Chapter 7
March, Four Years Ago
On Wednesday evening, I get cut from the restaurant about fifteen minutes earlier than the time I told Liam I’d be free. I cross the short distance over to Union Avenue Books, humming a made-up something under my breath.
Zara’s at the checkout counter, chatting with our dad on the phone.
He’s lobbying us to come visit him in France for Christmas and called me earlier today to ask if I had a passport yet (I don’t).
Before she hangs up, I shout a series of French words at him I’m actually shocked he understands well enough to find amusing.
Even though Zara and I live together, we sometimes go days without crossing paths, so tonight’s my first opportunity to debrief her while we wait to see if Liam will show.
“So you guys are just going to hang out and read?” she clarifies. “Platonically?”
Our eyes scan out the shop front window to find Liam parallel parking. His windows are rolled down, tanned side profile on display.
“Basically,” I say, attempting to ignore the competence of his parking skills and what it shouldn’t but does imply in my brain.
“Does Evan know about this?”
“Evan has tons of female friends.” Which is true enough but not an answer to her question.
Some of his female friends are actually “our” friends from the restaurant, but since Evan grew up in Knoxville, he’s also got a slew of people in his life I don’t have the bandwidth or energy to monitor.
Tonight, for example, when we got off work at the same time, he kissed me and told me he was grabbing a cold one with some high school friends.
Then he sauntered toward Old City without an invitation or a backward glance.
To Evan’s credit, he knows my Wednesdays are ritualistic. Zara works the closing shift at the bookshop and I always get cut around five, so I’ve gotten in the habit of reading here and waiting for her to finish before we grab dinner.
“I think,” I say, as Liam opens his truck door, my eyes lingering on his jeans and weathered Braves T-shirt, “that it’s like, a wholesomeness thing for him?
He mentioned feeling tired of the party scene.
He’s also a bit of a player, so maybe he’s trying to balance that out because of delayed guilt or something. ”
I leave out the part about Liam missing his dad, mostly because it’s his story to share, but also because I’m still not sure how I’m specifically supposed to help with that.
“Hmm,” Zara ponders. “What are you getting out of it?”
“An education on baseball, apparently.”
Liam pushes open the shop door, his eyes scanning for me. His dark brown hair is half damp, just starting to curl at the tips, and there’s a small, fresh sunburn across the bridge of his straight nose.
“Hey.” The word comes out scratched. “Sorry I’m late.”
“It’s four fifty-nine,” Zara informs him, chin on her hand. She blinks at Liam rapidly from behind her counter.
He inclines his head. “Zara. Read any good dragon books lately?”
“No, but I did read a baseball romance I could recommend.”
He smirks. “Point me to it.”
“Paige knows where.” She shoos us away from the counter when a woman approaches with an armful of paperbacks.
I gesture for Liam to follow me into the aisles with a finger wag. His grin widens.
“I don’t actually want to read about baseball,” he whispers to me.
“I’d be worried if you did,” I whisper back.
“I’ve had it up to here with baseball. We started two-a-days this week.”
“Two-a-days?” I pull a spine off the shelf and spin to face him, handing Liam a beachy rom-com my coworker recommended for me. He accepts it without giving the cover a glance and nods at me. “Two practices per day.”
“Is that why your hair’s all sweaty?”
“It’s wet because I showered for you, smart-ass.”
“That is the sign of a good friend.”
He nods at my plain black, collared dress, which he immediately clocks as a uniform. “I forgot to ask last weekend. What restaurant do you work at?”
“Emilia, in Market Square.”
“Is it any good?”
“Delicious, if you can afford a fifteen-dollar bread plate and twenty-dollar cocktail.”
“Not even on a good day,” he grumbles, his gaze finally dropping to the book.
That’s when I notice the not-insignificant hole in the left sleeve of his T-shirt.
He’d pulled up outside in a beat-up Chevrolet truck that looks like it was lifted from a junkyard, and he’s on a full-ride athletic scholarship, which probably means Liam doesn’t have time for a job between school and practice.
He must live off a small allowance from his mom.
“Me neither,” I admit, offering him a smile. “I can’t even afford these books, but Zara lets us put them back as long as we don’t dog-ear the pages or crack the spines.”
“Noted. Do I get to choose yours?” He holds up his book to me.
I was only trying to throw him off with that selection, but I say, “Sure.”
Liam locates and hands me Ready Player One.
“I already read this, like, ten years ago,” I say. “I always read my sister’s leftovers.”
“Funny.” Liam holds up the book I gave him. “I already read this, because same.”
“You’ve got sisters?”
He nods. “Two of them. I’m the youngest.”
“So that’s where our spark of friendship is coming from,” I joke. “We’ve both got baby-of-the-family energy.”
“You do not,” Liam says, “have baby-of-the-family energy.”
“You’d steal my birthright so flippantly?”
“The birthright of being told you’re perfect and having everything handed to you?”
“All the hand-me-downs were definitely handed to me,” I retort, though the part about being told I was perfect is categorically untrue.
I was never told I was perfect by my dad, and I was never told I was imperfect.
Now that I think about it, he’s never held a referendum on my future at all.
It didn’t matter to him if I went to college or not.
It didn’t matter if I left Bristol or stayed.
Dad has been quietly supportive of me all my life.
He attended every school concert, always kissed me on the forehead when he’d pass me in the hall.
But he never actively parented me, correctly assuming my older sisters had taken up that mantle long ago.
When I was a high school senior, Dad started talking of retiring, selling the house.
He knew someone who’d moved abroad to become an agritourist, and Dad couldn’t get the idea off his mind.
He’d been working in the same warehouse my entire life and was ready to be done with it, to go explore the big wide world.
We talked more about his plans for the future than we did about mine.
He’d poke me about it occasionally, but I’d just tell him I hadn’t decided yet.
In truth, I avoided talking to him about my interest in music beyond high school because I knew it reminded him of my mother, and I hated being the source of that sorrow on his face.
I think, whether intentional or not, Dad viewed my graduation as the light at the end of his single-parent tunnel. And I sometimes wonder if he used up most of his domestic patience on the four daughters who came before me and didn’t have enough left to give me an equal fifth.
I shake off the memories, focusing back on Liam. His deep brown irises seem to swirl as he watches me process.
“Maybe I don’t have baby of the family energy,” I admit.
“You have rising action energy.”
“What the heck,” I ask, “is that?”
Liam pulls the book out of my hand and sets it against his.
He places them both on a shelf and leans his shoulder on it.
“You know when you’re reading a novel or watching a movie, and the whole first half is leading up to some crazy reveal or shocking self-discovery that you know is coming even though you don’t have all the information to figure it out yet? ”
I consider this. “Yeah.”
“That’s your energy, Paige Lancaster.”
“Rising action energy,” I repeat, tasting the words. Liking it. “So, what you’re saying is, you need more information to figure me out.”
“I’m saying you need more information to figure you out.”
“That’s wise.”
“Well, I am in college.”
I hit him on the arm, and Liam laughs. “You don’t have baby-of-the-family energy either.”
“Right,” he says. “I have falling action energy. Student athlete at the beginning of the end of his physical prime who is probably too injured to go pro languishes in a small-town bookstore, reading the names of athletes who will go down in history, of which he is not one.”
He says it with a self-deprecating laugh, but it’s the second vulnerable, personal admission he’s offered me, and maybe that’s because vulnerable, personal admissions are written into the source code of our friendship.
Which means at some point I’ll have to meet him there.
“I think Wes Anderson wrote a movie about that,” I say. “But anyway, Knoxville isn’t a small town. I’d know.”
He holds up placating hands. “Didn’t mean to offend.”
“Where are you from, anyway?”
“Savannah.”
I nod at his Braves T-shirt. “Should’ve guessed. The Savannah Braves.”
“The Atlanta Braves.”
“Are you sure?”
A grin is creeping back in. “Pretty sure.”
“Maybe we should start reading these books we’ve already read.”
“I have a better idea.” Liam shifts his weight onto his toes and rests his hands on my shoulders. “Close your eyes.”
When I do as instructed, I instantly notice the absence of our eye contact.
“Now what?”
The ghost of his minty breath steals over my face. “Spin.”
I turn to the left, spinning in a few slow circles.
“Stop,” Liam whispers. He’s behind me now. One of his hands moves to my wrist. He lifts my hand, tucking away all my fingers except one, and then backs away from me. “Now, take two steps forward.”
One, two.
My pointer finger catches on a spine.
“There’s your book,” Liam says.
If this is his idea of platonic, then I am terrified to see him flirt.
Equally terrifying is the realization that with one brief touch to my shoulders and another against my hand, Liam Bishop managed to activate more of my visceral want than I have felt possibly ever.
And I genuinely believe he didn’t intend it.
Shock rolls through me as I contend with the fact that for the first time in a year and a half, I’m questioning my desire for Evan.
I’m questioning if I ever actually had a desire for Evan, or if I just assumed it to be there, so I never inspected to see if it was.
The book is a young adult fantasy novel I’ve also already read, but I can’t bear to say it.
Instead, I pull the book off the shelf, wordlessly drag Liam back into the other aisle, and say, “Your turn.” He obliges me, and I repeat the performance, albeit more clumsily than he managed it.
Liam winds up with a historical fiction romance adventure on the high seas.
We settle into the same two armchairs where we first met eighteen months ago. I put on my headphones and pull my knees up to my chest, propping up my surprise book. Liam hunches over with his forearms on his lower thighs and pushes open his novel’s flimsy paperback cover.
He thinks I don’t notice, because I’m (actually) listening to music and (supposedly) focusing on my first chapter.
But when a laugh pushes past his lips and his head shakes once in amusement, or maybe disbelief—not at the first sentence of his book, because he’s still on the title page, but something else going through his mind—it’s in my direct line of sight, just over the brim of my hardback.
That day, I notice everything.