“Could you?”
“Yeah.”
“Even The Little Mermaid?”
“Yes.”
“What about Moana?”
“Liam, I’m really trying, here. If you could please—” I am ready to storm out of the kitchen when I realize that he’s actually smiling. Well, sort of. With his eyes. Oh my God, was that a joke? He jokes? “You’re not as funny as you think.”
He nods, and doesn’t say anything for a moment or two. Then, “The Disney soundtracks are not that bad.” He sounds pained. “And I’ll try to be better, too. I’ll water your plants when you’re out of town and they’re about to die.” I knew he’d let my cucumber die on purpose. I knew it. “And maybe I’ll make a sandwich for dinner, if I get hungry past midnight.”
I lift my eyebrow.
Liam sighs. “Past ten p.m.?”
“That would be perfect.”
He crosses his huge arms on his equally huge, still bare chest, and then rocks a bit on his heels.
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
The silence stretches. Suddenly, this situation feels... tense. Sticky. A verge of some sort. A turning point.
A good time for me to leave.
“I’m going to...” I point toward the stairs, where my bedroom is. “Have a good night, Liam.”
I don’t turn around when he says, “Good night, Mara.”
Chapter 4
Four months, three weeks ago
There are plenty of things I wouldn’t expect Liam Harding to do when he enters the kitchen.
For instance, he’s unlikely to whip out castanets and flamenco his way around the island. To break into a Michael Bolton hit from the ’80s. To sell me a leaf blower and recruit me into some gardening tools MLM venture. These are all very improbable events, and yet none of them would shock me as much as what he actually does. Which is to look at me and say:
“It’s... nice outside today.”
It’s not that it isn’t. It is, in fact, really nice. Unseasonably warm. It’s because the Earth is dying, of course. Rising global average temperatures are associated with widespread fluctuations in weather patterns, and that’s why we’re still wearing lightweight jackets, even though it’s late November in D.C. and Christmas trees have been popping up for weeks now. A few years ago, Helena wrote a paper about the way human action is increasing the periodicity and intensity of extreme weather events. It got published in Nature Climate Change and has about a zillion citations.
I could say all of this to Liam. I could be my most obnoxious self and lecture on the topic for hours. But I don’t, and the reason is that even through his clipped, hesitant tone and his currently lowered gaze, I can recognize an olive branch when it bites me in the ass.
Which, right now, it absolutely is. Biting, that is.
It’s been about two weeks since I first became aware that Liam is capable of human emotions. And as it turns out, being in a truce while living together means having significantly fewer shouting matches, but still doesn’t make finding topics of conversation any easier. Which is fine. Most of the time. It’s a big house, after all. But on the rare occasions in which our schedules overlap and we end up in the living room or in the kitchen together...
Awkward.
As fuck.
“Yeah.” My nod is sprain-your-neck enthusiastic—overcompensating. “It’s nice. To have good weather, I mean.”
Liam nods, too (stiffly, but maybe I’m just projecting), and just like that, we’re back to square one: silence.