Chapter 9
March, Four Years Ago
My regret is immediate and existential when I hear Liam’s knock.
Time speeds up, the seconds flattening. I’m frozen in my living room, staring blankly at the front door to my apartment.
Liam knocks again. “Paige?” he calls out, voice muffled. “You in there?”
Am I? Or has my mental health, at the very least, vacated the premises?
The doorknob jiggles.
“Hang on!”
I stiltedly walk toward the door, sucking in a breath. When I pull it open, Liam’s in casual clothes holding a plastic bag full of peaches. His hair seems to lengthen, and his skin goes tanner, every time I see him.
“There was a stall on the side of the road,” he explains.
“Such a Georgia boy,” I mock.
“Joke’s on you.” Liam moves past me into the apartment. “These are from South Carolina.”
With curious eyes, he surveys the living space Zara and I share.
We’re renting in Old North Knoxville and have a surprising amount of space for what we pay.
The living room and kitchen are floored with sun-stained hardwood.
Most of what we have in here is thrifted—a blue velvet couch, a fairy-forest watercolor hung in a tarnishing frame, a few ceramic vases we keep filled with farmers market flowers.
At the far end of the room, there’s a giant French door with a small crack in the window that leads out to a stone patio.
Zara’s room is more easily visible from where Liam is standing; he glances into it, noting the expansive bookshelves and character prints taped to the wall, then swerves in the other direction toward my room.
Floral bedding, a lavender carpet, plain cream walls.
I replaced all the harsh light bulbs that came with the place to give everything a warm glow.
A small stack of books is on my bedside table, a pile of lined journals on the floor beside that.
Liam observes all this, moving over to my record collection and player.
There’s a Taylor Swift special edition on the turntable.
His eyes drift to my bed. The guitar is in the middle of it. Then he glances at my tiny desk where my keyboard sits, protruding over both edges.
“Which one are you teaching me?” he asks.
“Which one do you want to learn?”
“Both?”
“Which one do you want to learn today?” I clarify.
He thinks about it and says, “Guitar.”
I was worried he’d say that.
Hoping he’d say that.
“Okay!” I say too loudly. I grab the guitar off the bed and walk back to the living room, where it’s brighter and safer, and place it on the couch. Liam follows me, depositing his bag of peaches on the kitchen counter.
“Is Evan a musician?” Liam asks. His eyes find me across the kitchen island.
“No.” I rub the heel of my palm against my hip bone. “He was training to be a sommelier. And, um, I broke up with him last week.”
Liam blinks, says, “Oh, that’s dangerous.”
“What? Why?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Are you okay? Did he do something to hurt you?”
“No,” I promise him. “Well, nothing obvious.” Liam’s eyes narrow.
“He was pretty patronizing,” I blurt. “Like, when I told him about you, that we were teaching each other music and baseball, he said he was glad I was finding ways to keep busy since he, Zara, and Maisy don’t have enough time for me. I know it doesn’t sound that bad, but—”
“Sounds bad to me.”
“Evan’s made comments like that before, thinly veiled criticisms about me not pursuing a higher education.
Which is especially hypocritical since we have the same job.
Not for long—he’s almost sommelier certified and is moving to Gatlinburg to work at a resort—but anyway.
He would always walk that line with me, never saying anything untrue or outright offensive, so even when I was almost certain he was doing something wrong, I could never quite prove it. ”
There was also the age difference, which I had begun to suspect he employed to get me to treat him deferentially. The friends he never brought me around. And the fact that I don’t think I ever liked him all that much.
I wish I could say I still would’ve ended things if Evan wasn’t moving, or if Liam hadn’t come into my life as a better representation of how a man should act, but I’m not actually positive I would’ve had the courage.
I’m used to being left behind, not doing the leaving. I might’ve stayed out of fear of being alone.
Liam walks toward me, and soon I’m wrapped in a bear hug, my heels dangling off the ground. His smell is a combination of eucalyptus and peaches. “Well then,” he says into my hair. “I’m proud of you.”
It’s over in the next breath, Liam releasing me from his arms, taking a step back so I can breathe again. “Thank you,” I say dizzily.
“Thank you for telling me.”
That’s when I realize I was open with him about a hard thing. The same way he’d been open about his dad, his future with baseball. And it feels nice that I didn’t have to think about it first. Instead of telling Liam to even the score, I did it out of trust.
“My mom was a musician, though,” I say, on a roll now.
“She played fiddle for this bluegrass band that got small gigs across Tennessee and North Carolina. She left our family before I’d even turned one, so it’s not something I picked up from her directly, but I found one of her broken instruments in our basement one day and begged my dad to fix it for me.
He did, and then my oldest sister, Maren, got me enrolled in violin lessons. ”
I tried burying the lede, but Liam isn’t fooled. “I’m sorry about your mom,” he says softly.
“Me too,” I murmur honestly, while remembering the look on Dad’s face when he saw me play that violin for the first time. It was before a family dinner one night after my first few lessons. I was only eight, but he looked like he’d seen a ghost.
Her ghost.
“Anyway. Come sit,” I command.
Liam keeps his eyes on mine as he settles on the couch, leaving a few inches between us. I pass the guitar over and he cradles it gently.
He strums across the fretboard with his thumb. I hand him my lucky pick, and he examines it.
“Beatles lyrics.”
“Got a pack of ten guitar picks off Etsy with all my favorite songs.”
Liam doles out a fond smile, like he thinks I’m cute (but decidedly not the childish type of cute), and I scoot another half inch away from him, thinking of Maisy.
She still doesn’t know Liam and I have been hanging out, texting. I have no clue what her reaction will be.
“I’ll show you some chords first,” I tell Liam. “And then teach you the strings.”
Focus drifts over us, a slow-moving fog.
I have to applaud Liam’s commitment to learning.
Eventually I move off the couch and kneel in front of him so I can watch his finger pads push against the strings.
He memorizes the first few chords easily, then works on transitioning between them, strumming and smiling when he hears the change in note.
“You’re a natural,” I say, smiling too. “Look at your finger pads.” He flips them over and I point out the little indentations left behind from the guitar strings. “That’s how you know you’ve been hard at work.”
“How’d you learn to play this one?” he asks.
“In exchange for correctly guessing the answer to three riddles, Apollo blessed me with the gift of song.” Liam smirks. “YouTube,” I say.
His eyes light. “Show me.”
I turn on the TV and scroll over to the YouTube app, switching from Zara’s profile (which we usually use to watch bookish videos) over to mine. Guitar and piano tutorials, play-along sessions, songwriters’ courses.
“This is no messing around, Bristol.” Liam reaches down to grab the remote from my hands. Which is exactly when I realize I’m basically sitting between his legs.
He clicks play on a songwriter’s course as I move onto the couch. I blush as the video starts to play—how to believe in yourself as a songwriter, the video host announces—and snatch the remote back from him, hitting pause.
“Anyway,” I say.
Liam shifts to face me. “Can I hear?”
“The video? It’s boring, I promise.”
“No, one of your songs.”
Dead air explodes between us.
“I haven’t written any full songs.”
Liam tilts his head at me. “That’s a lie, Bristol. You just lied straight to my face.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because you made that same expression,” he says, reaching over to push at the space between my eyebrows, “when you told me you were a freshman.”
I glare. Liam smirks.
“The songs aren’t ready.”
“For what, a record deal? I’m not a producer, I’m your best friend, Paige.”
“It’s almost like you think if you keep calling yourself that, I’ll start to believe it.”
“You are starting to believe it,” he replies.
I pick at a velvet couch button while Liam watches me patiently. “I’ve never even told Zara I write songs. Whenever she asks me what I’m playing in my room, I tell her it’s an indie artist.”
“Technically, it is an indie artist.” Liam’s eyes narrow. “What about Evan?”
I shake my head. Liam’s gaze darkens incrementally. Possibly unnoticed to an untrained eye, but I spend a lot of time evaluating him.
“What if,” he asks softly, “you were brave just for me?”
I can be different, just for and just around Liam Bishop, I remind myself. That’s the whole point here. We’re a safe space for each other.
“I’m not even a good singer,” I grumble.
“Self-deprecate one more time,” he threatens, “and I’ll turn your guitar into a baseball bat.”
I grab it from him instinctually and settle it onto my lap.
What happens next happens in a fugue state.
I operate on instinct and play a song start to finish, barely registering the lyrics or the chords or the breathiness of my voice.
I’d named it “Grow Up Faster” in my journal.
A song about a father who wanted his life back, who was tired of and overwhelmed by parenthood, of shouldering the sole responsibility for his five children, who wanted his youngest child to figure her future out.
Grow up faster, Strawberry, I love you, I promise,
I’ve done this five times now, but you’re still a novice