Chapter 6 #2
I took another sip of my water before answering, my smile rueful.
“It definitely wasn’t always that way.” I shift a little in my seat, uncomfortable talking about my mom even with my two closest friends.
“I’ve told you guys what my mom was like.
Half the time we didn’t even have food at the house.
” I didn’t mention the times we didn’t have heat.
Or when we hadn’t been able to sleep at night because her druggie friends were over.
Or the way she’d start smacking us around when she was really drunk.
I shook my head to clear it, hating to even think about all that crap.
“So here’s this kid who’s smarter than everyone else at school.
A better hockey player than ninety-nine percent of the kids he played with.
The most driven person I’ve ever met. And in spite of all of that, people still looked down on him because he was dirt poor. ”
Peyton makes a face. “Kids can be such assholes.”
“Amen, sister.” Unlike my twin, I had done my best to not attract attention.
I tried to blend in, to make myself smaller, to keep myself off the radar of the asshole kids who got off on putting others down.
And I’d been pretty successful at that. Right up until the point I’d started tutoring our high school’s most popular and beloved sports hero.
“Andy was basically pissed off all the time,” I told them.
“He had an attitude with everyone. He got into tons of fights on and off the ice. Like I said—huge chip on his shoulder.” I grabbed a sip of water.
“And then you had Liam.” I picture him the way he’d been in high school.
So handsome, always smiling, friendly to even the lowest of the loser kids.
“He was the total golden boy.” I snorted, seeing him clearly in my mind’s eye, his flaxen hair shining in the sunlight while he lounged on the quad, surrounded by friends and admirers.
“Even his hair fit the part. And Andy was his total opposite. Slight and wiry where Liam was broad and big, even as a kid. Pissed off at the world where Liam was everyone’s best friend. ”
“This is a fascinating dive into our local billionaire’s psyche,” Peyton said. “But where do you come in?”
“I started tutoring Liam my sophomore year,” I said.
“At first it was just something I did through a school program. I knew I was going to need scholarships to go to college and I thought it would look good on my transcripts. Eventually my advisor started to recommend me to parents of kids who were struggling. I started tutoring outside of school and making some money.”
“And Liam was someone whose parents wanted to pay for a tutor?”
I nodded. “He had a hard time with math. He was a smart guy but numbers really tripped him up. So I started working with him at his house after school when he didn’t have hockey practice.
” I smiled sheepishly. “Unlike my brother, I had no qualms about the fact he was so perfect and popular. I thought he was just like, the most amazing thing ever,” I said in a girly voice then rolled my eyes.
“By the time we were seniors, we’d spent a ton of time together. We were friends.”
He was my best friend. My only friend, really, besides my brother. How pathetic I’d been.
“Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that maybe he liked me, too. He was really nice to me, even though I wasn’t at all popular or pretty.”
“I’m sure you were a lovely teenager,” Rosa said loyally. I blew her a kiss.
“Regardless, I built it all up in my head. Liam was nice to everyone. But you know how it is when you’re that age—you can spend hours analyzing every touch, every look.”
Peyton snorted. “Pretty sure we still do that today.”
I grinned over at her, wondering how differently my life would have been if I’d had good friends like this as a teenager. What would it have been like if I’d had girlfriends to talk all this through back then? Would they have warned me I was heading for heartbreak?
Our waitress appeared again with our meals and I was relieved.
I hadn’t ever talked any of this out. Andrew knew what happened, but that was mostly because he could read me like a book even back then.
In all honesty, I didn’t care about it anymore, not really.
It wasn’t like I’d spent the past twelve years pining over Liam.
I’d had several boyfriends, some of them pretty serious. I’d moved on a long time ago.
But there was something about saying it out loud that made me feel like that lonely, heartbroken girl all over again.
After Rosa had a few bites of food in her, she turned her attention back to me. “So, what happened? Did you ever tell him how you felt?”
“Kind of? Towards the end of senior year, it seemed like we were getting closer. Sometimes we would have our sessions outside of the house, like at coffee shops or this diner in town.” I smirked, twirling some of my pasta onto my fork.
“In my head this was serious stuff. It was almost like we were dating. But Liam was probably just getting senioritis, antsy and ready to get out of the house.”
“Pretty sure I felt that way from sophomore year on,” Peyton said. “I couldn’t escape high school fast enough.”
I’d been the opposite. High school hadn’t been all that fun for me, but at least I knew what to expect. The thought of going away to college, meeting new people, living in a dorm with someone I’d never met, being separated from Andy—I had approached the end of my senior year with dread.
Besides, the closer I seemed to get to Liam, the more I wanted to freeze time and just exist in that perfect bubble for as long as I could.
“There was this one day when he was particularly antsy. He promised me he’d come back and get his work done if I would go ice skating with him. Said he just needed to stretch his legs. And I’m thinking, ‘you want to spend time with me out in public? Hell yeah!’”
Rosa laughed. “You had it bad.”
“Girl, you have no idea.” In all these years I’d never met a single person who could make me feel the same wild storm of butterflies I’d felt whenever I got close to Liam.
“So anyhow, we went skating, and it wasn’t until we got to the arena that I kind of woke up and remembered that I was terrible. ”
Peyton laughed. “Who amongst us hasn’t pretended to be into a sport for a guy?”
“Well in my head, my inexperience made it so much better! Because Liam had to help me. And that was sooo romantic.” I closed my eyes, smiling as I remembered how momentous the afternoon had felt.
“God, he was probably so annoyed. He just wanted to skate around and burn off some energy and instead he had to hold his dorky tutor’s hand while she baby-stepped around the rink for an hour. ”
I took another few bites of pasta, the memory as clear as watching a movie play out in my head.
Us falling. Liam cushioning me with his arms. Him leaning over me.
“We, uh, kissed that day.” I forced myself to roll my eyes.
“And the angels sang and the birds rejoiced. I was positive it was the best kiss I would ever have.”
I was playing it off, my tone light, but the truth was, it really had felt that way to me.
In hindsight, I could see that it was probably more of an accident than anything else, the way our lips came together as we struggled to sit up on the ice.
Or maybe it had been idle curiosity on his part, now that we were in such close proximity.
At the time, though? It had felt very, very real.
Rosa made a face at me. “I’m getting very invested in this story, Grace. I feel like I’m watching some teen romance on Netflix. But you’re about to tell me it has a sad ending, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “It felt really sad to me at the time, but it was just a misunderstanding. Somehow, I got it in my head that he wanted to take me to prom when he was really just asking me what my plans were—”
“Hang on a second,” Peyton said, a hand raised. “I need more detail. How does that happen?”
I shrugged. I honestly still didn’t understand it myself. I had been so sure. I could still recall every moment of that conversation with perfect clarity.
We’d fallen to the ice. He’d kissed me. Then he said that he had been thinking about prom. I said something vague in agreement, waiting for him to go on, but his eyes had gotten wide.
“You’re saying yes?”
When I’d just looked at him in confusion, he continued. “You want to go together?”
That had confused me even more. I was starting to wonder if I’d hit my head on the ice. Was Liam actually asking me to prom? “Do you want to go with me?” I’d squeaked.
“Yeah,” he’d said, cheeks turning red. “I mean, yes. Let’s do it.”
I’d obviously missed something. We’d both been so awkward, stumbling over our words. Had I really just been so caught up in this crush that I wrote in the lines I wanted him to say? Was it my fairytale version that I remembered all these years later, instead of the truth?
I knew one thing for sure—if Liam hadn’t planned to ask me and the whole thing had just been a colossal misunderstanding on my part, his reaction would have been precisely the same.
He never would have shamed me or teased me for assuming wrong.
He was so friendly, so easygoing. He would have just gone along with it, made the best of it.
Maybe turned the whole night into a group thing with a bunch of friends.
“Grace?” Rosa asked, and I realized I had zoned out there for a minute, lost in my memories.
“Sorry, what?” I reached for my glass of water, needing to do something to keep the grimace off my face. It was so stupid to feel shaken up about this now. It was more than a decade ago. It was a silly teenage prom. It didn’t matter.
“How do you misunderstand someone asking you to prom?” Peyton pressed.
I shrugged. “I was an awkward kid. I must have misread something or…” I shook my head.
“Whatever. What matters is that a few weeks later his girlfriend came up to me in the library and let me know that they had been planning on going for ages and I must have misunderstood whatever Liam said about it that day.”
“He had a girlfriend?” Rosa gasped.
It had been a shock to me too. “Apparently. I could tell she was pissed but she said he felt really bad and it was all just an awkward mistake. But since Liam was so nice, he didn’t want to say anything.”
“So what’d you do?” Peyton asked.
I shrugged. “I let him off the hook. There was a debate tournament the weekend of prom and I signed up for it. He went to prom with Chloe.”
And then they got married right after college. And had a baby together.
“Damn, Grace,” Rosa said, shaking her head. “That’s like, traumatic.”
I made a scoffing noise. “Hardly.”
“No, it is.” She leaned across the table towards me, eyes wide and serious. “When crap like that happens in our teen years it sticks with us. Haven’t you seen Never Been Kissed?”
I laughed. “As much as I might like to be compared to Drew Barrymore, it was nothing like that. It was just a silly misunderstanding that I built up in my head because I had a crush.”
I didn’t tell them how I used a month’s worth of my tutoring money to buy a dress before Chloe confronted me. Or how I had felt beautiful for the first time in my life when I tried it on.
I ended up selling it on eBay and got a good chunk of my money back, so it hadn’t been a total loss.
I also didn’t tell them how Liam’s face had turned white when I told him I was going to the debate tournament. How, for just a second, he had actually looked like he might be sick. Or maybe break something.
He was probably just feeling guilty.
“So that’s my big sob story about the hockey player,” I said, pushing my plate away.
My appetite had waned considerably since I started talking.
“It was weird to see him the other night because we hadn’t run into each other since graduation.
He stayed in Minnesota for school and Andy and I both got scholarships to Michigan.
That was the end of it.” I forced a smile on my face as I turned to Rosa.
“So, what’s the verdict? Was my teenage tale of woe worthy of Netflix? ”
She grinned back, but I thought her eyes might be a little sad. “That was like, One Tree Hill levels of teen angst.” Then her smile faded. “I think you should talk to him about it.”
I stared at her. “You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not. I think you guys need to clear the air. It sounds like you never heard his side of the story.”
“Rose, give me a break. I am not going to bring up our high school prom to a professional hockey player. He probably doesn’t even remember it!”
She shook her head. “The way he was looking at you the other night sure seemed like he remembered everything.” She looked to Peyton for backup. “Don’t you think?”
I was sure she would agree so it was surprising when she narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure.”
“Seriously?” Rosa squeaked.
“I admit, at first, I was definitely on Team Hot Hockey Player, but now…it sounds like he was kind of a dick to you, honestly. And I don’t want a guy like that getting in your way.”
He wasn’t a dick. The words were right at the tip of my tongue. I had no idea why I was feeling so protective of Liam.
Peyton must have read the expression on my face. “Even if you did misunderstand the prom thing, he kissed you. When he had a girlfriend.”
I had always tried hard not to think about that part.
“He was just a teenager.”
“Even a teenager should know not to cheat,” she argued.
“Well, maybe they weren’t that serious at that point? I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”
“That may be so,” Peyton continued. “But there’s obviously still a lot of emotion tied up in this for you. And we all agreed that what you need at this stage in your life is uncomplicated fun.”
“We did not all agree to that,” I argued. She ignored me.
“I mean, if you think you can have a meaningless fling with this guy, then go for it. Because he is definitely smoking hot. But if it’s going to make you feel all girly and sad, I really think you should stay away.”
“But what if he’s her true love?” Rosa shot back.
“Do you have a flask in your purse?” I asked her. “Have you been spiking your water while I wasn’t looking? It was a crush. In high school.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, giving me an uncharacteristically grim glare. “I am not drunk. I’m just saying—there’s history between you and Liam O’Conner. And I don’t think whatever there was between the two of you is over yet.”