Chapter 24
June, Four Years Ago
“You don’t come from a naked family, do you?”
Liam peels his eyes off the road. “Excuse me?”
“A naked family. Where everyone still walks around naked even once you’re all adults.”
“Families like that exist?”
“I’ve heard firsthand accounts.” From Maisy’s varied dating history, in fact, but I don’t mention this part to Liam.
I told him about my last conversation with her and explained that Maisy was trying to be different, but otherwise, I’ve tried not to bring her up.
It makes missing her a little less painful.
I rip open the bag of sunflower seeds and offer it to Liam.
“No, thanks.”
I blink. “Aren’t baseball players supposed to love chewing on these?”
His lips twitch. “Did you buy them just because you assumed?”
“Yes. As a bonding activity.”
“Well, that’s cute,” he says, grinning. “I’ll have a few.”
We each toss back a mouthful and get to work chewing the seeds out of their shells. It’s not remotely tasty, or fun. It’s actually kind of like chewing on splinters. I twist to Liam, whose eyes are dancing at my sour expression.
“Where the spih cup?” he babbles.
I smack my palm to my forehead. Liam rolls down his window and spits onto the interstate. I copy him.
“Yeah.” He wipes his mouth, reaches for his Gatorade. “I’m not really into that.”
“So, not a naked family,” I loop back, fishing for the sour gummy worms instead. “Are you illegal dog breeders?”
“Not that they’ve let me in on.”
“Do you grow devil’s lettuce in the backyard garden?”
He laughs. “I wish my family was that cool.”
“Then I simply don’t understand what warranted you saying Please don’t change your mind about me when you meet them.”
Two nights ago, in the middle of watching Jerry Maguire on Liam’s twin bed, he told me, voice careful, “I’m going to Savannah this weekend. It’s the first anniversary of my dad’s death.”
I’d leaned onto an elbow, swept a hand through his soft curls. “Okay,” I said, studying the sudden vacancy of his brown eyes.
“If you aren’t working … I mean, I would understand if you don’t want to, since it’ll be depressing and awkward.”
“Do you want me to come?”
He pulled me over his chest, so my ear was by his heart. It was thrumming. “Yeah, Paige,” he said. “I really do.”
I wasn’t sure feeling touched was even an appropriate internal response, but I had been. And I knew if Liam was hurting, I wanted to help make it—not less. But smoother, maybe. I wanted him to know he’d have someone in the hurt to sit with.
“Then of course,” I said, “I’ll be there.”
Now, we’re fifteen minutes from his childhood home, and ever since we climbed back in the car after topping up on gas and grabbing a few snacks, Liam’s been antsy. Anxious.
“I don’t know how to explain,” he says, the words torn, “how uncomfortable it is. When I visit my family.”
I set my elbow on the console, lean in his direction. “Do you want to try?”
He breathes quietly for a few seconds. “Yeah. But I don’t want to villainize them to you before you meet them.”
I catch his eyes. “I can keep it separate. Your feelings, my first impressions.”
He chews on his lip, but eventually, Liam sighs long, then expels his words in a verbal exorcism.
“I’ll hold the baby wrong and never get a second chance.
Buy a birthday present that’s a choking hazard.
Mention something baseball related that makes my brothers-in-law roll their eyes.
Talk about Dad and send my mother to her room in tears for the rest of the afternoon.
It’s like I’m walking on eggshells all the time.
Like I’m—I don’t know—like they need me to be something I haven’t figured out how to be yet. ”
After a beat I ask, “Does it feel like they want you to be more like your dad?”
His fingers tense on the steering wheel. “Yes. And I think it breaks their heart that I’m not.”
Beneath his words, I hear the rest of it: It breaks my heart that I’m not like him most of all.
There’s no way Liam has zero of his father’s traits, but he’s only twenty-one. Surely his family isn’t looking for him to become the man they lost?
“He was always there,” Liam goes on. “Anytime one of us had something tricky come up, he’d be there to help navigate it.
Meanwhile, I’m not even moving home after graduation.
I’ll be absent, possibly more so than I already am.
I missed Kayla’s engagement because I was playing in Texas, and Heather’s pissed I didn’t meet her baby until he was three months old.
And my mom”—his laugh is dry—“she’s there, but she isn’t there. ”
He shakes his head, turning onto a quiet street lined with magnolias. The houses are uniform, lined up like soldiers on tight lots. The car turns onto a cracked driveway, toward a redbrick house with a pot of dying white flowers on the front porch.
“Nothing that happens over the next two days is going to make me want you less,” I promise him. “We’re here in memory of your dad. Everything else is periphery.”
Liam shifts into park and turns to me. There’s true fear in his eyes. Whatever he was on the brink of saying gets swallowed, and Liam nods, smiling gently before climbing out of the car.
Inside the house, Kayla and Heather stand from the couch, long, blond hair hanging down their backs in beautiful waves. Heather’s son is on her hip, a six-month-old named Benjamin. When Heather sees me trailing after Liam, she freezes.
“Who’s this?” Kayla asks brightly, hugging her brother first, eyeing me over his shoulder.
“This is my…” He turns to me, as if considering. “My girlfriend, Paige.”
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,” Heather says, watching me with suspicion. “Or that you were bringing her home.”
Liam stiffens. “I told Mom.”
Heather rolls her eyes and mutters low, “Mom is an unreliable narrator.”
“She didn’t tell you Paige was coming?” Liam asks.
“She did not,” Heather says, “and we planned for you to sleep on the couch. Dad’s old office is a mess right now with Benjamin’s baby stuff.
” She says this all in a highly accusatory tone.
It would be obvious that Liam is starting out in the Heather Bishop doghouse even if he hadn’t primed me for it.
“I don’t mind sleeping on the floor,” I say.
“No,” Kayla and Liam say together, turning to me.
“There’s camping stuff in the shed,” Kayla says.
Liam nods. “I’ll pitch the tent. Are there any spare linens?”
Kayla nods, grabbing my hand. “Paige and I will get what you need.”
She drags me down a dark hallway, and only once she gets to the end of it, mutters, “I am so sorry about that. The last thing I want is for you to feel unwelcome. Our mom hasn’t been herself, and Heather and her husband are between houses, so they’ve been living here in close quarters. Everyone’s just tense at the moment.”
“No biggie at all. I know your family has a lot going on,” I promise her, lifting her hand so I can better see her engagement ring. “This is beautiful, by the way.”
“Thanks,” she says, beaming. Her eyes are just like Liam’s. Big and expressive. “I can’t believe you exist. Liam used to swear he’d never date until after he graduated. He must really be obsessed with you.”
My blush is rampant. “It’s mutual, believe me.”
We grab pillows, sheets, and quilts, and Kayla guides me through a side door to the backyard, where two men—presumably the husband and husband-to-be—are drinking beers in front of a TV on a card table.
“Lucas, Benny! This is Paige, Liam’s girlfriend,” Kayla announces.
They look up, eyes scanning me from matching lawn chairs, but don’t stand.
“He brought a buffer?” one of them mumbles, but I still heard it, loud and clear. Kayla smacks him on the shoulder. The other guy laughs.
“Nice to meet you both,” I say sweetly, then move toward Liam when I see him coming out of a small shed near the tree line. He’s frowning at the tent equipment in his hands. When he sees me, he whispers, “Don’t call Benjamin ‘Benji’ unless you want to get reamed out by Heather.”
“Noted. Can I help you with that?”
He smirks. “Did you come from a camping family?”
“The only vacations we ever took.”
“I had a feeling you wouldn’t mind this,” he says, grinning. “But thank you for also being okay with it.”
Even if I did mind, which, coming from a big family, I actually don’t, I’d lie through my teeth about it to set Liam at ease right now.
“You met the spouses?” he asks as we spread out the tarp, build out the tent poles.
“Yep. They called me a buffer.”
Liam glares at them across the yard, which makes me snort. I turn to see Kayla’s been pulled onto the lap of the man who made the comment. “You know that’s not why you’re here and that’s not what I expect from you.”
I nod and say, “I know.”
He studies me over the tent as we erect it, his eyes loaded with a meaning that I have no difficulty parsing. You’re here because you matter to me.
Once the bedding has been organized over the sleeping pad and Liam and I are grabbing our things from the car, I say, “You called me your girlfriend.”
“Yeah, well. Just because I said I wouldn’t ask until after the draft doesn’t mean I’m going to let my family assume you mean less to me than you do.”
“What if I ask you, right now?”
“Try it,” he dares me.
“Will you be m—”
“Yes.”
I laugh brightly. “So did I negate your waiting scheme?”
He doesn’t answer until we’re inside, the front flap zipped shut.
Liam and I dump our weekenders in the corners.
He takes my cheeks in his hands while we kneel, facing each other, and he says, so softly, “When I ask you to be my girlfriend, Paige, I’ll be asking you for a lot more than just that.
” His thumbs coast over my cheekbones, back and forth.
“Do you get what I’m saying, and why I’m waiting? ”
I nod, feeling safer with him, more trusting of him, than I could’ve ever fathomed. A college pitcher playboy I never even tried to change.