may 2017 : 3 years and 4 months ago

Natasha was so hard to read. And so different from anything Liam was used to.

Sure, Caroline was confident. She knew she was popular, knew she had a sphere of control, and carried herself with a sense of self-superiority because of it. But Natasha didn't seem proud. Despite how wary Liam had become of pretty much everyone, her self-assurance seemed like it came from a genuine place. She clearly wasn't trying to prove anything to him as she had yet to tell him a single thing about herself besides her name. She was one of those rare types of people - the ones who with just one look at them, you immediately saw that they knew exactly who they were and what they wanted.

He just had absolutely no clue what she wanted with him.

She stayed by her car a good ten feet away, eyeing him curiously and biting back a small smirk at his comment. He expected some sort of witty response, but instead she simply asked, "So where are you off to?"

"Oh...nowhere in particular."

"As in actually nowhere or 'I don't want to tell you in case you're a crazy stalker' nowhere?"

"You could try having a little more faith in me," he suggested. "That wouldn't be a very nice way for me to repay the 'pretty girl who keeps showing up to save me when I'm doing something stupid.'"

She raised her eyebrows slightly, looking amused. Liam, on the other hand, had no idea what in the world he was doing. Natasha had a weird effect on him; all of that wittiness and charm rubbed off enough to get him playing along and saying things he normally wouldn't. He didn't know he had the confidence left in him for that kind of stuff anymore.

Perhaps it simply didn't require a lot of confidence to call her pretty because they both already knew it was a fact.

"In that case, being able to hang out with yourself is a good skill to have," she offered.

"Is that what you're doing right now?"

She nodded. "So, did you do it?"

She lost him there. "Uh...do what?"

"Stay out of trouble. Like I asked you to."

Despite her expectant expression, he had a feeling she already knew his answer. But he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that he thought of her from time to time. She definitely didn't need to know that she had crossed his mind right after he'd been drinking and kissing Caroline at that stupid party. "Not exactly."

"Well, since you don't have any stab wounds currently," she ventured. "I might dare to say that progress has at least occurred."

"Something like that." Something that starts with t and ends with herapy.

A moment of silence passed, the two of them caught in this staring game of waiting for the other person to look away first. Liam's instinct was to pull his eyes off of her, to shrink back into himself and go be alone again. But he couldn't make himself move. She was impossible not to look at.

It wasn't simply because she was pretty, although that was definitely true. Who was he kidding? She wasn't just pretty; she was intimidatingly beautiful. All of her features seemed to perfectly complement the others as if carefully designed to work together. Her lips were a soft pink against her fair skin, freckles splashed across her cheeks and her arms like stars scattered throughout the heavens on a clear night. Then there were her eyes, framed by long lashes and a brighter blue than he'd seen, like the sky on the best of summer days. Even the color of her hair reminded him of when he was happy, reminded him of the cinnamon Jo would sprinkle on his coffee or the hours he spent outside reading books under the orange trees.

He liked her. He liked that she wasn't holding it against him that he went back on his word. And there was some other alluring quality to her besides her looks, something that drew Liam in like a gravitational pull despite the fact that he couldn't quite put a finger on what it was. All he knew was that there was something special about her. She was somehow both adventurous and safe, down-to-earth yet otherworldly. It was like she was some sort of ethereal being, remarkable in ways he couldn't wrap his head around. And he was just...Liam. He wondered what she was thinking about him as he thought all of these things about her.

He was so far off in his thoughts that seconds or minutes could have passed - he wasn't sure which - before Natasha broke the silence. "So, how was your birthday?"

"What?"

"You said that you were almost nineteen," she reminded him. Liam was surprised she remembered that; he had long forgotten that he mentioned it. "So did that ever happen or are you just stuck as an eighteen-year-old forever? I have to admit, that would be pretty cool. Not for you, but ya know. Minor details."

Where did she come up with these things? Her brain clearly worked at twice the speed his did. "Sorry to let you down. That's today, actually."

She perked up slightly as if finding this fact genuinely exciting. "Is that what you're doing, then? Celebrating?"

"I...yeah, I guess."

"I have to say, this is the least enthusiastic birthday party I've seen."

"One isn't much of a party."

"Sure it is. That's what I was just talking about."

"I guess," Liam repeated but knew that he was proving her point by sounding rather unenthusiastic.

Although he had become an expert at lying to everyone else over the past few months, he doubted that it was worth attempting with Natasha. She was going to be able to see right through him no matter how hard he tried.

When she narrowed her eyes and finally came towards him, Liam knew she was up to something. And for some reason, that made him both slightly nervous and slightly excited. His heart did a little thump in his chest. "What?"

"You seem like you could use a drink."

Liam was starting to think that Natasha abandoned him to go drinking.

He was waiting outside the bar she popped into. Standing against the brick wall, he scrolled on his phone and tried to appear like he belonged there and had not potentially just been ditched. She left him there with a quick, "Be right back" a solid fifteen minutes ago. Although he didn't particularly mind waiting, soaking in the last rays of sunlight and appreciating that none of the passing pedestrians were paying him any attention, he wasn't sure why she would have decided to bring him along with her only to bail out five minutes in.

Finally, right as he was seriously considering if he should just leave, she emerged with two plastic cups full of some sort of fruity frozen drink and handed him one. "Sorry that took forever."

He eyed his cup in slight confusion. "Uh-"

"For some reason, you're allowed to get the frozen ones to-go but nothing else," she shrugged. "But if you're too fragile to drink something fruity I'll happily do it for you."

"No, uh, that's okay." Pretty much anything was going to be better than the cheap beer he drank with his friends. He tried a sip and thought it wasn't half bad. He hadn't had any alcohol since Caroline and missed the familiar warmth that started to settle in his stomach.

He lightly nudged Natasha with his elbow as they started walking and prayed she wouldn't smite him for it. "You know, for someone who told me to stay out of trouble you're really encouraging me to get in trouble." Nothing screamed responsible like underage drinking.

"Progress, young grasshopper, progress," she reiterated with a bit of a smile and plenty of mock wisdom. "You were covered in beer when I met you, so this seems pretty tame."

He couldn't argue with that, so he just took another sip of his drink.

"And if you thought I was some sort of saint or something," she added, shooting him a playful sideways glance. "You've got the wrong girl."

They walked and talked for who-knows-how-long as the sun continued its descent towards the horizon. There was a park nearby, so Liam and Natasha strolled along its sidewalks without much intention, but he was more than okay with that. He didn't want her to leave just yet.

They chatted and finished off their drinks, the humid summer air forming dewy condensation droplets on the outside of his plastic cup and making it slick in his grip. Natasha certainly liked to talk a lot, but he didn't mind. It allowed him to learn a lot about her. She was from a small town in New York near Albany and kind of hated it there. She let people she liked call her Nat-

"People you like, huh?" Liam mused, the corners of his mouth threatening to twitch up into a grin. "What do I get to call you, then?"

He caught the little satisfied smirk that danced on her lips for a second. "Nat is fine," she replied smoothly and continued on with her story.

He tried to listen carefully and ignore the way his heart skipped each time their free hands accidentally brushed against each other. He didn't need to notice the way the sunset made her hair even more brilliantly red or how the soft eventide breeze brushed strands of it against her heart-shaped face and tempted him to brush them away. This is not a good time to have a crush, dude. He was still so messed up from Caroline. So he focused on Nat's voice instead of her face, but that only helped marginally.

She went to college for illustration and graduated a semester early back in December. After Christmas, she got out of New York as fast as possible and came here where it was warmer and sunnier. She mentioned in passing that she briefly dated a guy for a little over a month right after she got here, probably because Liam was already aware of this information - she'd given him a pair of said ex's clothes to change into that day they met and she found him covered in blood and Bud Light. She turned twenty-two in March and had mostly been focusing on work since that breakup.

"It's been nice, but a little boring," she admitted. "Not nearly as interesting as college life, I'm sure."

Liam's life had definitely been interesting all right, just nowhere near the particular breed of interesting she was thinking of.

"Why'd you want to leave home?" he asked her curiously.

She gave a small sigh, but it wasn't an annoyed one. "Ah, my family is just a little...much."

"I get it."

"You know, I got the impression that your parents are a little bit special when I saw your fancy car, but I wasn't gonna say anything," she told him. "Your parents super pushy, too?"

"Sometimes. It's not really that," he shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. "They're just workaholics. They both work super crazy hours and it's nice to have some extra freedom and all, but it starts getting kind of old to rarely see the people you live with."

"What do they do?"

"Mom runs a modeling agency. Dad's the CEO of a software company." Liam didn't typically like to talk about their jobs because then everyone immediately knew how much money they had, but Nat didn't seem like one to judge him based off of his parents.

Her eyebrows raised. "What kind of software?"

"Uh, data analytics...but I couldn't really tell you what that means," he confessed, causing Nat to laugh a little.

"Well anyway, back to your question," she smiled. "New York gets too cold in the winter and I would have had to move to Manhattan to get a good job, and I didn't want that. So here I am."

He would have told her he was glad she was here if that wouldn't have sounded so creepy. It was unexpectedly refreshing to talk to someone new, someone who wasn't from school and didn't know his reputation. Someone who was trying to simply see him as he was if he'd do the same in return.

And to his own surprise, Liam wasn't scared of being seen by her.

As they were bantering with one another, he had begun to realize that something was very different about him now. His fight-or-flight response wasn't kicking in like it did with everyone else, as if it had never left his subconscious that she had been there to give him help when he needed it and wouldn't screw him over like all his friends did. He wasn't getting tense around her or flinching away. He didn't feel like he had to run.

In hindsight, he'd realize that this was why he took things with her as far as he did and why he did it so quickly when they would have worked better as friends. But he didn't understand himself that well yet. All he understood was that she was a pretty and funny and confident girl who was making him feel kind of alive again.

He had been numbed for so long. But now, as he looked over at Natasha, he was suddenly wide awake.

They arrived at a metal bench. "Wanna sit down for a minute?" she asked.

"Yeah, sure."

His heart sped up a notch as he realized that he now had to face the awkward do I put my arm on the back of the bench or not scenario, but his mind was just warm and foggy enough from his drink to make him brave enough to go for it, although he made sure to not let his fingers touch her shoulder. Natasha gave him a smug side-eye but made no actual comment.

"So what about you?" she asked. "What are your dreams?" As she looked over at him, Liam tried not to pay too much attention to how it made him feel. He wasn't going to be able to form coherent sentences if he did.

"I honestly don't know."

"Well, you're still in school. You have time to work it out," she assured. He really needed to stop thinking about how close she was to him. "You seem authentic. I think you'll be fine."

"I dunno," he admitted. "I'm starting to think that three more years isn't nearly enough time to figure out what I'm doing." He didn't actually mean to be vulnerable, but words just kind of came out of him when he was around her.

"I'll let you in on a secret, Liam," she decided, lips curving into a sly smirk. "Most of the stuff you do in college, the stuff you're worrying about right now - it's not gonna matter at all once you're done. School is shallow. You get caught up in stupid things. But once you're out? That's where the real fun begins."

Natasha had gotten just close enough to Liam that he could feel the light flutter of her breath on his skin. A breath hitched in his throat, his awareness of anything besides the two of them rapidly melting away. His eyes flickered down to her lips and back up and the question softly slipped off his tongue. "The real fun, huh?"

"Mhmm."

The sun was just about to slip under the horizon, its last rays glinting on her copper hair and eyelashes and making her somehow even more radiant. And they were a little bit closer than they had been a second before. It would have been so easy to-

Breaking her eyes off of him, Natasha started to reach over for her purse and then stopped.

"What?" he murmured, unable to fully shake himself out of the sort of trance she was putting him in.

She was looking out at the sunset. "If I had my sketchbook on me, I'd pull it out to draw that. I don't know that I could capture it well, but it's beautiful."

"Some beautiful things are worth enjoying without overthinking it."

Another teasing grin appeared on her lips. "Liam, you seem exactly like the type of person who overthinks everything."

"I do not."

"Oh really?"

"I swear."

"I don't believe you," she whispered, her eyes sparkling daringly. "Prove it."

So he proved it. He kissed her. And she didn't hesitate to kiss him back. All Liam cared about was how good it felt. He wasn't sure if he was longing for affection or longing for her and he had no clue what it was that she was craving, but they both clearly wanted it, sinking into the feeling of each other like this wasn't only the second time they had ever met.

They broke apart, the moment over as quickly as it had come, and Liam felt a grin make its way onto his face. "You know," he breathed, his eyes still closed and her hair tickling his face. "For someone who keeps pointing out my age, you really seemed to enjoy that."

A laugh left him as she playfully shoved him back and got up. "Don't make me regret that."

He smiled, feeling bolder than he had in a long time. "So what, you're not gonna let me have your number after that?" he called as she started to walk away.

Natasha didn't glance back at him. "Catch up to me and maybe I'll think about it."

He ran after her.

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So that happened. How are we feeling about Liam and Natasha?

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