I snort. Which is a bit mean, but I can’t help it.
“He is,” she protests. “I know you two don’t get along, but he isn’t a bad guy.”
“I still don’t get why you don’t like him,” Lauren says.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, trying to work out how to change the subject. “We just clash I guess.”
“You don’t clash. You have UST,” Lauren says.
I roll my eyes. “We do not.”
Ava says nothing, just watching us talk.
“Yes you do,” Lauren continues. “When we were on vacation he couldn’t take his eyes off you. Remember how annoyed he got when he saw you talking to that other guy?”
“He wasn’t annoyed,” I tell her. “He laughed when he found out the guy was married.” My cheeks heat up and it’s got nothing to do with the steam room. It’s just that the whole situation was embarrassing.
“Yeah, he was annoyed,” Ava says softly. “You were at the bar so you didn’t see.”
I blink. He was? That’s… strange.
“You two would make such a cute couple,” Lauren says and this time I really do laugh.
“What?” Lauren asks. “Don’t you think so?”
“Liam doesn’t do relationships,” I tell her, feeling on firmer ground
“He doesn’t?” She looks at Ava. “He must have had girlfriends in the past.”
Ava shrugs. “I think so. I don’t know. He says he doesn’t have time for relationships now.”
“Sounds like somebody else I know,” Lauren says pointedly, looking at me.
“If I did have time it definitely wouldn’t be with him,” I say. “He never sleeps with the same woman twice.”
“What?” Ava frowns. “He said that to you? When?”
Oh shit. I’m skating dangerously close tothat night.“Um, I don’t know. It was a conversation in passing. It doesn’t matter anyway.” Because I wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole.
“Poor Liam,” Ava says, because she always looks for the best in people. “That’s sad.”
“I don’t think he’s sad about it,” I say. “He seemed pretty impressed with himself.”
“He didn’t really have the best role models in life,” Ava tells us, still looking thoughtful. “With their dad changing wives every few years and their mom still thinking the sun shines out of his ass, they all got affected by it.”
“Myles isn’t going around sleeping with a pile of different women,” Lauren points out, beating me to it.
“No, but Myles swore off love until we got together,” Ava says. “They’re all a little messed up by their childhood, they just don’t realize it.”
The buzzer goes off, reminding us we’ve been sitting in the hot steam for too long. And I breathe – or at least try to – a sigh of relief. I don’t want to talk about Liam anymore. I’ll deal with him tomorrow at the christening and then he’ll go home to New York and I probably won’t see him again until Charlie’s first birthday and that’s not until next year. He can go back to his playboy ways and I can go back to normalcy.
That’s just how I like it.
CHAPTERFIVE
LIAM
“So you’re going to be spending more time here in Charleston,” Eli says to me, lifting his bottle to his mouth. “Wow.” He glances at Holden. “You’ll be the last man standing in New York.”