Chapter Ten #2
I didn’t reply to that. Because he was right again.
Liam and I walked in relative silence. The smack of my sandals or the scuffing of his sneakers against the sidewalk occasionally filled the air. The street was even less busy now as the sun crept deeper down toward the horizon, flooding the sky with a citrine glow.
“Want to walk through the park?” Liam suggested, tilting his head toward the Rosewood Park entrance.
“Sure. I don’t think I’ve ever been here at night before.”
Another blanket of quiet fell upon us as we walked through the park. It felt different here compared to the summer festival. It was peaceful.
The thick trees, which had barely begun to shift into their autumn colors, blocked the majority of what sunlight remained.
The lampposts that lined the path illuminated the park just enough, showering it in a delicate glow of light.
Liam and I settled beside one another on a bench in the center of the park. “Want to try some of my cheese ice cream?”
My gaze shifted down to his hand, which was coated in the sticky drippings of his obnoxiously tall ice cream cone. That was exactly why I refused to order a cone. “First of all, absolutely not. Second of all, shouldn’t you finish your cone first?”
Liam smiled. The incandescent glow of the lamp posts flickered in his amber eyes. They looked almost golden.
“What would be the fun in that?”
I didn’t have any argument for that question. I could hardly find it in me to come up with any words at all. My heart had been racing since we left the ice cream shop. Every word felt charged with a sort of electricity.
“You called me Liam earlier,” he said out of nowhere.
“Did I?” I asked, my face heating up once more. When had that become my reaction to him? When had he gained the power to make my cheeks blush and my heart race?
“Once at my shop earlier and then again at the ice cream parlor.”
I decided that if he was going to start asking me questions, I would take it as my opportunity to start asking questions of my own. “You’ve started calling me Jessa lately.” My eyes locked onto his. “Why?”
“I don’t want you to think that all you are to me is the girl I grew up with.
” His words felt so loud in the silence of the empty park.
“As kids, you were always Jessie to me. And I guess I kept calling you that because a part of me didn’t want that to change.
Eventually, though, it was mostly because I liked seeing that annoyed look in your eyes. ”
The corners of Liam’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. I wasn’t sure why I had never noticed that before. That fact and his words were all that I could cling to at the moment.
“But things change. You’re more than just Jessie.
Sometimes it feels like everything has stayed exactly the same for me, but you’ve gone out and changed everything for you.
” I could relate to his words more than I would ever dare to admit out loud.
“I want to get to know you as you are. And someday, if I’m lucky, I’d like to be close enough to be able to call you Jess. ”
I wasn’t sure how I was meant to respond. In all the time that Liam and I had known each other, he had never once shared something that felt so vulnerable. I figured that the only real way to respond to such a thing was to give him the same in return.
“You’ve always been Liam to me. There’s never been any way that I could mentally separate the different pieces of you. I bet that probably would make things easier, though,” I said with a snicker. “You’re Liam. In my head, that’s who you are. So I guess it sometimes slips out.”
“I like it when it slips out. It makes me sort of feel like we’re friends again.”
The next words I spoke fell past my lips fully on their own accord. “I wouldn’t hate that.”
Those golden irises of his seemed to glow. I don’t think that he had ever looked so beautiful as he did at that moment. “I wouldn’t either.”
Suddenly, we were far too close. At some point, one of us had scooted closer, and the other had leaned in slightly. Our faces were inches apart. My gaze flickered down to his lips for a split second. When my eyes found their way back up to his, there was something akin to hunger in them.
My breath hitched as he moved the slightest bit closer.
I realized that I was leaning in too. At that exact moment, a realization hit me—the realization that I wanted him—Liam seemed to have his own moment of clarity.
His eyes opened impossibly wide, and he threw himself back on the bench, putting as much distance between us as he could.
“Hey, you know what would be fun?” he asked.
I tilted my head in response. Words evaded me altogether.
What had I almost just done?
“How about if I win, you try a bite?”
Win. Right. He and I were in the park enjoying ice cream, not on a date, not as friends, but as competitors. “Fine,” I agreed. Declining would only imply a lack of confidence. Weakness. And truthfully, I was grateful for the distraction.
Liam smiled. “Shall we pull up the results then?”
“Go ahead.”
I sipped my milkshake as Liam pulled up the results on his phone. The sickly sweet flavor was heaven on my tongue, but it did little to settle my nerves.
“Alright. Last I checked, we were pretty close. You were only behind by six points.” His words revealed more than he probably intended to.
I let out a breathy, half-hearted laugh. “You mean that I wasn’t the only one checking reviews like a lunatic?”
“Nope,” Liam said, carefully examining his phone screen. “You’re tough competition, Jessa. Give yourself a little credit.”
The soft sounds of Liam mumbling math to himself as he added up our points slowly faded. The results of the competition felt so insignificant compared to what had almost happened.
We almost kissed. Liam Ashford almost kissed me—and I didn’t pull away.
“Well,” his voice cut through my thoughts like a hot knife through butter. “Hate to be the one to break the news, but I hope you’re in the mood for something cheesy.”
“No,” I groaned. “Tell me you’re lying.”
“Wish I could.” The teasing lilt to his voice told me that was absolutely not the case. “But I can’t. Open wide.”
Before I could react, there was a spoon being shoved in my face, topped with a thick scoop of beige colored ice cream that smelled nothing like cheese.
“Oh my god. Please, no,” I whined, all while opening my mouth anyway. I wouldn’t dare give Liam the opportunity to call me a chicken.
“Bottoms up,” Liam said, sounding more joyful than I had ever heard him before.
There were no words to describe the taste that hit my tongue. I spit it out in an instant. “People feed that to their dogs?” I shouted in disgust.
Liam nearly toppled off the bench from laughter. “No way it’s that bad!” he said breathlessly, in between laughs.
I took a long, slow sip of my milkshake, hoping to wash the lingering taste off my tongue. “Try it,” I demanded. “You forced me to. Now it’s your turn.”
Liam’s face screwed up in disgust as he lifted the cup to his nose and sniffed it. “It smells like dog food,” he said, scooping up another spoonful.
I rolled my eyes at the perpetual moron beside me. “I wonder why.”
A giddy wave of excitement washed over me as I watched him lift the spoon to his mouth and take a bite. No less than a split second later, Liam was leaping off the bench and gagging as he furiously spit into a bush. “It’s so much worse than I thought. Why are there chunks?”
“You’re going to make me throw up if you keep dry heaving like that,” I warned him. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.
“Quick, give me a sip of your milkshake.”
I hugged the foam cup to my chest. “No way, you have your own ice cream. I’m not letting you touch mine with your cheese mouth.”
“Whatever that was, it was not cheese.”
We both laughed together. I eventually did give in and reluctantly gave Liam a sip of my milkshake, which somehow turned to him greedily gulping down nearly half of it.
At the end of the evening, as I lay in my bed, cheeks aching from how much I had smiled, I realized that for the first time in my entire life, I didn’t exactly mind losing to Liam Ashford.