Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
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Back in Liam's bedroom, he takes his pajama shirt off and throws it to the floor before landing on his bed in a messy heap. I hover in the doorway.
"Sit, Cook," Liam says, mostly to his pillow.
I sit at his desk and open his laptop. Surprisingly, he hasn't changed his password in a few years, so I still know it. I pull up Netflix and start scrolling through.
"Come to bed, Cook."
Liam's "Continue watching" on Netflix is full of music biopics of Queen and Elton John and old musicians. He's got a strange taste in music. Pop music from our parents' generation, and even earlier. I think it's because his dad left him a huge stack of records when he died, and it's the music his dad loved.
"What do you want to watch?" I ask him.
"I just want to talk."
"About what?" I ask him.
I'm starting to dread this strange conversation with drunk Liam, where he's insisting I have a secret. Because in the back of my mind I think that he must know that I saw his text message to Oscar. He must know that I know. Oscar must have told him.
I have absolutely no idea how to handle a conversation with Liam Somner about the fact that he might possibly love me. So I want to avoid it for as long as possible, until I have managed to get my head straight. Which, knowing me, could take a while.
"You want to tell me about Max?" I ask him.
Maybe that's cruel. To bring up Max again when Liam is so clearly drunk and has the potential to swing from happy to sad in a minute. But he was the one who brought it up first, and it'll probably occupy his mind enough that he can't think about the text message.
Liam pulls up his head from his pillow and looks at me. "Why are you sitting over there?"
I lean back and swing in his desk chair, but don't answer him.
"How much of the story did I tell you?" he asks, lowering his head again.
"You were at the lake," I say.
"Mm," Liam says. "Okay, come lie beside me and I'll tuck you into bed and tell you a story."
I grudgingly get out of the chair and sit cross-legged on the end of his bed.
"Ah, nope, that's not going to work," Liam says. "You gotta be lying down if you want a bedtime story."
I go onto all-fours and crawl across the bed, then lie down on my side, facing Liam.
"See, that wasn't so hard, was it?"
"You didn't brush your teeth," I remind him.
He groans. "Fine, mom." And then he's throwing himself across me, off the bed and into the bathroom. A minute later he ducks his head around. "You gonna brush yours too?"
