Liam leans a hand on the corner of the left wall. “I laugh all the time when you’re around,” he says. “I love how deeply you careabout your sisters. How you can find the optimism in every situation. And when you asked me all those questions about baseball, and my dad, it made me feel like you wanted to understand me. I felt like I understood you, too, when you let me be the first person to hear your songs. Maybe in a way no one else ever had.”
This. This is the real Liam, right now.
“And this next point I’m going to make is incidental. Really just more of a personal bonus for me, but…” He trails off, eyes heating as they sweep over me. “Your body was made to my exact specifications,” he murmurs hoarsely.
For the second time.
“I was wondering, Paige Lancaster. Actually, I was hoping, wishing, on my knees begging to know, if you’re at all interested in being my girlfriend.”
My pulse shoots up like I swallowed a hummingbird.
This moment—thisexactmoment—is all we both wanted four summers ago. Liam knows what he’s doing.Iknow what he’s doing. It’s wish fulfillment. It’s making up for lost time, flattening it until the time gets folded into quarters, into eighths, into nothing. With his body near mine, my mind hazy from his words, I fall into the trap with him and let time go, doing my best not to think about it anymore like he asked.
“Yes,” I whisper.
Liam leans in, maybe on instinct, then pulls away in the next millisecond, smiling faintly. “Then let’s go on tour, Bristol.”
Chapter 11
July, Now
The hotel is an unassuming tower half a mile from the venue. Liam leads me straight from the starlit parking lot up to the tenth floor.
It doesn’t occur to me to worry about the bed situation until I’m staring at the single, king-sized cloud of luxury in the center of the room.
“Only one bed,” I say. Then: “Is that a mirror on the ceiling?”
Liam smirks at me, setting my guitar case in the corner by the window. Beyond it, the city glows. “We’ve done it before.”
“Shared a bed, or fallen asleep to our own reflections?”
He strolls back toward me, eyes like a hunter. “The bed part.”
His dorm room. My apartment. His truck bed. My shower.
I’m getting off track.
“Liam,” I say. “There’s a mirror on the ceiling.”
He grins and shrugs. “I have no say in the hotels we book.”
“Hang on. Is thisnotyour first rodeo with ceiling-mirror hotel rooms?”
“Far from it. Also, I get randomly upgraded to honeymoon suites sometimes. One of them had a heart-shaped whirlpool tub and no shower. Just you wait.”
There’s an MLB game playing on TV that Liam must have left on when he came to get me. He follows my line of sight, turningto face the screen, where a Kansas City Royals batter is stepping up to home plate.
“It’s not summer without baseball,” I say, quoting him.
He crosses his arms over his chest, eyes on the screen. “That was then.”
“You still love it.”
He half turns to answer. “I still have an unhealthy relationship with it.”
“Don’t we all, with our passions?”
Another half turn, so he can flick his eyes up and down my body. “Definitely.”
