Chapter Three #2
At that moment, I wished that I could have denied him. I wished that he had been wrong. That I could say I had changed—that fundamentally, even down to my favorite drink, I was a different person. But that wasn’t the truth.
I had changed less than I wanted to over the years. I was still me through and through. A fact that made my stomach churn with a feeling I had grown to become quite intimate with: a feeling of pure inadequacy.
“Thanks,” I said quietly when Liam handed me the burning hot paper cup. He had even cheaped out on the cups. It was almost laughable.
The hot chocolate was mediocre at best. It reminded me of the kind Mom would buy and mix with hot water back when I was a kid. It wasn’t nearly as good as the hot chocolate we sold at The Prologue, a fact I took pride in. Still, I sipped it anyway.
“So,” Liam started. “I thought you would only come back here if it was over your dead body?”
I locked eyes with Liam and took another slow sip of my drink. Amusement was already shimmering in his eyes.
“I did say that,” I agreed. “But I needed to ask you something.”
“Well then, how can I be of service?”
“I want you to tell me the truth,” I said, as if that would somehow sway him into actually being honest with me. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m drinking hot chocolate?” Liam replied with a faux sense of ignorance.
“You know what I mean,” I said impatiently.
“Do I?” he asked with a smirk before lifting his own drink to his lips.
I huffed out a sigh. “Cut the clueless act. What are you playing at? Why would you open up your shop on Rosewood Avenue, of all the streets in town? And why directly next to mine? What do you want from me?” My composure was slipping.
The words came out with more anger than I had intended, but I couldn’t help it.
Liam was still Liam in the same way that I was still Jessa. One look at him, and I was a teenager again, arguing with him as if my life depended on it.
A look flashed across his face. There for one moment and then gone.
“I’ve wanted to open a place like this for a long time.”
“Okay.” My frustration softened a bit as I finally began to get answers. “Why here?”
“Cheap rent.”
He wasn’t wrong there. The cost to lease a shop on Rosewood Ave was cheaper than pretty much anywhere else in town, but something about the way he wouldn’t meet my gaze told me that there were details he was leaving out.
“And you chose this storefront because?” It felt like an interrogation, but civil conversations hadn’t been our ‘thing’ for more than a decade.
Liam leaned back in his chair, a lazy grin stretching across his face. “Because I missed you.”
I scoffed. “Give me a break, Ashford.”
“Fine. The truth is…” Liam paused for a moment. “This place had already been in the works when my mom mentioned to me that you were opening up your bookshop.”
Like two puzzle pieces snapping together, something clicked in my mind. Of course, Liam had known about The Prologue. Our moms were still best friends. He had likely known from the very beginning.
“And?”
“And once she told me, I couldn’t get it or you out of my head. You’re the only person who’s ever really motivated me to chase what I want.” His tone sounded genuine, but the words were so unlike him.
“Are you serious?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.
Liam’s gaze flickered up to meet mine, a teasing smile tugging at his lips. “Nope. I just couldn’t resist seeing this look on your face.”
I hated him. With every fiber of my being, I hated him. I had no idea what I had done so wrong in life to be cursed with a man who simply followed me around with the sole intent of aggravating me.
“What do I have to do to get you to leave?”
His smile only grew. “Can’t. Signed an eighteen-month lease, and I’ve still got a little under a year left. You’re going to be stuck with me, Jessie.”
I inhaled deeply, shutting my eyes tight and willing my imagination to transport me anywhere else on the planet. A year. A minimum of a year that I would be stuck with the moron.
“What about when your lease is up? What do I have to do to make you leave?”
Liam’s face lit up once again. “I was hoping you would ask that. I have a proposal.”
At that moment, for a second, Liam and I were eighteen again, sitting in the front seat of my car. “Something tells me I don’t want to hear it,” I couldn’t help but say.
“I promise you do,” Liam assured me. Before I could even respond, he continued on, “A competition, like old times. I know that we agreed to put an end to them after high school, but wouldn’t it be fun? We are stuck together for a whole year after all. Why not make the most of it?”
I thought about it for a moment before replying, “What exactly would the competition be?”
“I was actually thinking about a series of competitions. We could take turns picking them. The winner will be determined by whoever has won the most when the year is up. The winner gets to stay, and the loser relocates.”
The thought of relocating The Prologue away from its perfect location to anywhere else made me sick to my stomach. But if there was one irrefutable truth about me, it was that I could not ever turn down the opportunity to compete with Liam Ashford.
“You’re on, Ashford,” I said, sticking out my right hand.
He smiled fondly, like he had known that there was no way I would turn down the offer to compete with him again. Like he had known that after all these years, my soul yearned to feel alive in the same way it had back when we were in school together.
“May the best shop win,” Liam said, taking my hand in his and shaking it.
“Mine will,” I replied, a grin tugging at my lips.