Chapter Eighteen
“You didn’t have to come home with me.”
“Of course I did,” Dinah said cheerfully. “Carter all but shoved me out the door.”
Kayla eyed Dinah as they walked up the stairway to her apartment door. “Yeah, that was . . . weird.”
But Dinah only grinned. “So weird.”
“Why are you happy about that?”
“Because I’m pretty sure he’s planning some elaborate engagement thing.”
Kayla stopped in her tracks. “What?” she screeched.
Dinah giggled. “Yup. He thinks he’s so subtle too. It’s adorable. I mean, it’s also driving me crazy because I have no idea when he’s actually going to do it so I’m always halfway on edge, but it’s mostly adorable.”
“Dinah.” Kayla didn’t know why she felt so teary. It was just . . . God, they were getting old. Jobs and heartaches and marriage. “You’re getting married.”
Dinah, cool as a cucumber Dinah, looked a little teary herself. “Well, if he ever actually asks me anyway.” She sniffled a little.
“And I know I’m totally jumping the gun, but you’ll be my maid of honor, right?”
Then they both started crying in earnest, and it was such a better cry than last night or this morning. This wasn’t about being sad or vaguely dissatisfied. This was all about being so happy for someone she loved.
She pulled away from Dinah, realized they were standing in the middle of the stairwell hugging and crying. “Come on. We can cry inside.”
“And drink, right?” Dinah asked in a squeaky voice.
“Damn straight.”
Kayla walked with Dinah up the stairs, but nearly ran into her when Dinah stopped short at the top of the stairwell.
“Oh,” Dinah said, an odd tone to her voice.
Kayla sniffled looking over at the door where Dinah had stopped midstep. “Oh,” Kayla repeated herself.
Liam got to his feet, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Um, hi. I need to talk to you.”
Part of her wanted that too. A very big part. But he couldn’t just stomp on her heart one night and then show up the next expecting to get whatever he wanted.
“We’re busy.”
“This is important.”
Kayla lifted her chin, pointing between her and Dinah. “So is this.”
Dinah reached out and squeezed her hand. “Why don’t I go home?”
“But—”
Dinah shook her head. “Get your shit straightened out, Kay. We’ll celebrate after it actually happens, okay? I want your head in the game for it.” Then she pulled Kayla into a hug and squeezed. “Just work it out, or cut it off for good,” she whispered. “Don’t let it keep dragging out, okay?”
Kayla sniffled again and nodded as Dinah released her. After one last arm squeeze, Dinah disappeared down the stairs and Kayla stood in the breezeway with Liam.
Her heart hurt. A sharp, painful ache in her chest. She hadn’t had time to build up any kind of defense against him. Everything with them had all happened so fast, and she needed time to sort it out.
She could live without him—she knew that—but she needed a little bit more time to feel like that was the best alternative. Right now living without him just sucked.
“I don’t want to do this right now.” She grabbed her keys and moved for her door.
But he stepped in front of her. “I do,” he said firmly.
She knew she should meet his steady gaze with the most condescending, imperious look she could manage. She should tell him to go to hell. Instead, she stared blindly at his chest. Her throat was tight and she felt like crying again, and it was so damn infuriating that she would cry again.
Again and again and again, over this. “Butt face.”
“I’m sorry did you just . . . say . . . Did you just call me a butt face?”
She covered her face with her hands and let out an irritated groan. “I don’t want to do this! I want you to leave.” She blew out a breath, forcing herself to look at him. He looked tired. Beat down. “How’s your Dad?” she asked, because she might think he was a butt face, but she didn’t want him to be a sad one.
“Everything looks good.”
“I’m glad. Really.”
“I know.”
“Now can you please go?” she asked, perilously close to tears.
“No.”
She wanted to stomp her feet and push him. Instead, she went for a low blow. “I really think it’d be best for poor Aiden if you did, don’t you?”
He ran his tongue over his top teeth and let out a breath. “I get that I deserved that.” He kept that unreadable blue gaze on her. “But I’m not going anywhere until we talk.”
“Why are you making this hard on me?” she demanded, trying to blink back the tears. “Last night wasn’t bad enough, now you’re trying to make it worse?”
“I know you’re mad at me, and I know I fucked up, but I don’t think we automatically stopped loving each other because we had a fight.”
“Sure, but maybe I don’t want to love you,” she threw at him, crossing her arms over her chest.
His hand dropped and he inhaled sharply, standing so unnaturally still for a few seconds she was almost afraid to breathe.
He wiped his hand over his mouth and beard, his throat working hard to swallow. She had to stare at his throat, because on his face was a kind of pain that even mad at him she regretted having put there.
She wanted to run away. She wanted to hide. She wanted to sweep all this feeling—hurt and fear and fury—into some dark corner. She wanted it so bad she could hardly see straight, but there was this little piece of her reminding her of what he’d said last night.
About her running away, and he hadn’t been right, exactly. She hadn’t run away last night by ending things, but right now she was running away from what Dinah had suggested—figure it out or cut it off. She wanted to hide from it, wait for it to go away, and that just wasn’t an option.
“Let me tell you about this morning, and then if you still feel that way, I’ll go,” he said, his voice little more than a rough scrape, his throat still moving as if he found it as hard to breathe evenly as she did.
Though everything in her screamed to refuse, she forced herself to nod. Figure it out or cut it off. This had to be handled, not run away from, even if the hardest part was the fact that he’d been the best example of standing up and taking care of things she’d ever seen.
Grandmother and Dinah bulldozed through, and Dad swept things out of the way or manipulated his way to get what he wanted, but Liam stepped in and solved problems and really helped people. He cared beyond himself.
That was half of why she was standing here crying as she unlocked her door and pushed it open though. Because she admired his ability to fix, she just hated his inability to draw any boundaries with it.
She wiped her face with her palms as she stepped into her apartment. She heard him follow and close the door but she didn’t turn around to face him. She hugged herself and tried to figure out what it was she wanted from this.
From him.
To end it. She had to end it. This was Liam’s pattern, and it wasn’t going to change. Working things out would only bring them right back here, and it was too much hurt. It was way too hard. She had to end things now with complete and utter certainty.
“I was wrong last night,” Liam said, his voice low and sure. Never in her entire life had Kayla heard someone admit being wrong with such a sincere certainty.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, and he stood there, eyes steady on hers, so . . . sturdy and certain. She looked away again.
“You were right, and the funny thing is, you’re not the first person to accuse me of my helping priorities being a little skewed.”
“So why should I think what I said actually mattered if no one’s ever gotten through to you?”
“Because you were the first person who really truly mattered to accuse me of it.”
Her arms began to shake even as she held herself tighter. She wanted to be strong enough to say it wasn’t enough. She wanted to be strong enough to know that ending it was the only possibility for them to both be happy.
But those words undid all of her certainty.
* * *
Kayla didn’t say anything. She kept standing there in the middle of her living room with her back to him. Holding herself, something like a tremor going through her body, but she made no other reaction to his words.
He didn’t know if he was getting anywhere, and that clawed at him, but his only choice here was to keep powering forward.
Maybe he couldn’t fix everything, but he still had to believe there were some things he could—and should—fix.
“It turns out when someone you love says something you don’t want to hear, it’s a lot harder to dismiss, and then my grandmother sort of reinforced what you said, and it’s really, really hard to deny the truth when two people are forcing you to look at it at the same time.”
She turned to face him, but nothing about the expression on her face was reassuring. Her eyebrows were drawn together, and her lips were pressed into a firm, disapproving line.
“I’m glad . . .” She cleared her throat and it killed him to see and hear that kind of pain in her. Pain he’d put there. “I think it’s great you think we’re right, because I happen to agree, but I don’t see how it changes anything.”
“How can it not change anything?” he demanded, trying to tamp down the frustration that was starting to weave in with all the hurt and fear. He knew he’d made a mistake, but only for a couple hours. She couldn’t honestly be ready to end this because he’d . . .
“Talk is cheap,” she said firmly, looking him in the eye. And tears swam there or he might have been felled completely by those words. “It’s easy to say that I’m right. But knowing I’m right doesn’t mean you won’t jump to help Aiden at the expense of yourself the next time your mom asks.”
“I told her,” Liam gritted out, holding on to his temper. “I told Mom I wouldn’t do this anymore. That I wasn’t going to break up with you, not even for pretend. I told her that she needed to let Aiden try and fix himself.”
“And she took that well?”
“Of course not.”
Kayla inhaled carefully, shaking her head and looking away from him. “I don’t want to be the thing that screws up your family. I don’t . . . It isn’t even all about Aiden. I mean, that’s a lot of it, but it’s not the only place you . . . I’d never want to be the thing you sacrifice yourself over, and I don’t think I can trust you on that.”
“I’m trying to realize there can be a balance, Kayla.” He wanted to move close, to touch her, to get through to her, but she held herself like she was fragile, and he hated that he’d put that there. “I like helping people. I like fixing things. I can’t change that about myself, but I think I can change how often I do those things without thinking about the consequences. I never wanted to lose you. If I’d thought for even a minute about how you’d feel about pretending to break things off, I never would have asked you to do it. I was blinded by . . .”
“Your need to fix things.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I think you’re misunderstanding me, because I get it. I get you. I know you want to help, and I know it comes from a good place, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a very good bet in the whole significant-other department.” She swallowed, a few tears spilling over. “I love you, Liam. I do. But I can’t be the partner who says, yeah, it’s fine, go help everyone else.”
“Maybe I was looking for the partner who would tell me to stop,” he returned, each word feeling like a shard of glass was scraping against his throat.
She let out a little sob at that, the tears falling more freely even as she tried to wipe them away, and he couldn’t let that stand—not for boundaries or because she wanted him to. He crossed to her and pulled her into his arms.
She cried into his chest, and though she didn’t move her arms around him, she didn’t use them to push him away either. She leaned against him, and she cried, and he knew he had to keep moving forward, keep working—not to fix this but to make this.
“Remember when you told me your family treated you like decoration? I would never, Kayla. I couldn’t. I need you, and I think you need me.” He pulled her back so he could look her in the eye. “I know I’m not perfect. Sometimes you might have to remind me to step back, but what I’m saying is I’d listen. I’ll always listen, and we may disagree, but I will always listen to you. I don’t want to be apart. I don’t want to lose you. I love you, and I’m not perfect but damn if I’ll make the same mistake twice once I realize it. I’ll fix whatever I break.”
“I don’t need you to fix anything. Not my sink or me or you. Not us,” she said on a whisper, but it wasn’t a refusal, and she didn’t step away.
“Okay, so maybe we agree to make something. Together. And when you make something with someone sometimes you don’t agree on the direction, or maybe you have to go back and sand down some jagged edges, but you talk, and you decide together what the next step is.”
She didn’t say anything so he reached into his back pocket and pulled out the gift he’d brought, wrapped up in a paint-splattered cloth from his workshop. “I’ve been, uh, working on this the past few days, the very few moments we haven’t been together, and I went home this afternoon and finished it before I came over.” He held it out to her.
“What is it?” she asked skeptically.
He took her hand and placed the lump of cloth and wood into it. “Look.”
She swallowed, her eyes red and tears still rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. She unraveled the cloth until the item came into view.
Her eyes went a little wide as she held it out of the cloth. “It’s a lovespoon,” she whispered.
“So, I, um, took a few liberties with the symbols and—”
“There’s a bear.”
“Two bears. The smiling one and the, er, frowning one.”
She stared at the lovespoon with wide, unblinking eyes. “Like my figurines.”
“Well, yeah.”
She traced her hands over the outline of the spoon. He’d poured a lot of himself into the shape, into the carvings, into the meaning of it, and it meant more than he’d ever be able to articulate that she seemed to appreciate it.
“No one’s ever . . .” She shook her head, her voice cracking on the ever.
“Paid such close attention?”
She blinked up at him as if amazed by the fact he could finish that sentence, but of course he could. “I know, because it’s the same for me. No one, Kayla. I think I’ve been waiting for you, and I will never take that for granted.”
“I was really determined to break up with you, Liam,” she said, her voice squeaky and strained. Her mouth worked, her breath going in and out in little shaky bursts. “But how do you break up with the guy who gives you a lovespoon?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll make you a million more if it ups my chances of keeping you.”
She let out a little watery laugh. “I . . . I just want what’s best for both of us.”
“I do, too. I think we’re better together. Don’t you?”
This time she stepped toward him, sliding her arm around his neck and pulling him against her. “I do,” she whispered, holding him close and tight. “I really do.”
He wrapped his arms around her, held her tight, even with the spoon between them. “I never wanted to lose you, Kay.”
“I know,” she said, her words muffled in his shoulder. “And I hope you know I never needed to be more important than Aiden or your family. I just wanted to be as important.”
“You are. You absolutely are. And if you ever feel like you aren’t, you—”
“Say it. Not run away from it.” She tipped her head back and smiled at him. “Yeah, we are definitely better together.”
There was nothing truer in his life than the fact that Kayla Gallagher made it better, and he would do whatever it took to make sure that lasted a lifetime.