’m here if you need me. Always.”
“Love you too.” I met him square. “Just stand down. I know my own heart and mind, Liam.”
“I know you do.” Quiet now, every edge gone off it. “I just worry.”
And we left it there. He kissed the top of Steph’s head, tapped my doorframe once on his way past — the small wordless Liam thing he does in place of the sentence — and went to his truck, and a minute later he rolled away down Sycamore Row.
Steph didn’t say a word until his engine had faded off the end of the row. Then she picked the bag back up, came past me into my kitchen, set it on the counter, and turned around with both eyebrows already climbing.
“I’ll talk to him,” she said seriously. “That part’s mine, not yours.”
Then the grin broke across her whole face like weather turning, and she lowered herself into a chair with both hands and a small groan and patted the seat beside her.
“Now. I want details.” She pointed a finger at me. “And don’t you dare spare the spice.”
I laughed, I couldn’t help myself, and sat myself down beside my sister-in-law, and thought, not for the first time and nowhere close to the last: God, I love this woman.