Page 104 of The Savior

“Liam!” She pulled with her body weight, and finally, he bowed to his crowd and backed her up to the brick wall again.

“At least a little romantic?”

“I don’t know what to call that.” Her long lashes, which curled at the corners of her eyes, fluttered as he caged himself around her.

“Sexy?” he joked.

Her eyes bugged. “What will it take for you to never do that again?”

The list he could come up with given thirty seconds, a pen, and a piece of paper… His nerves skipped, and all his humor was gone. “Do you like how I touch you?”

“Liam—”

“Do you?” He inched his face closer. “Those goose bumps. The way you shiver. Do you like how I make you feel? It’s a very basic question.”

Chelsea nodded.

“I don’t give a fuck who thinks what. Either people accept this—”

“What is this?”

“This. Us,” he amended as if that clarified things. “Either they accept us, or they mind their business.”

She didn’t respond.

“You and me? We’re not disloyal. We’re not done hurting. We’re not doing anything except for living. Either friends and family give us the grace to live as something other than a shell of a fucking human being, or they can stick their judgment where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she confessed.

“But you will hurtme.” That was as real as it got.

Her bottom lip trembled.

He dropped his forehead against hers. His forearms still caged her to the brick wall, and he knew that standing on a busy street wasn’t the place to ponder how life evolved or question who she was so afraid of disappointing. “I refuse to question why and when we fit. We just do.”

“It’s just that simple?”

Fuck yes, it was. “It’s whatever we make it.”

Liam waited a breath of a second, wondering if they were at a fork in their road where their understandings and expectation forged different paths.

“I’m glad I saw you love her,” Chelsea said.

His breath hitched. That wasn’t at all what he expected her to say if he’d had a hundred lifetimes to guess.

“Because,” she continued, “I saw who you were. How you carried her feelings like a responsibility and a privilege.”

His throat ached. “Chelsea…”

“You are a good man.” She cupped his cheeks. “And I don’t want to disrespect others who saw that and loved you because of it.”

“Linda and Frank?”

She nodded. “I suppose.”

“We’ll talk to them.”

Chelsea rolled her lips together. “I don’t know why that sounds so hard.”

---