Chapter 11
When I spent time with Liam as a teenager, it always amazed me how quickly I could go from completely comfortable to a giggling nervous wreck.
In the early days, I had been nervous all the time.
Here I was, this dorky little sophomore with glasses and frizzy hair, sitting within touching distance to one of the most popular, most gorgeous guys in the school.
I spent weeks being red-faced and tongue tied.
Eventually, I’d started to feel more comfortable around him.
That was the thing about Liam—he was good at making anyone comfortable.
I think that had a lot to do with his popularity.
He was nice to everyone, no matter what clique they hung out with.
He never acted like he was too popular or too cool for anyone.
Slowly, I found myself less nervous around him.
Then, one day, he offered me some of his mom’s homemade cookies after our session was done.
So I sat at the O’Conner’s kitchen table with the hottest guy in the school, eating chocolate chip cookies and talking about the Spiderman movie that had just come out.
A few weeks after that, Liam’s mother invited me to stay over for dinner when we were wrapping things up.
When I tried to decline, Liam insisted. His parents were every bit as nice as he was, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to live in a house like that.
The O’Conners didn’t have a ton of money, but you could tell just by looking that they took good care of what they had.
The house was clean and cozy, there was always plenty of food, and Liam went to bed every night with a full belly, knowing that his parents loved him.
I would have been jealous—if they weren’t all so friendly.
Dinners started to become a regular occurrence. Sometimes we would have our sessions outside of the house, at a nearby diner or coffee house. After a while, it started to feel like Liam and I were actually friends.
He liked to tease me. I think he probably thought I’d let him get away with it, seeing as how I came across as pretty shy.
But he failed to consider that I had a twin brother.
Teasing was nothing new to me. So I gave it back to him as good as I got.
I could tell he liked that—he always laughed uproariously whenever I made a joke at his expense.
That’s how we spent the hours, three days a week, every week, from freshman year until we were seniors.
I was more comfortable with Liam O’Conner than I was with anyone except Andy.
His parents treated me like a family friend, not someone they were paying to help their kid keep his grades up.
Even Liam’s jock friends were nice to me at school—but that might have been because they were afraid of Andy.
But as comfortable as I felt with him, he could turn me into a blushing, stammering mess with little more than a pointed glance.
All it would take was for him to lean closer to me when I was explaining something, and my heart would break out into a dance.
Every time his hand brushed against mine—which seemed to happen more and more as time went by—color would flood my cheeks.
A few times he even touched my hair. On those days I was pretty sure I might just drop dead right there in Leigh O’Conner’s kitchen.
The day I spent with Liam and Josie at the botanical garden reminded me a lot of those old high school feelings.
For the first time since I’d run into him at the bar, I actually felt myself relaxing around Liam.
He just looked so worried about his daughter, I had to comfort him.
And once I’d done that—a simple touch of my hand on his arm—it suddenly felt just like old times.
We might be a lot older now, with a hell of a lot more history and baggage, but Liam O’Conner was still that same kind boy. And I was still his friend.
And, just like the old days, I found it exceedingly easy to slip back into the squirming, blushing, Liam-obsessed girl he used to turn me into with no more than a heated glance.
As we followed the kids along the trails, Liam continued to hold my hand.
I didn’t think much of it at first—it had only been a comfort thing, because of the heavy subject matter.
But the longer we walked without him dropping it, the less friendly the action felt.
When Liam brushed his thumb along the sensitive skin between my thumb and forefinger, heat exploded in my belly so quickly you would have thought he’d done something far less PG.
And he didn’t stop. The entire rest of the hike he held my hand, stroking my wrist, making me feel like I was going to burn away into hot lava at any moment.
I was glad the kids were getting along. But their budding friendship also meant they weren’t underfoot to distract me. The farther ahead they ran down the path, the more tension settled over us. I felt hot and shaky and way off balance and I had no idea what to do to ease my suffering.
It might ease your suffering if you throw Liam down on the path and kiss the hell out of him, a voice in my head whispered. Funny, the voice sounded an awful lot like Peyton.
It would also traumatize his daughter, who happened to be one of my students. Yeah, I needed to get a handle on this crush before I did something totally inappropriate.
“I’m hungry,” Elliot whined eventually.
“Me too,” Josie said.
Liam turned to me, smiling. “What do you say, Gracie? Want to grab some lunch?”
I had no good reason to refuse. And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t want to refuse.
I wanted to stay right there in this gorgeous man’s orbit, soaking up his smiles and the gentle rumble of his laughter like a plant to sunshine.
I knew from experience that there was going to be a time, probably sooner than I wanted, when Liam would once again be gone from my life.
I wanted to absorb every moment I could while I still had the chance.
We decided on the food trucks at the entrance to the park. We all were in the mood for different things, so we split up, Elliot and Liam heading to the hot dog truck while Josie and I waited in line for sandwiches.
“Did you have fun today?” I asked her, even though her bright eyes made the question unnecessary.
“I did,” she said, bouncing on her toes.
“Elliot told me his favorite books are Percy Jackson. I love those books! I think my favorite one was Sea of Monsters. Or maybe the last one. He said that sometime we could watch the movie together. Do you think we could do that? Do you think his mommy would let him come to my house?”
I stared down at the suddenly happy, excited little girl, wondering where on earth she had come from.
Josie had been polite in my classroom, volunteering occasionally, seeming to have fun with Gabby and a few of the other girls when they played.
But I had assumed she was something of a wallflower, like I had been.
I had yet to see anything like the bubbly, grinning, excited little girl in front of me.
I thought again of how Liam said she was having a hard time, and my heart squeezed for her. If this was her usual demeanor, she had been more down at school than I realized.
As we got our food and headed over to the table Liam had grabbed, I decided I wasn’t going to mention to him how stark a difference there was between her school day demeanor and this one. But I was going to do something to try to draw this side of her out a little more.
“So, Josie,” I told her, once we were all sitting down to our lunches. “I noticed that you like to play at the science center in our classroom.”
She just nodded, mouth full of ham and cheese.
“And I know from your placement tests that you’re really good at math.”
“Doesn’t get that from me,” Liam said, and I shot him a quick smile before returning my attention to his daughter. “I think you would have a really good time if you joined the STEM Gems.”
“What’s that?”
“The STEM Gems is a group I run after school,” I told her. “We do a lot of work on computers and we do fun experiments and take field trips. Pretty much anything cool you can think of that has to do with math, science, or technology.”
“That sounds fun,” she said, cautious.
“It’s really fun. Most of the girls are a little older than you, but I bet you’d like it. Want to give it a shot?”
“You definitely should,” Elliot told her, scooping up so much ketchup on his fry it dripped over onto his fingers.
“Auntie G always plans the best trips. I’m not allowed to be in the club because it’s just for girls.
” At that he made a face at me. “But sometimes she tries the experiments with me first to test ’em out. ”
I held out my fist to bump his. “Good job, buddy.” I winked at Josie. “I didn’t even have to pay him to say that.”
She giggled.
“So what do you say? Want to be a STEM Gem?”
She looked from me to her dad before fixing her eyes on me and offering a shy smile. “I think that would be fun. Thank you for asking me, Miss K.”
Oh, my heart. This peanut was such a sweetie. It was impossible not to fall for her. A glance over at Liam told me he was thinking the exact same thing, his chest all puffed out with pride at her manners.
“That’s all settled then,” I told her. “First meeting is Tuesday after school. I’ll see you there.”
“Okay!”
I glanced at Liam again and my breath caught in my throat when I realized he was looking at me with almost the same amount of intensity he’d shown for his daughter. I swallowed, my cheeks immediately going pink, and reached for my iced tea.
“Auntie G,” Elliot said. “Can we go look for hummingbirds?”
A quick check of his plate showed me he’d demolished the hot dog and fries. And I would bet that he’d still be begging me for ice cream on the way home. The kid’s appetite knew no bounds.
“Text your mom first. She wanted you to check in.”