Page 64 of Tell Me It’s Right

Swallowing hard, I wet a new cotton ball.

“Gracie,” he says lowly.

I focus on his knuckles as I dab at the cuts.

He inhales sharply, then so low I almost don’t hear him, he says, “I need you to know…this isn’t…this isn’t me anymore. I don’t want you to think that this is me.”

I set the bloody cotton balls on the counter. I have no idea what to say, so I wait for him to continue. His brow furrows as he searches my face.

“It used to be,” he says. “The fights—but I haven’t—it’s been ten years since the last one.”

“When you got expelled.”

It wasn’t a question, but he nods.

There’s a cut through his eyebrow that I hadn’t noticed before, and I jut my chin to ask for permission to clean that one too.

He nods and clenches his jaw as I get to work.

I don’t meet his eyes as I say, “There were a lot of rumors about what that one was about.”

His shoulders kind of…deflate at that. Enough to make me pause what I’m doing.

“It was a week after my mom, and my first day back at school. My dad thought it would be good for me toget back to normalor whatever. Some stupid freshmen were talking shit in the halls. Gossiping about how my mom crashed the car on purpose to get away from my dad—or thathedid it and staged the whole thing to look like an accident. I just—I blacked out. The next thing I knew one of their jaws was broken and I was sitting in the dean’s office getting kicked out. My dad paid everyone off to keep things quiet and stop the kid’s family from pressing charges.”

I press my lips together against the sudden nausea churning in my stomach. I’ve finished cleaning all visible wounds, so I focus on slathering some antibiotic ointment on a Q-Tip. Just thinking about losing my mom has my eyes burning, let alone having to listen to her death turn into the latest piece of small-town gossip. And at sixteen years old?

I start dabbing the cream on his knuckles, and I think that’ll be the end of the conversation, but then in a strained voice he says, “For the record, I’m sorry I dragged you into this and that you had to come get me. And I’m sorry I got arrested for it. I know what you must think of me now, but…I’m not sorry I did it.”

I know what I’m supposed to think, supposed to feel. Angry, disgusted. Afraid, maybe? I shouldn’t condone violence or feel any satisfaction at seeing Miles’s bloody and broken face.

And yet.

“I just don’t want you to be afraid of me,” he whispers.

I hold his gaze. I must have drifted closer without realizing it because now there’s barely any space left between us. I’m standing between his legs, the heat of his body surrounding me, his face a few inches above mine even though he’s sitting. And I just…can’t bring myself to feel any of those things.

Because despite the million memories I have of him giving me a hard time over the years, I also have a lot of other ones. The kind we pretend never happened.

Like when he’d found me on the playground in seventh grade after a group of bullies dumped my lunch out and stomped all over it. He’d wordlessly dropped his in front of me and walked away, even though it meant he’d go without.

Or the ride home he gave me in high school when he found me waiting outside after Leo got his first girlfriend and forgot about me.

And my personal favorite, my freshman year, a junior named Oliver Davis asked me out on a dare and left the entire lunchroom laughing at me when I said yes. A few weeks later when Oliver tried to do a prom proposal for some senior girl, he got through his whole little musical number, withProm?written on the chests of the basketball players behind him, and a fart-sound simulator stashed in his backpack went off the second he opened his mouth to ask.

No one was ever able to prove that one was Liam, but the smirk on his face as he watched the whole thing go down said enough for me.

Liam Brooks has made me feel a lot of different emotions over the years, but fear has never been one of them.

“I could never be scared of you, Liam.”

His gaze softens before shifting to the cut on my mouth.

“You might want to go to the hospital,” I murmur. “I’m not exactly qualified?—”

“They’re not that bad. I can tell.” Slowly, he peels his gaze up from my lips. “Thank you. For the help.”

I stare back wordlessly for a moment, two. His eyes flick between mine like he’s searching for the answer to an unasked question. Maybe I’m looking for it too.

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