Lahat ng Kabanata ng Falling for My Best Friend's Brother: Kabanata 271 - Kabanata 280

Liam's POVI sat in the coffee shop for another twenty minutes after Zoey left.Not because I had anywhere useful to be. Just because I needed the time to get the anger down from the level it was at to the level I could actually function at. The anger at Zoey was the easier one. I could set that aside because she was gone and there was nothing further to do with it. The anger at myself for going there in the first place was harder to let go of. I had walked in hoping for a straight answer and walked out having called a woman a prostitute, which was not how I had expected the evening to go.But I had nothing. That was the only fact that mattered right now. The information I came seeking, I didn't have it yet.I turned the options over and they were fewer than I would have liked. I could stop looking on my own. I could wait and watch and let the thing I already knew go unaddressed until it got heavy enough to crush whatever was left between me and Avery. Or I could go to Avery directly,

Liam's POVI was inside in under two minutes.I crossed the small stretch of path between her front door and mine, let myself in, and stood in the hallway for a second with my keys in my hand and nowhere to put the anger that was in my chest right now. It was not one thing. It was a whole pile of things and they were all moving at the same time and I could not put myself together.I put my keys down on the table and walked into the front room.I walked back out of the front room.I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, closed it without taking anything, and pressed both hands flat on the counter and breathed. The breathing did not help. I pushed off from the counter and went back to the hallway. That did not help either, so I went upstairs and came straight back down, and somewhere in the middle of all that I put my fist against the wall hard enough to make the picture frame above the console table rattle.Jade's door opened."What the hell is going on?" She was standing in her door

Avery's POVI raised my hand to knock on his door.But it opened before my knuckles touched it.Liam was standing in the doorway with his jacket on and his keys in his hand. We both stopped at exactly the same moment, him in the act of stepping forward and me in the act of stepping forward, close enough that if either of us had moved another three inches we would have walked into each other.He looked at my face.I had washed it in the kitchen sink but I knew from the cold tight feeling around my eyes that the evidence of the last forty minutes was still visible. I did not try to hide it."Please," I told him. "Just hear me out. That is all I am asking. Hear me out and then if you still want to leave I will step aside and I will not say another word."He looked at me with his jaw tight and the expression of a man who had already made a decision and was being asked to unmake it."Liam." My voice cracked slightly and I let it. I was not managing this. Not tonight. "Please."He looked pa

Liam's POVI did not say anything on the walk to the car.Not because I had nothing to say, but the opposite. I had too much of it and I needed to let it settle before I opened my mouth, because some of what I was feeling was the kind of thing that came out wrong if you said it before you understood exactly what it was.What I had watched in that establishment had done something I had not prepared for. I had gone in bracing for something ordinary, a way to understand what she had been keeping and why, and what I got instead was several hours of watching someone be completely herself in a room where nothing was required of her. That was harder to know what to do with.Avery walked beside me and she did not push for words, and that was one thing I needed now. I needed to be in my head for a few minutes.She looked different after a shift than she looked anywhere else. Not tired exactly, more like something had been put down. The held-back version of her that operated at the athletics co

Avery's POVWednesday came the way all days I was not ready for came, which was exactly on time and completely indifferent to whether I had figured anything out.Liam picked me up at half past five. I had my bag, my jacket, the expression I used when I needed to look like everything was fine. He was in a good mood the way he often was after a football training session that had gone well, easy and warm, talking as he drove about something Tate had said on the field that afternoon. I sat in the passenger seat and laughed at the right moments, watching the streets go past the window and thinking about the route he was taking and whether it was taking us anywhere near my real job, the Velvet Underground.It was not. He was going directly to Crestwood Community Centre. Of course he was. He was a man who had offered to drop his girlfriend off at work and was doing exactly that. There was nothing suspicious about the route he was taking. I was the suspicious one, mapping everything, calcul