Page 75 of So Bad It Must Be Good

“So why should I think what I said actually mattered if no one’s ever gotten through to you?”

“Because you were the first person who really truly mattered to accuse me of it.”

Her arms began to shake even as she held herself tighter. She wanted to be strong enough to say it wasn’t enough. She wanted to be strong enough to know that ending it was the only possibility for them to both be happy.

But those words undid all of her certainty.

* * *

Kayla didn’t say anything. She kept standing there in the middle of her living room with her back to him. Holding herself, something like a tremor going through her body, but she made no other reaction to his words.

He didn’t know if he was getting anywhere, and that clawed at him, but his only choice here was to keep powering forward.

Maybe he couldn’t fix everything, but he still had to believe there were some things he could—and should—fix.

“It turns out when someone you love says something you don’t want to hear, it’s a lot harder to dismiss, and then my grandmother sort of reinforced what you said, and it’s really, really hard to deny the truth when two people are forcing you to look at it at the same time.”

She turned to face him, but nothing about the expression on her face was reassuring. Her eyebrows were drawn together, and her lips were pressed into a firm, disapproving line.

“I’m glad . . .” She cleared her throat and it killed him to see and hear that kind of pain in her. Pain he’d put there. “I think it’s great you think we’re right, because I happen to agree, but I don’t see how it changes anything.”

“How can it not change anything?” he demanded, trying to tamp down the frustration that was starting to weave in with all the hurt and fear. He knew he’d made a mistake, but only for a couple hours. She couldn’t honestly be ready to end this because he’d . . .

“Talk is cheap,” she said firmly, looking him in the eye. And tears swam there or he might have been felled completely by those words. “It’s easy to say that I’m right. But knowing I’m right doesn’t mean you won’t jump to help Aiden at the expense of yourself the next time your mom asks.”

“I told her,” Liam gritted out, holding on to his temper. “I told Mom I wouldn’t do this anymore. That I wasn’t going to break up with you, not even for pretend. I told her that she needed to let Aiden try and fix himself.”

“And she took that well?”

“Of course not.”

Kayla inhaled carefully, shaking her head and looking away from him. “I don’t want to be the thing that screws up your family. I don’t . . . It isn’t even all about Aiden. I mean, that’s a lot of it, but it’s not the only place you . . . I’d never want to be the thing you sacrifice yourself over, and I don’t think I can trust you on that.”

“I’m trying to realize there can be a balance, Kayla.” He wanted to move close, to touch her, to get through to her, but she held herself like she was fragile, and he hated that he’d put that there. “I like helping people. I like fixing things. I can’t change that about myself, but I think I can change how often I do those things without thinking about the consequences. I never wanted to lose you. If I’d thought for even a minute about how you’d feel about pretending to break things off, I never would have asked you to do it. I was blinded by . . .”

“Your need to fix things.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I think you’re misunderstanding me, because I get it. I get you. I know you want to help, and I know it comes from a good place, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a very good bet in the whole significant-other department.” She swallowed, a few tears spilling over. “I love you, Liam. I do. But I can’t be the partner who says, yeah, it’s fine, go help everyone else.”

“Maybe I was looking for the partner who would tell me to stop,” he returned, each word feeling like a shard of glass was scraping against his throat.

She let out a little sob at that, the tears falling more freely even as she tried to wipe them away, and he couldn’t let that stand—not for boundaries or because she wanted him to. He crossed to her and pulled her into his arms.

She cried into his chest, and though she didn’t move her arms around him, she didn’t use them to push him away either. She leaned against him, and she cried, and he knew he had to keep moving forward, keep working—not to fix this but to make this.

“Remember when you told me your family treated you like decoration? I would never, Kayla. I couldn’t. I need you, and I think you need me.” He pulled her back so he could look her in the eye. “I know I’m not perfect. Sometimes you might have to remind me to step back, but what I’m saying is I’d listen. I’ll always listen, and we may disagree, but I will always listen to you. I don’t want to be apart. I don’t want to lose you. I love you, and I’m not perfect but damn if I’ll make the same mistake twice once I realize it. I’ll fix whatever I break.”

“I don’t need you to fix anything. Not my sink or me or you. Not us,” she said on a whisper, but it wasn’t a refusal, and she didn’t step away.

“Okay, so maybe we agree to make something. Together. And when you make something with someone sometimes you don’t agree on the direction, or maybe you have to go back and sand down some jagged edges, but you talk, and you decide together what the next step is.”

She didn’t say anything so he reached into his back pocket and pulled out the gift he’d brought, wrapped up in a paint-splattered cloth from his workshop. “I’ve been, uh, working on this the past few days, the very few moments we haven’t been together, and I went home this afternoon and finished it before I came over.” He held it out to her.

“What is it?” she asked skeptically.

He took her hand and placed the lump of cloth and wood into it. “Look.”

She swallowed, her eyes red and tears still rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. She unraveled the cloth until the item came into view.

Her eyes went a little wide as she held it out of the cloth. “It’s a lovespoon,” she whispered.

---