Liam put the pizza and beer down and took the notebook from me.
He stared at the paper for much longer than it took to read it.
Then he put it down.
“You’re grateful that I’m alive?” he said, voice almost a whisper. But a man who spoke like Liam didn’t whisper, he had a low, thick rasp.
The smallness in his tone hurt me. I didn’t hesitate to cross the space between us and cup his face the same way my mother had earlier today. “Yes, Liam. No matter who you came back as, I’m glad you’re alive. I tried to lie to myself and say I wasn’t. But I’m a journalist. I’m trained to spot lies. And that’s the biggest one of all. That even in the middle of this pain and misery, I feel joy that I’m standing in front of you right now.” I stroked his scar. “That I’m touching you,” I whispered.
He put his hand lightly, hesitantly on my hip. “I didn’t use to feel anything about being alive,” he said. “I didn’t feel anything but shame. I tried to build a life as far away from what I could’ve had with you so it would be like I really was dead. And it suits me. As much as I fucking hate to say that to you, I couldn’t live any other life. I couldn’t have come home. There would have been one day you forgot to close the kitchen drawer or got the wrong brand of yogurt and I would’ve done something so ugly and destroyed the beautiful life I didn’t deserve.” His hand tightened on my hip. “Destroyed the beautiful woman I didn’t deserve.”
“I know,” I whispered.
I didn’t like the truth of what he was saying. But no one really liked the truth. The truth was a bully we all pretended to like. Never had I gotten that quote from my favorite book like I did now.
His eyes moved over my face, something working between us. Something weaving through the air, now we had cleared the space with the truth earlier today. Something pivotal.
Because I’d told myself that once Liam told me the truth, I’d be forced to make a decision. I’d imagined the decision itself would be some pivotal, climactic moment, like in the movies with all that sad music, it’d probably be raining and it would become a defining chapter in our story.
But the decision was small, blink and you miss it type small. It was me packing up that Walmart bag and getting on the back of Liam’s bike. Something about the way he looked at me sitting on it told me if I didn’t get on, he’d just drive back, leaving me with only the vision of his cut and I’d never see him again. He was giving me an out.
I didn’t hesitate.
I got on.
And he drove off.
No rain.
No climatic moment.
It wasn’t a chapter in a story.
It was barely a footnote.
But it would define the way it ended.
And here we were, in a hotel room, one last night of just us before we went back to the club for whatever ending awaited us.
This was the moment.
The pivotal one. Where we made declarations. Promises that would be broken.
But he stepped back.
My hands stayed suspended in the air for a beat.
Liam moved to open the pizza boxes, pass me a beer.
I took it wordlessly, the smell of pepperoni and mushrooms filled the air. Our favorite. The one food that we both liked the same way.
We ate in silence, I forced the pizza down even though my stomach was churning. The beer went down much easier.
“You want to ask me shit now?” he asked, putting the pizza away and giving me the last beer. I was outdrinking him.
“What shit?” For once, I didn’t actually have any more questions.
No. That was a lie.
I had a lot of questions.
Like, do you still love me? Is this going anywhere? Will you give up the club for me?
But they were not the questions even someone like me asked.
“For your story. You’re still writing it, aren’t you?”
The words were a blow. A dumping of cold water into my psyche. The story. What brought me here, what drove me for the past decade, I’d all but forgotten about the story because I was too busy thinking about our story.
Liam obviously wasn’t.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, sure, of course. I’m still writing it.”
Something moved in his eyes. Disappointment?
But I had already transitioned myself into my old skin, the journalist mode that I used to feel so comforted, so insulated in. Now it was just cold. Ill-fitting.
I moved to the Walmart bag, rifling through to find the one thing I’d had on me while I’d been scaling the clubhouse wall. I didn’t pack a toothbrush, but a small tape recorder, I’d shoved in my pocket. Maybe I was still a journalist.