Page 28 of The Night
“You don’t have pictures?” He frowned. “Hmm.”
“What? You thought I'd saved those cheesy pics of you, me, and Russian Elvis? That maybe I cry myself to sleep over them every night? Please,” I snorted. “Sorry to disappoint. I assume housekeeping trashed them along with all the other crap we left behind.”
In fact, Ihadkept one tiny souvenir from that weekend, one symbol of my naive optimism and my stupidity. The shiny gold ring I’d given Liam—the ring he’d left behind—sat in my drawer upstairs, where I could take it out and look at it if I were ever again tempted to do something as epically idiotic as falling in love.
I was happy to say I’d almost forgotten its existence… until now.
Liam cleared his throat and went back to his work, slicing peppers into ever-tinier slices. “So, you saved the cat from a fire, huh?”
“What?” My mind was two thousand miles away, in a hotel suite in Vegas.
“Your cat. I, uh… googled you earlier this week, and I saw the cutest picture from a couple months ago of you cuddling a cat that looked just like Fia, while dressed in all your fire gear like you were Mr. September in the Firefighters of New York calendar. The, uh, caption said you were in O’Leary, New York. That’s how I first tracked you down.”
“Figures. That photo is the bane of my existence,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Brings me nothing but shit.”
I hadn’t really considered what I was saying until I’d said it. I’dmeantthat I’d heard enough trash-talking about my sex-symbol status from the other guys at the station—and from Parker—to last a lifetime. But Liam’s eyes went soft and sad in misunderstanding, and I didn’t know if it would be better or worse to correct him because I had no freakin’ clue whatbetterandworseeven looked like in this situation.
I’d been worried about the man haunting mytown, but now he was in my damnhouse.I’d said we weren’t friends, but I found it hard to stay mad at him—which was fucking weird, since I had no problem being an asshole to basically everyone else in the world. I was also really fucking tired because I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours, but I felt like I’d been juiced with a live wire.
So I concentrated on cutting up chicken and said nothing.
“So Fia’s an interesting name,” he ventured after a minute. “Is it Italian?”
“Close. It’s Latin. It means fiery. Seemed like her mama and her litter mates abandoned her during the fire, and I couldn’t just leave her there, so.” I shrugged, uncomfortable. “She came home with me.”
“That’s really adorable. The name, the story.”
“Yeah, well.” I turned away to dump the cut-up chicken into a pan. “I had a piece of debris fall on my head during that fire, so I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“How badly were you hurt?” Liam’s voice had lost all trace of humor, and I turned back to him with a frown.
“Not bad. Just a knock on the head.”
“What did the doctor say?” he demanded.
“I didn’t see a doctor. What for?”
“Because you don’t take chances with knocks on the head, dummy. You get X-rays”—he cast his pretty green eyes to the ceiling—“because it might look like there’s no injury on the surface, but something could have gotten messed up underneath.”
He was...worried? How weird was that? But my chest tightened because it was also kind of sweet. Made it harder than usual to stare him down and achieve my usual sarcastic tone… but I did it.
“I’m touched, Liam, but clearly I managed to survive without your input.”
I turned back to stir the chicken and he fell silent. With nothing to focus on but the sounds of Liam chop-chop-chopping and Hazel talking softly to the cat, I felt like a jerk… possibly because I was.
“I just meant adopting her was a moment of weakness,” I caved and explained. “You know, from the head injury? It was a joke.”
Liam’s chopping paused. “Since when is it a ‘moment of weakness’ to feel a basic human emotion and act on it?”
The air between us pulsed with the truth we both recognized.
Since five years ago this month.
“Look.” Liam set down the knife with athunk. “Let’s clear the air here. Five years ago, I had to do one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But it wasn’t because—”
I turned around again, brandishing my spoon like a weapon. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.Have I in any way indicated that I give a shit?”
Liam’s jaw clenched. “Yeah, you kinda have.”