The Way We Learned to Love ✓

01 - liam

Hi friends, thanks for reading! A couple of things before we get into the story:

In case anyone skimmed over the Author's Note, I'm leaving one last reminder to not read this book before you read The Search for Lily Myers. This book is meant to be read second and will contain huge spoilers for that one.

TW: Similarly to the last one, this book is meant to have a little bit of something for everyone and will deal with mental health themes in addition to romance. Anxiety, depression, other mental illnesses, suicidal thoughts, and domestic violence will be discussed. There still won't be any content that I believe warrants a mature rating, but it will be more intense than in the last book. The first part of the story steers more so in a general fiction / mental health discussion direction with romance sprinkled in. I've enjoyed writing it so far and feel like I've done a better job at representing these things than I did in the last one. I hope you'll feel the same way!

Also, putting this out there just in case: there's blood in this chapter (can you tell yet that this is going to be a fun book?)

Happy reading!

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february 2017 : 3 years and 7 months ago

Relationship Rule #1: If your crazy girlfriend starts throwing stuff, get out of there.

Relationship Rule #2: Don't tell her to "calm down" unless you'd like to learn your lesson about Rule #1 the hard way.

If you didn't know her, you never would have guessed that Caroline Davis wasn't the good girl she made herself out to be. She was president of the freshman class, a peer tutor, and volunteered at a homeless shelter once a week. Her once-long brown hair was now chopped to her shoulders because she donated it to one of those organizations that makes wigs for kids with cancer. And she had these big brown doe eyes that made her look as innocent as she pretended she was, so you fell for her tricks every time.

Caroline was an expert at twisting her own words after she made a mistake to convince Liam that her jabs towards him were merely made in the heat of the moment. It wasn't hard for him to believe her. He couldn't comprehend why she would be dating him if she actually hated him so much. He didn't yet understand how sometimes people just want to use you and then throw you aside.

For weeks and months to come, he would think that he brought this upon himself. After all, it had been his choice to come hang out with his friends even though he knew they were all going to get hammered. But he couldn't - he had a history test the following morning that was worth a quarter of his grade in the class. He had learned his lesson after he tried to study for the last test hungover and had been so out of it that he said the first president of the United States was George W. Bush.

Jessica, Callum, and Josh were currently all varying degrees of drunk, but Caroline was by far the worst. And drunk Caroline liked to argue. She was in the living room and Liam started walking into the kitchen when they started fighting.

Walking away was his mistake. Liam didn't have time to realize that she hurled her brown beer bottle at him before it hit the counter next to him and exploded into a million pieces like a firework, glass spraying everywhere.

All went completely silent for a second except for the faint dripping sound of Bud Light trickling off the linoleum countertop and onto the floor.

The adrenaline stopped the pain from hitting him immediately, but his heart was already threatening to pound out of his chest.

To say he was pissed off would have been an understatement. And his shirt was now drenched in beer.

But before he could open his mouth to yell at Caroline, he looked down at the puddle of beer on the counter. Red...why was it red? It wasn't red a second ago. His wrist was warm, something was trickling down his arm...He rubbed at it and his hand came back a sickly bright red.