So I pushed him.
And slapped him.
And then, with horror, I realized it was Liam, not Blaise.
I’d gotten out of there as quickly as I could—in a daze. Once in my room, I sat trying to figure out what had caused my reaction.
I’d always believed myself to be strong. A fighter. I'd had to be to survive this long.
But the thing was, I’d been running on adrenaline for so long to make it through each and every day of the hell I had to endure and then to escape. That had definitely sucked the life out of me. I was running on fumes. I had nothing to hold me up, and as I settled and began to come down from that adrenaline high, something new was setting in.
Something I believed might have been PTSD.
I knew I was no doctor, but I was smart—Blaise had made sure of that—and I felt certain that I had to be suffering from that. I was stuck, though. I was a ghost, without ID or even a birth certificate. I definitely had no health insurance.
There was nothing I could do to help myself.
Nothing but fight, and I’d been fighting for so long I didn’t know if I could keep it up, but I’d have to try in order to keep my sanity.
I wouldn’t let it break me. I hadn’t let anything else get to me, and I’d lived through more horrors in four years than most people experienced in a lifetime.
Liam wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.
The sliding glass door—which was actually more like a whole damn wall—opened behind me, and Liam stepped outside.
“Ari?”
I looked over my shoulder at him, acknowledging him with the small raise of my brows.
There was a rock wall built on the far side of his yard—calling it a yard seemed silly since there was no grass, but whatever—to keep people from falling since his house was positioned high up on a cliff and the beach lay directly below us. That’s where I sat with my legs dangling. When I kicked, my feet met open air. Maybe I should have feared the fall, but I didn’t.
Liam shoved his hands in the pockets of his black shorts, and his long stride carried him to me quickly.
“What are you looking at?” He quirked his head to the side, studying me like I was some fascinating work of art displayed in a museum.
I turned away from him and back to the view. The sky and the ocean stretched as far as the eye could see.
“Possibilities.”
I lifted my chin slightly to glance at him. He looked even more curious than before.
“What kind of possibilities?” His face fell into serious lines with his question, almost like he was mad at himself for showing any interest.
I shrugged, absorbing the feeling of my hair tickling my shoulders—a sensation I’d taken for granted at one time. So many little things I’d never cherished that I now clasped tightly in a closed fist, never wanting to let go.
“One possibility, in particular,” I began, adjusting my grip on the wall where my hands rested beside my hip. “It’s silly,” I muttered, hanging my head in shame.
“Tell me,” he pleaded, and I swore I felt his fingers graze my bare shoulder, but when I looked up his hands were still shoved deep in his pockets.
“I was thinking about what it would be like in an alternate universe. What if I’d grown up somewhere else, had different parents…” I trailed off, knowing he wouldn’t understand. Leaving those thoughts behind, I grinned up at him. “Maybe I could have been a princess.”
I thought he’d laugh, or maybe glare at me and tell me not to be so stupid, but instead he smiled slowly, and said, “Why be a princess when you can be a mother-fucking-knight?”
“A girl knight?” I asked, feeling something akin to happiness light up my insides.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d craved a normal, silly conversation with someone. I would’ve never believed the person would’ve been Liam, though.
“Sure.” He shrugged, taking his hands out of his pockets and bracing his arms on the wall beside me. “You can be anything you want to be.”