Page 63 of Hold

She would never forget the look in Liam’s eyes. In the moment before he could shutter his feelings behind pressed-together lips and a dead blue stare, his eyes and mouth opened in shock and hurt. There was no question who Gabriel was; he looked exactly like Jake.

“Liam,” she said, extricating herself as best she could from the couch. He’d already taken a step back from the door.

“Who the fuck is that?” Gabe said, his sharp voice a clear contrast to the gentle tones of a minute ago.

“Oh God. Liam,” she said again, racing to the door, reaching for him. He took another step back, a step he didn’t seem conscious of. His eyes hadn’t left hers, but each step was a negation of everything they’d built over the summer, everything she’d thought they could become.

“It’s not—” she began but stopped herself.It’s not what it looks like.Wasn’t that the worst cliché? It almost always was what it looked like, and was Thea even sure that this time was different? Gabe’s soft words and huge eyes had put her under some kind of spell.

Liam stumbled down the first step as Thea opened the screen door. He caught himself on the stair rail, dragged his hand down it another step, and then quickly pulled it off, staring at his hand that had, no doubt, gotten a splinter.

“Shit,” she said. “I’m sorry, Liam—”

That made him pause in his examination of his hand. That hand that had caressed her neck so gently only two days ago. She put her own hand to her neck just remembering it.

Did he remember that too? In the light from the porch, his blue eyes were icy, which meant he did. Or he didn’t. “I bet you are,” he said. His eyes flicked past her for a moment, and then he turned around and left the porch.

“Whoisthat?” Gabe said again from behind her. He put a hand on the small of her back, possibly from habit but also probably because he wanted to claim her. Liam got into the blue monster baby and broke the sleepy summer night with its engine rev. In seconds, he was out of sight.

The spell had broken. Now Thea remembered other words Gabe had whispered to her, words that had kept her from believing she could have a life without him in it. Gabe had always been so good at feeding her the kind of story that got her to do what he wanted, whether they were a sob story or tiny needles of abuse sinking by degrees into her heart. Tonight was no different.

“Get out, Gabriel,” she said, not bothering to turn around. Her voice sounded as dead as Liam’s eyes had looked. “Go away. No, you can’t have us back. All that bullshit about googling your therapy. Just to suck me back in, I bet. Fuck the hell off. Get out of my house and leave my kids alone. We never needed you, and we don’t now.”

“T—”

“Andstopcalling me T.” She turned around then, the anger that had left surging through her. “My family and the people I love call me that, and you are neither of those things. Get out.”

“Thea—”

“Get out!” She was screaming like a fishwife, and she didn’t care. “Get lost!I don’t need you!Get lost!”

“All right, all right. Jaysus.” He went down the steps. On the lowest one he looked back at her. “So was he your boyfriend?”

She counted the words on the middle fingers of each hand. “Get. Lost.”

“Mommm!” She’d woken Benji with her screaming. Gabe looked up at the bedroom window above the porch.

Gabe looked back at her, and in the yellow porch light she thought she saw triumph. “I’m coming back, Thea,” he said. “I told you; I’m not leaving ever again.”

He blew a kiss to the window above her and walked down the street.

She heard the window rattling and rushed back into the house and up the stairs before Benji broke the thing trying to get to his father.

He was hysterical, worse than she’d just been. “You sent him away! I hate you! You told him to leave!”

“Shhh. Shhh.” She tried to corral his flailing limbs, taking a few hits to her arms. “He’ll be back. I was mad, but he knows you want him back.”

“He won’t! He’ll go back to Ireland again!”

“He says he won’t go back again.” She pressed Benji’s hot, wet face to her cheek. “He says he loves you, loves you both. He says he’s staying. I’ll call him tomorrow and ask him to come back to see you.”

“Will you?” He gulped and looked up at her, his dark eyes shimmering in his nightlight’s dim glare.

Poor kid. He didn’t know who to trust anymore. That was what Gabe had taught him, that grown-ups couldn’t be trusted, even those who swore they loved you. It was a lesson Thea had still not learned. And now she’d taught it to Liam.

“Well, I’m your mother. Have I ever lied to you? I don’t mean about the little things. About the big things?” He looked down, unable to deny it. “I swear on your BB-8 that I will call your da tomorrow and ask him to come back.” She said it past the lump that had appeared in her throat.

He looked over at the two-foot-high robot that sat in pride of place in the corner of the room. It was his most treasured possession, and she’d heard him talk to it like it was a friend. “On BB-8?” he said uncertainly.

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