Chapter Nineteen
Liam and I were both silent as we sat across from one another in the cafe of his empty shop. There was nothing but space between us, yet all that empty space felt like it was packed in as tight as it could be with the thousands of words that he and I had left unsaid.
This silence was my opportunity.
I opened my mouth to finally tell Liam everything. To finally break apart that wall between us, brick by brick, until there wouldn’t be a single thing left unsaid between us any longer.
We spoke at the exact same time.
“Liam, I think that I—”
“I terminated my lease.”
Silence fell over us once more. I stared at him. He stared at me. Some time passed—it could have been ten seconds or a thousand years, and I wouldn’t have had a clue.
Finally, I spoke. “You did what?”
“I terminated my lease. What was it that you were trying to say?”
I shook my head. The idea of continuing on with what I was about to tell him felt like insanity after the bomb he had dropped in my lap so casually.
“Why would you do that?” My voice was barely more than a whisper. It was commendable that I could even form words at all with the way my mind was racing.
Liam painted a half-smug, half-defeated expression on his face. I could not stand the look of it.
“I think it’s for the best,” he said. With every word, it felt as though he was pushing a few more inches of space between us, building up another wall.
“Why?” That seemed to be the only word I could get out.
His actions felt like a betrayal.
“I know you, Jess.”
“Is that so?” I seethed. “You know me?”
“Yeah,” he began. “You’re going to win tomorrow. Then you’re going to feel bad about me losing and tell me that I don’t really have to leave. I don’t ever want to put you in that position, so I—”
There he was, acting like my savior once again, deciding how this all was meant to end without ever so much as asking for my input.
It was infuriating. Liam Ashford was infuriating.
“Seriously, Liam.” I stood up, narrowing my eyes at him. “I have lost to you over and over and over again all my life. Please, do not tell me that you are actually this stupid.”
Liam stood. “What?” His expression morphed into one of confusion. “Jess, I tried to tell you—” He cut his own words off with a sharp sigh. “You ran.”
“I know that!” I was practically shouting at the man who stood only a foot away from me. “I know that I ran, Liam, but that doesn’t—”
“I shouldn’t have done this,” Liam said.
There was such a deep look of sadness and guilt in his eyes.
“I shouldn’t have trapped you into this.
” He ran his fingers through his hair. The same gesture I had witnessed countless times before.
“I should have let you live your life and run your shop. I never should have—”
Liam Ashford was standing right in front of me, aggravating me more than he ever had in all the years I had known him. And he was looking at me with those irritatingly sad eyes.
“You are such an idiot.”
The look of confusion on his face faltered for a moment. As if something had clicked behind those stupid, beautiful eyes.
“Jess—”
I closed the space between us by fisting a hand in his t-shirt, just below the collar, and yanking him toward me.
He stumbled a little as his waist bumped the table.
Then Liam’s lips came crashing down against mine.
Once more, the world fell silent, save for the gasp of breath that escaped him as our mouths met.
His hands tangled in my hair, tilting my head slightly so he could deepen the kiss. A swipe of his tongue on my lower lip had me obediently opening my mouth. His tongue moved against mine in a mesmerizing rhythm that made me weak at the knees.
I had never noticed before that Liam wore cologne, or perhaps it was a new thing for him. Either way, it’d be impossible not to notice when we were sharing the same air.
The scent suited him, warm and slightly sweet with hints of a smoky, cedar-like aroma.
He smelled like Sunday mornings together on his mother’s sofa. The park by our old apartment complex when we were children. The student council room that he and I both spent far too much time in back in high school. Liam smelled like home.
I realized that I could travel halfway around the earth—I could see all that there is to see and do all that there is to do. I could meet hundreds of people, wiser and kinder and far more handsome than him, but I would always still find myself dreaming of him.
Of all the ever-changing things in my life, Liam Ashford had always remained the one constant. He was the same to me at twenty-three as he had always been. He was my home. I would seek him out until the end of my days, not because he was all that I knew, but because he was all that I needed.
Perhaps it was that realization that had me muttering into the kiss, breathy and dizzy on affection, “I love you.”
It was not how I had planned for those words to come out. Not in the slightest. In fact, I had spent the past week mulling over exactly how that conversion was meant to go. It was meant to be a sweet, thought-out confession, not something I mindlessly muttered against his lips.
But I meant those words all the same.
His lips stilled against mine.
“What?” Liam asked breathlessly.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. My whole body felt as if it were on fire. I had no doubt that my entire face was probably flushed a deep red all the way up to the tips of my ears.
Liam pulled back and stared at me with dark eyes. “No. What did you just say?” His voice was rough and deeper than usual.
“I didn’t—”
I meant it. I loved him. With my entire being, I loved him. The only reason those words had slipped out in the first place was because it was such a concrete, unwavering truth within my heart.
But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The first time I told Liam Ashford I loved him was meant to be a romantic moment. It was meant to be perfect, but I ruined it.
“Say it again,” Liam said. His gaze was burning hot and locked onto mine so fiercely that I couldn’t dare look away.
Standing there, being expected to say those three words, while those deep brown eyes, which I recognized better than my own, were staring straight into the depths of my soul—it felt impossible.
It was so very different from blurting it out in a whisper of a breath, kiss drunken and overwhelmed with emotion.
“Say it again, Jessa,” Liam repeated after I had stood there silently for too long. He was different like this. In a way that I had never seen before, but also in a way that I craved.
I opened my mouth. I decided that, right moment or not, I wanted to say it. I felt those words so deeply. They had every right to be spoken.
But no words came out.
A prickle of embarrassment crept up the back of my neck. I felt defeated. I could finally stand up for myself. I could force myself to get over my obsession with perfection. I could kiss Liam with every ounce of love I had in me.
But I couldn’t tell him I loved him.
Even when I knew it to be true with such absolute certainty. It was pathetic—I was pathetic.
Liam smiled that blindly bright smile I had grown to adore. He didn’t seem to find me pathetic in the slightest.
“Fine,” he said as he swiftly made his way around the table. “Then, I guess I’ll have to make you say it.”
“What—” Was all I could squeak out before he lifted me up.
My heart hammered in my chest as I wrapped my legs around him.
“I love you,” Liam said as he carried me.
“You—what?” Everything was happening far too quickly and not at all how I imagined it would.
His chest vibrated against mine as he laughed. “I love you, Jessa,” Liam said as he stepped into the stairwell. “I love you. I have no idea how you didn’t know that.”
Liam Ashford loved me.
“How long?”
Another laugh. “All my life,” he said, yanking open the door to his apartment and then carrying me inside.
“All your life?” My brain had simply stopped functioning. “What do you mean?”
Liam set me down, so I was standing in front of him in the center of his living room. His eyes softened, and his warm, gentle hands settled on either side of my face. He swiped a thumb back and forth on my cheek and stared, as if he was immortalizing the moment with his eyes.
“I have loved you all my life, Jessa Alden.”
Liam pressed another kiss to my lips, different from all the kisses we had shared before. This one was soft and gentle. His lips moved slowly against mine, and his hands stayed right where they were, holding onto my face as if I were something precious.
When we finally pulled apart, he bumped his forehead softly against mine. A second passed, then another. Until quietly I heard him say, “All my life.”
All his life. Liam Ashford has loved me for his entire life, and I had no idea.
“You’ve loved me all your life, and never said a word?” I asked, the slightest bit of anger bubbling up inside me.
The truth was that Liam had every reason not to say anything.
I had spent over half of the years we had known one another competing with him.
And, in the few months that I had grown to realize that maybe there was something more between us than our rivalry, I had spent the better portion of that time avoiding and running away from him.
The truth was, regardless of how long I had loved Liam, I hadn’t been ready to let myself accept it until this very moment.
“I tried to tell you at the park,” he confessed.
“I wasn’t ready then,” I admitted quietly.
“I know. I told you that I would wait for you, Jess, but after you ran away, I figured that you needed space. That it’d be better if I…”
My stomach sank as I remembered what had initiated this entire conversation in the first place. Liam had terminated his lease. He was leaving.
“If you left?”
Liam nodded. “I realized that I had sort of trapped you into this—that it wasn’t fair to you.”
“You really are an idiot, Liam,” I said, gazing into those endless brown eyes of his. “You think that I don’t want this?”
Liam remained silent. I could see the doubt still glittering in his eyes.