Page 65 of The Summer I Destroyed You

The conversation was going so well. I was pleased, but now I’m itchy, fragile, and I hate feeling either of those things. “You’re ridiculous. Are we going to sit around holding hands and talking about our feelings?”

“No,” he says softly. “But if you’d pull your head out of your ass, you’d realize I’ve already told you about mine.”

* * *

I leave Dallas for Nashville to check on our project there.

“We’re probably taking this whole phone thing too far,” I tell Liam when he calls that night, though I’m smiling. “What’s even left to discuss?”

“You love it,” he replies. “Let’s figure out where we’ll go on our first real date.”

“We’re not going on a first date.” I sink onto the edge of the bed and kick off my shoes.

“Yeah, we are. We’ll discuss it later. Or I’ll ask your mom for some pointers.”

My eyes fall closed. “Please promise you’ll never discuss me with my mom.”

“Because she wouldn’t approve of you dating a college dropout?” he asks. He phrases it like a joke, but there’s something tense in his tone.

Liam’s so confident all the time. It never occurred to me until now that he could feel otherwise.

“No, because my mother hates me, and she’ll say awful things to you and worse things to me if she knows.” I rise and walk to the bathroom, putting him on speaker as I go.

“Why does her opinion even matter anymore? Why haven’t you just washed your hands of the whole situation?”

“Because she’s the only parent I have.”

“That’s like saying ‘I only have one open sore.’ Sometimes it’s better to have zero of a thing than one. I suspect she falls into that category.”

“It still feels,” I say quietly, soaking a cotton ball with makeup remover, “as if I can do the right thing or say the right thing and I’ll finally win her over.”

“Em, parents are supposed to be the only people you don’t have to win over. They’re supposed to love you simply for existing. And if you have a parent who still needs to be persuaded about you after all this time, then you don’t have the parent you deserve and you never will.”

My stomach sinks. He’s right, of course. I’ve known that long before now. I mean, it would require total memory loss for my mother to no longer hate me, and I suspect even then, she’d quickly decide I was the enemy.

“When enough people hate you, Liam, you can be reasonably certain that you’re the problem.”

“Is this about high school?” he asks. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened?”

“No. You wouldn’t want to describe your most humiliating moment for me. I don’t want to describe mine for you, okay?”

“When I was fifteen, it was my first blow job, and I came all over the girl’s hair.”

I laugh, throwing the cotton ball in the trash. “That’s not even unusual. A lot of guys—”

“It happened when she was pulling my pants down,” he says. “And going forward, when we’re talking about sex, please don’t mention anything you’ve seen happen with a lot of guys. Anyway, that’s tied for the number-one spot with this night when I had the flu. I was driving to meet my friends and then I realized I was going to shit my pants. So I turned around to go home, driving like a maniac, and I got pulled over.”

“Oh no.”

“Yep. They thought I was drunk. They made me get out to take a sobriety test and I shit my pants during it. You know those cops are still laughing. So there you have it. Do you see me differently?”

“I don’t want you in my car if you’ve got the flu,” I reply.

He groans. “Em.”

“I just don’t understand why you need to know.”

“Because there’s this huge swath of your life you don’t want me to mention, but it’s driving everything you do in Elliott Springs,” he replies. “It’s sort of the elephant in the room.”

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