“Stop looking up stuff,” Aria said as A.J checked his phone for the tenth time.
“I’m sorry. Everyone we know is sending me every link that comes out about Liam.”
Liam laughed, paying it little attention as he brought his coffee to his lips while peering over the edge of the balcony. He looked so damned cute in his knit hat, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop hugging up against his arm, even if it meant I’d barely touched my food. I knew it was a common vacation symptom, but I wished for a moment that this could just be our lives – cuddling up under beautiful mountains with our best friends and all the time in the world.
“Anything interesting?” Aria asked, though she made sure to sound annoyed to convey her displeasure with A.J’s phone addiction.
“Uh. Holy shit, yeah,” he said, shifting his eyes toward Liam. “You, uh, you wanna hear, buddy?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No. Also, shouldn’t your phone be blowing up right now?”
“I haven’t had service since we got here,” Liam said, popping a bite of steak and egg in his mouth. He smirked at A.J. “You gonna give us the news or what?”
A.J’s eye actually twinkled as he broke into a boyish grin. “They got your venue, man. You’re fighting at Madison Square Garden.”
Aria dropped her fork as I threw the blanket off our shoulders. “Oh my God! Liam!” I wrapped him in the world’s tightest hug. “Oh my frickin’ God, that’s huge!”
A.J pointed at me. “Listen to your woman. They don’t let just anyone figh
t in our city, bro. This is a fuckin’ honor.”
Liam nodded, reluctant to let out his excitement but when A.J got up to drape a bear hug over his shoulders, he let that sexy grin break free from between his teeth. His emotion came out all at once as he pumped his fist and brought it down on the table. “Fuck, yes!”
We couldn’t stop celebrating. We didn’t even think to order any kind of celebratory drinks, but a bottle of champagne came to us anyway, apparently sent from a couple inside who could feel our “radiating joy.” We burst out laughing and waved when we looked through the window to see a white-haired couple grinning wide and waving back at us. Since they didn’t drink and had already settled up, Liam paid it forward by sending a bottle of Krug to a random couple – tourists from Japan, we later learned, who came over to do a giant toast with us. The cheer kept multiplying, and it was such an unbelievable feeling – the kind of pure elation I had either forgotten or simple never experienced in my life.
Maybe it was the elevation, but I felt tingly and high as we walked out of the restaurant, A.J’s arm around Aria, Liam’s arm around mine. A.J promised to shut his phone off for the rest of the day as we rented the same Jeep Liam used to drive and took a trip to the quaint town of Breckinridge, continuing our celebration in the fittingly picturesque town plucked straight from a storybook.
“Here’s to all the amazing new things in our lives,” Aria toasted in a charming log cabin of a restaurant perched at the tippy top of a hill. “To the four of us, and the two of you, and all the happy days that lay ahead of us.”
We took our time on that one round of champagne, and before it got too dark, we decided to make our way back to Vail. With A.J and Aria grabbing her things from the coat check, Liam and I waited outside, his coat wrapped around me and his lips buried in my hair. I closed my eyes, ignoring the view around us to just steep myself in his love. Neither of us said a word, but we didn’t have to. We didn’t want to jinx it because it truly felt like this was it – the first page of not just our next chapter, but a completely different book. As I thought about his fight at Madison Square Garden, I grinned quietly against Liam’s chest. I hadn’t wanted to go home before, but now I truly couldn’t wait.
* * *
It was dark by the time we arrived back, and we laughed because we’d made the mistake of leaving every light off, which meant we were about to walk into a massive, three-story house of pitch black.
“Scary,” Aria remarked, but the second we walked in the house, three lights beamed up at us, joined by a chorus of chirps.
Ding-ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!
“What the hell?” I muttered before realizing that our phones had just connected to the Wi-Fi again, and we were receiving all the texts we’d missed throughout the day.
My heart crashed against my ribs when I saw the names that lit my phone.
Ethan Kirk.
Jenna Pettit.
I looked up to see Aria’s wide eyes already on me. Our feet gravitated to each other as we both sifted through the hordes of messages to click one link – a Facebook post by an anonymous account. Once it loaded on my screen, I knew. I didn’t even have to read any of the words to know what Ethan had just done.
From there, I blacked out.
* * *
I was ruined – scorched and blistered. Set on fire and left to burn. There was no way to come back from this, and there was little I could have done, phone or not, New York or Vail.
Ethan had posted Owen’s letters to me on Facebook.