“I brought you a sandwich,” I said, digging into my bag and pulling out the wax-paper-wrapped panini.
I sat it next to him, and he uncovered his eyes long enough to glance at it before he laid back down. “Thanks.”
It wasn’t rude, the way he said it, but it wasn’t exactly inviting, either.
I sat there for a while just looking around the room. My eyes caught on a discarded canvas tilted on its side in the corner. It was bent and warped like it’d been kicked, but behind the damage was a ghoulish image, muscle and ligaments stretched across bone, the skeleton not human, but not any animal I was familiar with.
I cleared my throat. “Feeling alright?”
“Fine. Just tired.”
“Tired,” I echoed on a laugh. “Sure. Okay.”
Liam removed his arm, then, frowning at me. “What, you don’t believe me?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Not even a little bit.”
“What’s your problem?”
“My problem?” I laughed, shaking my head. “You’re just going to pretend like you’re fine, like you were quiet all the way home the other day, and you skipped class two days in a row, and you’re laid up in a dark room because you’re fine?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do.”
Liam sat up straight, throwing the covers off him in a huff. “Can’t a man be left alone?”
“You’ve been left alone. For three days.”
Another sigh. “What, Harley? What do you want to talk about?”
“You know what.”
He swallowed hard, shaking his head before he reached for the water on his bedside table and drained half the glass.
“Are you just going to pretend like it didn’t happen?” I asked on a whisper.
“That what didn’t happen?”
I shook my head. “I guess that’s my answer.”
I stood, leaving the sandwich behind, but before I made it to the door, Liam called out my name.
“Wait,” he said after, dragging his hands through his hair. He balanced his elbows on his knees, one of them bouncing erratically. When he finally looked at me again, I saw the pain etched into his brows, the words he couldn’t say stuck in his throat.
I sighed, leaving my bag on the ground by the door before I walked back over to him. I reached for him slowly, tentatively, until he wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face in my stomach.
I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of him around me, soothing him with my hands running through his hair. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” He pulled back, looking up at me.
More silence.
“Do you need me to say it?” I asked.
“Please, don’t.”
“I’m falling in love with you.”
You would have thought those words were bullets to his chest, the way he shrank away from me, wincing, shaking his head over and over like this was how it all ended.
“I’m falling in love with you, Liam,” I repeated. “And I know you’re falling for me, too.”
“I told you,” he croaked. “I can’t.”
“But you have been. And four days ago, you held onto me and looked me in the eyes and told me you wanted more, too.”
“I do, but—”
“Stop it,” I said, shaking him a little, begging him to look at me, but he wouldn’t. “Stop acting like you’re incapable of loving me.”
“But I am,” he said more firmly, standing until we were chest to chest. I backed up a bit at the dark look in his eyes. “I told you, Harley. I told you when we first agreed. You asked me for the summer. You said you could do casual. You said—”
“Yeah, well, I lied. And it looks like you did, too. So now, where does that leave us?”
He blew out a frustrated breath through his nose. “I can’t be with you, Harley.”
I ignored the way those words stung, because I knew he wasn’t saying them because he felt them. He was scared. He was freaked out.
He wasn’t the only one.
“Would you just stop?” I begged again. I reached for him, but he shrugged me off. “All summer long, you’ve told me not to be afraid. You’ve told me to embrace my truth, to be proud of everything that I am and everything that I’m not, to run toward my imperfection. Be strong,” I said, my voice deepening to mimic his. “Take life by the horns. Seize the day. Carpe diem, right? And yet look at you,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re running.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Stop acting like I’ve never been through anything hard in my life.”
He gritted his teeth, eyes focused somewhere across the room.
“You’re not the only one who’s been hurt, Liam. But you insist on ruining the rest of your life because of a tragedy that—”
“I shouldn’t be alive at all!”
His chest heaved with the declaration, his eyes wild where they pinned me, and it was all I could do to keep my jaw off the floor and my racing heart inside my chest.