Chapter 16
May, Four Years Ago
Dear Paige,
I’m writing you a handwritten letter because I’ve got a suspicion that you’re not going to play me “The Pitcher” until you’re feeling less vulnerable about it, and the way to make you feel less vulnerable is to show you that I also can be.
So here are my words, which you have on record to keep, to revisit whenever you feel like it, the same way I’ll want yours once you let me hear that song.
They won’t be as pretty, but I promise you, Paige, they’re true.
Last year was a hard one for me. My dad was gone out of nowhere.
I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. My family hasn’t coped well, and I’ve felt distant from my mom and sisters ever since.
When my elbow kept me from getting drafted, I had to pull my grades out of the gutter during summer school just to make it to junior year.
I buried myself in schoolwork to keep the grief at bay, then buried myself in training with the goal of never seeing a senior year.
All of this to say, I wasn’t expecting you.
I didn’t even have my head up looking around for you.
Over the past year, the only people I’ve been considering are my family and me.
But some force, perhaps the greatest force in the world, stopped me in my tracks the day we met, and did it again at that party, like the universe was offering me a second chance. You have wholly uprooted me.
I’m not burying myself anymore, Bristol. I’m looking up, right at you. You’re the brightest thing in my life, and now, I’m so thankful for that elbow injury because without it, I wouldn’t know you.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in two months, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about it, but I do know this. All I do these days is consider you.
Liam
Once he gives me the letter, I play the song for him right then and there.
I learned not to want him when it was raining, we were reading
The lesson never took and now I’m praying
The pitcher keeps me
There’s a question hanging between us, called forth in the letter, restated in the lyrics: he claims I stopped him in his tracks the day we met. And now I’ve admitted to trying not to want him because I thought he was interested in Maisy.
When my fingers lift off the keys and the last note dissolves against the walls of my bedroom, Liam kisses the back of my neck once.
“Liam?” I ask. I stand, turn to face him.
“Paige.”
“You were flirting with me, right? The day we met.”
Something shutters behind his eyes. Some kind of guilt. “Yes,” he says anyway, not denying it. “I was never interested in Maisy.”
My brow furrows. “You had to have been a little bit interested if you went on a date with her, Liam. It’s okay. I promise it’s okay.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, pushing back his hair. “I mean, I guess for a minute, when I thought you weren’t available. I’ve never been one to say no to a date and at that point in my life I wasn’t taking anything too seriously. But that’s all it was. Just one date. We weren’t a match.”
“Hang on,” I say, coming dangerously close to a conclusion I hate. “What do you mean I wasn’t available?”
He clears his throat, focuses on the wall, then forces himself to meet my eyes.
“I thought I was walking out of the bookstore with your phone number. When I called and Maisy answered, she and I laughed about the confusion at first, but—she told me you had a boyfriend, then asked if I wanted to get dinner. I said yes.”
I was under the impression you and Evan got together right when you moved to Knoxville.
“I know how that looks. And I swear, Paige, I don’t think of girls interchangeably, but you were taken, and she asked, and—”
“Liam,” I say, cutting him off. “I’m not mad you went on a date with Maisy. I’m—I was single. For like, months after we met, I was single.”
He waits for reality to hit me, just as surely as it must’ve hit him when he learned my first date with Evan was on Halloween.
Maisy kept us apart.
“When I realized,” he murmurs, “I thought about confronting her, giving her the opportunity to tell you the truth herself. But I figured she’d find a way to rationalize it, and I was scared she’d maybe even paint me as the villain.
I’m normally all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not taking any risks this time around when it comes to you. ”
My head is shaking in denial. “There has to be an explanation, though. She knows we’ve been—that we’re—she knows we’d figure this out eventually.”
“Not if she genuinely thought I was only planning to get in your pants,” Liam says sadly, “and then never speak to you again.”
“Maisy must’ve been trying to protect me,” I reason, imagining her voice saying, Paige, a guy like that would’ve eaten you alive, especially back then. You were too na?ve for him. I was just pulling you off his radar.
“You wouldn’t have needed protecting,” Liam promises, the gold in his eyes like flecks of light on water. “I wish I’d gotten the opportunity to prove that. I’ve never treated a girl in a way I’d be embarrassed for you to learn about.”
Liam is mad at Maisy and trying to swallow it, because he can tell I’m trying not to be mad at her. It’s just that I can’t imagine Maisy doing this out of jealousy or ill intent. She’s been my best friend since we were little. She had to have had a good reason.
“I’ll talk to her about it,” I say, and after Liam’s apprehensive look, I add, “I’m not going to let her change my opinion of you.”
He nods but looks ill at ease. I approach him cautiously, wondering how to vanquish it. My head tilts up in invitation, and Liam’s eyes go to my lips before his mouth follows.
We’re still so new at this. He’s careful with me, slow and gentle, his lips coasting over mine, but soon he dips to whisper in my ear, “Loved the song. Play it again?”
“Maybe later.”
He lifts me onto my bed and crawls over me, his expression starved. We devour each other’s sounds for a few minutes until I start fiddling with his belt.
He pulls back, half laughing, half groaning. “Now who’s trying to get in whose pants?”
“Me, in yours,” I state plainly.
“We need to go meet Zara,” Liam says.
“There are higher needs on my hierarchy.”
He grins. “It’s my only chance to say goodbye before she graduates and moves away.”
Flustered as I am by Liam’s dexterous fingers tugging at my hair, splayed across my hip, I’m equally undone that he cares about my sister enough to want one last dinner with her before he goes off to play a series of games in Florida.
We straighten up and head to the bookstore, sneaking loaded looks at each other the whole way there.
“Zara found out about my songs,” I tell him while she’s helping the last customer of the night check out. We’re tucked behind a shelf, out of view. Liam’s nose and lips are skimming the cotton over my shoulder.
Something satisfied flickers through his eyes, like he’s pleased it’s less of a secret now. “How did she react?”
“She said she’s always known,” I say with a sheepish smile. “She was just waiting for me to own up to it, but now that she’s leaving, she had to jump the gun.”
Liam laughs low.
“It was honestly a nonevent,” I say. “When I played her one, she started singing along. She’d already mostly memorized it through the walls.”
Another satisfied flicker. “Did you know there’s a songwriters’ roundtable happening at a nearby coffeehouse tonight?”
I tilt my head at him. “How do you know that?”
“As if I don’t have a laundry list of date ideas with you specifically in mind.”
“Oh, me too. Peach picking at a local farm, new car shopping.”
“You have me confused with someone who wants a new car.”
For the first time, I consider the old truck he’s driving might be a memory association for his dad and change the subject back.
“We don’t have to go to the roundtable tonight. I went with Evan once and he said it gave him secondhand embarrassment. And anyway, Zara mentioned earlier she wanted tacos.”
“First of all, Evan’s an idiot, but this we knew. Second, tacos are still on the agenda, and third, I don’t just want to go, Paige, I want you to play, especially now that you and Zara have talked openly about your music.”
His words are a sharp lance. My body shuts down, no longer warm under his touch. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to?”
His look is withering. “Don’t want to or are scared to?”
“I don’t want to. Songwriting is my thing. It’s not meant to be shared.”
He sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Paige. For the record, I think that’s a shame.”
“And I think you being on constant display for strangers is what makes you feel that way.”
Liam’s hands move to my waist. His thumbs rub in small circles. I watch them for a few seconds before forcing my eyes up to his. They’ve inhaled the sun, brought it indoors.
At least there’s no disappointment on his face. Only determination.
“Then can we at least go?” he asks, voice soft. “I want to rewrite that memory for you. Erase what it was like when you went with Evan.”
My lips quirk. “You don’t think you’re going to get secondhand embarrassment?”
He says nothing, shakes his head. Like a challenge.
“Last time someone sang about her undying love for Cheesecake Factory.”
He fights a smile. Says, “I hope she’s back tonight.”
I shrug. “If Zara doesn’t mind.”
“You know what that was like?” Zara says, walking backward on the sidewalk, melted ice cream dripping down her cone.
“A book?” Liam and I guess at the same time.
“Exactly!” She takes a slurp of her Cruze Farm mango Dole Whip, turning to face forward again. Her curls bounce cheerily—loose, and recently sheered to shoulder length after an impromptu reevaluation of her impending “city girl look.”
Zara slows her pace, coming between us as we pass a sports bar on our left, a make-believe honky-tonk on our right.
“I’m always reading about tortured artists who meet and mingle in a coffeehouse where the owner-slash-barista falls in love with the blushing talent, and tonight, I’m pretty sure that fucking happened! ”
“I was getting those vibes,” Liam agrees before his lips cover the straw of his milkshake. “The girl who played the song about her dead cat?”
“The cat’s name was Vincent,” Zara notes, “and when she rescued him, he had only one good ear.”
“Meta,” I joke.
“It was a good song,” Liam says. “I mean, it didn’t have a pre-chorus or anything, but—”
I snort into my dulce de leche.
“Tattooed barista thought that song was the second coming,” Zara says.
“I liked the guy with the beard,” I say.
“Paige, he didn’t sing. He scatted.”
“It counts.”
“If you say so.”
“Personally,” Liam says, “I think Paige would’ve wiped the floor with all of them.”
“Hear, hear!” Zara thrusts her cone into the air, and the frozen mound flies high before slapping the concrete in front of us. We bust out laughing.
Eventually, we swap our treats for frothy beers and close out the evening at an Irish pub on Gay Street, talking about Zara’s plans for New York—where she’ll live, what she’ll do, how she’ll afford it, what weekend Liam and I should come up for a visit.
She’s on fire for her future, practically feverish, her eyes shimmering.
I’m thrilled for her and distressed by it all.
The scale of which emotion tips heavier depends on the day.
At some point, Liam’s hand migrates to mine under the table, and he runs his fingers over the top of my knuckles. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s a tiny gesture, a minute reassurance. We’re still friends, but we’re also this.
“Well,” Zara announces after finishing her first beer, right as I’ve ordered a second with a duplicate of Candice’s ID. “I’m heading home, but you two should stay.”
“You sure?” I ask her.
“Very.”
Liam stands to hug her goodbye, promises to stay in touch throughout his Robin Hobb reading journey.
My second beer arrives, and I pour half of it into Liam’s glass, suddenly wanting us to be even paced in our drinking tonight.
He lets me, taking a sip with his free hand and lacing our fingers together.
“Paige,” he says, twirling the glass between his fingertips, staring at the amber liquid.
“Hmm?”
“Would you…” He drifts off, blinking twice.
“Would I?” I have genuinely no clue where he’s going with this.
Liam sets down his glass and turns to me, pulling one of his legs to the other side of our bench. I lift a foot onto it, aiming my body to face him. His hand moves to my cheek and his thumb brushes softly, just once.
Even this amount of PDA is something I’ve never experienced in my life, and it’s tantalizing. To be wanted this publicly.
Eyes on mine, he asks, voice half gone, “Would you want to sleep over at my place tonight?”