008: The audacity

Avery's POV

"I was wondering when you were going to pick up," Colton said.

His voice was calm, without any ounce of guilt present there. He didn't even sound particularly apologetic. Just smooth and measured and rehearsed, the voice of someone who had spent the last several hours deciding exactly how he wanted to open this conversation and had landed on calm as his best option.

"What do you want, Colton?" I said.

"I want to talk. Last night turned into something it did not have to be and I think we both deserve a proper conversation instead of just silence."

Jade was watching me from her chair with both eyebrows raised so high they had nearly disappeared. I held up one finger and she pressed her lips together and sat back.

"A proper conversation," I said.

"Yes. You didn't come to dinner, Avery. Do you know how long the waiting list is at Rossini's on a Friday night? I have been on it for three weeks. Three weeks of planning that birthday dinner and you just vanished without a call or a text. I was sitting at that table by myself for forty minutes."

I sat down on the edge of Jade's bed very carefully and gave myself one breath.

"Let me make sure I understand you," I said. "You are calling me the morning after I walked into your dorm room and found you in bed with another person and what you are opening with, the very first thing you want me to hear, is that you had a reservation and I missed it."

There was silence on the other end.

"I am trying to have a real conversation—"

"You had a reservation," I said. "You planned a birthday dinner. And several hours before that dinner, in the room you gave me a key to, I found you in bed with someone I know. She sat there and looked me in the face and smiled and you are calling me the next morning to talk about the table, like I was supposed to show up regardless of the situation." I paused. "Don't call me again."

Before he could say another word, I hung up.

I sat quietly for a moment. Then I looked at Jade, who had been reading my expression like a book for the past two minutes.

"I'm going to kill that bitch Brianna," she said. "How dare she?"

“Jade.”

"Colton too! The audacity he has to even call you right now!"

"Let it go Jade."

"You must be kidding right now. How dare he take you for a fool for eight months!?"

I let out a sigh, rolled my eyes and shook my head.

"I am going to at least say something to her at practice today," she said, and her voice had gone to that particular quiet that meant she was genuinely, seriously furious rather than just annoyed. When Jade was annoyed she was loud and immediate. When she went quiet like this she was deciding things. "I'm gonna confront that thieving bitch in front of the whole squad. Every single person there. She is not going to smile her way through it."

"Jade."

"She deserves it."

"She absolutely deserves it," I said. "But think about what happens the moment it becomes a scene. Coach Vega has one rule about personal business on her floor and you know exactly what it is. She pulls you from the lineup and Brianna gets to stand there and watch you get benched without doing a single visible thing to make it happen."

Jade's jaw locked.

“How are you even calm right now? You should be crazy with anger, at least at Colton for being so foolish.”

"Brianna has always been like this for two years," I said. "You already know it. Every single move she makes is designed to get a reaction. The moment you give her a scene she wins the whole thing and you handed it to her."

"So we just walk in there like nothing happened. No way!"

"We walk in there," I said, "and we run the practice sharper than we ever have and we don't give her the satisfaction of watching me go crazy. We give her absoynothing to work with. Not today. I bet that will drive her more crazy than a reaction would."

Jade stared at the ceiling. Her hands were in tight fists at her sides.

"Fine," she said at last. "Just for today. But I am not done."

"Good," I said. "Neither am I."

She exhaled slowly and the rigid set of her shoulders came down slightly. She looked at me then in the way she did when she was done being furious and was checking in properly.

"Are you okay?" she said.

It was harder to answer than it should have been. I had been holding myself together so carefully since yesterday afternoon that I had not actually stopped to ask myself that question honestly.

"I will be," I said. And I meant it, which was different from being okay right now, and Jade knew the difference without me explaining it.

She picked up her bag. "Come on. Let's go to the mall or something before I change my mind to pound Brianna."

I followed her out of the room and down the stairs.

We reached the kitchen doorway and I saw him again.

Liam had his back to us.

He was at the counter still in the same grey shirt, spreading butter across a piece of toast with the unhurried ease of someone who had been waking up in this house every morning for years and not someone who had arrived less than an hour ago.

I stopped walking and stared at his frame.

Everything in me went very quiet and very focused all at once, because standing a few feet away with his back to me was the person I had spent one of the most memorable nights of my life with.

My whole body remembered before my brain had a chance to do anything useful about it.

I pressed my feet flat to the floor and tried to fix my face so it wouldn't show exactly what I was thinking about at that moment.

Jade walked past me and her footsteps made him turn around. He looked at Jade first and nodded. Then his eyes moved past her to the doorway and found me.

His expression was easy and open and still completely without recognition of who I was.

"Hi. I'm sorry about the door. I just moved in this morning," he said to me. The same voice. That deep kind-of-sexy boy voice that makes a girl's knees buckle.

"Liam, this is Avery," Jade said, reaching for her jacket from the chair. "She lives next door. She's been my best friend since we were eight." She said it with the weight of something that mattered. "Avery, this is Liam. Carter's son."

He looked at me.

And then he held out his hand.

I looked at it for one long second. The same hand that had been in my hair. That had held my face in the low light and traced slow lines along my sides and held me close afterward while his heartbeat hammered against my own chest.

That was barely twelve hours ago.

Now it was being held out to me in a kitchen as an introduction to a stranger.

I placed my hand in his and shook it.