Falling for My Best Friend's Brother의 모든 챕터: 챕터 141 - 챕터 150

Liam's POV I thought about what Avery said for the rest of that week.Not the whole conversation. Just that one moment at the end of it, the way she looked at me after I said 'you already know' and did not argue with it. Did not pull back or laugh it off or find some way to make it smaller. She just looked at me and let it stay between us like something that belonged there, and I kept coming back to it in the in-between moments of the days that followed. On the walk to training. In the gap between lectures. In the twenty minutes before I fell asleep.I wasn’t used to that. Usually when I said something real, people pulled away from it or like Zoe made me feel bad for showing my emotions or something like that. But Avery never did. She stayed, listened, and I still didn’t quite know what to do with someone like that.Tate called on Friday afternoon while I was in the middle of trying not to think about any of it."Tonight," he said. "The guys are going out. Mulligan's first and then w

Liam's POVThe lights on the stage pulled into a single focused beam.And then she walked out.Scarlett.She was wearing something dark and not too revealing, and her mask was in place the way it always was, the one detail that never changed no matter what else did. She carried herself the way she always did when she came out, like she had already decided where her feet were going before she took the step, like the space was hers and she already knew it.She stepped to the centre of the stage and the room went quieter than I expected a room that size to go.I put my drink down on the table.The music came in, low and deep, and she started to move.I had seen her perform too many times before. I had come to Velvet Underground enough times over the past few months that her set was not new to me. I knew the way she controlled the stage, the way she used the space, the way she never rushed anything and never wasted a movement. I had sat at that bar and watched and gone home and told mysel

Avery's POVI always swept the room during the last part of the set.It was something Raven had told me in my first month at Velvet Underground. 'Know your room', she said. 'Not just the front row. The whole room. You want to know where your energy is landing and where you are losing people.' So I did it every performance, a slow sweep from left to right near the end while my body was doing what it knew how to do and the thinking part of my brain had a spare moment to look around.I was midway through the final routine when I looked toward the far tables.I saw Tate first because Tate was tall and I had seen him enough times outside the club to recognise the shape of him even in low light. He was leaning back in his chair with a drink in his hand and saying something to Flynn, who was beside him.Then I saw Liam.He was at the same table, a little further in, and he was looking at the stage. Not the way people looked at a stage when they were waiting for their turn to talk again. The

Avery's POVI got home just after two o'clock in the morning.The house was quiet. My mum's light was off under her door, which meant she had either gone to sleep early or gone out and not come back yet. I dropped my bag by the door and went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water and stood there drinking it and staring at the wall.The set had gone well. The room had been good, Raven was right about that. On any other Friday I would have come home tired in a clean way, the kind of tired that came from doing something you were good at, and I would have been asleep before one.Instead I was standing in my kitchen at midnight with a full glass of water thinking about Liam leaning forward at that table.I went to my room and changed out of my clothes and got into bed and lay there looking at the ceiling.The calculation in my head started up again the same way it had been since I left the corridor at Velvet Underground. Liam was at the club. Zoey was at the club. I was on the stage in

Avery's POV"I need you to listen to something," I said.There was a rustling sound on Jade's end, the kind that meant she was sitting up and pulling herself properly awake. "Okay," she said. "Go ahead."I read her the text. All eleven words of it, exactly as Zoey had sent them. Then I stopped and waited.There was a pause on the other end of the line. Not the kind where someone was thinking of something to say. The kind where someone had already thought of something and was deciding how much of it to give."Jade," I said."I heard you," she said. "I'm thinking.""It's almost three in the morning. I've been staring at this text for twenty minutes. I need you to think faster."Another pause, shorter this time. Then Jade said, "Did she finally find out if Liam has feelings for you?"I pulled the phone away from my ear for a second and looked at it, then put it back. "What?""I'm asking if that's what this is about," Jade said. "She went out with him tonight. Something happened. And inst