Hi, everyone. As you probably guessed from the title, this chapter is dual POV. I couldn't settle on just one when I was trying to write it so it starts with Lily, switches to Liam at the break, and then goes back to Lily after the second break. It should be obvious but I wanted to give you a warning in case you were confused! 

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august 2018 : 2 years and 1 month ago

Lily managed to ungracefully push the door handle down with her elbow and then nudge it open with her foot, the need to do so created by the fact that one set of fingers was currently clutching a Barnes and Noble bag while her other hand was intertwined with Liam's.

"I would have done that for you," he chuckled.

"That's much less fun," she told him as they stepped inside. "But remind me not to do stupid stuff like leave the door unlocked."

"Don't do stupid stuff like leave the door unlocked."

She rolled her eyes but felt herself smile. "Thank you, that was very helpful."

"I try."

"I can tell."

The house was currently empty since both of her parents were at work. Liam flicked on a light switch as she set her bag down on the kitchen island.

Shopping was not originally on the agenda for today—the afternoon Barnes and Noble run was spurred by an email from one of her professors with a list of books he wanted them to have before class started next Monday. She was really trying to avoid thinking about school for as long as possible but even more so trying to avoid getting on any of her professors' bad sides right off the bat. She searched for the books on Amazon, but they weren't going to ship to her in time. The next option was the campus bookstore, but their prices were ridiculously high, so she decided to give Barnes and Noble a shot first and unexpectedly ended up finding what she needed there.

It was approximately the temperature of the surface of the sun outside and tendrils of heat followed them into the house despite the fact that the front door was firmly shut, but Lily had just the remedy for it. As soon as she dumped her bag on the counter, she opened the fridge and retrieved two glass bottles of Coca-Cola.

She proudly showed them to Liam as if she herself had been the one to acquire them although that was not the case. "Look what Mom grabbed at the store."

Lily wasn't usually a huge soda drinker, but there truly was something better about it when it came from the bottle. Passing one of them to Liam earned her a "Thanks, Lils."

She popped the lid off and took a quick swig of her drink before setting the bottle down on the island behind her. Liam came forward, his arms encircling her waist, and he pressed a gentle kiss onto her forehead. She couldn't have hid the smile that formed on her lips if she tried. He figured out rather quickly that she was quite fond of forehead kisses and made sure to give her plenty of them.

He stepped back just slightly and his eyes flickered over to her bag of books before returning to her. "Ready for class to start?"

"Is anyone ever really ready for class to start?"

"I think those people do exist, actually," he mused, his lips curving into a cute little lopsided grin. "They're just a very rare breed of person that we are not."

"I'm not too worried yet, though," she shrugged. "I mean, I'll probably change my mind after the first day, but I figure sophomore year won't be as hard as freshman. Less to adjust to."

"Mine definitely wasn't," he agreed.

She had only heard a few stories from Liam of what he was like his freshman year before and while he was dating Caroline Davis, but he was far from forgiving in his assessment of himself. Lily found it hard to believe that he was ever capable of being as terrible of a person as he made his past self out to be. The Liam she knew was so kind, so sensitive, so selfless. Those weren't traits you acquired in a year, at least not to the extent he revealed through how he treated her. He was innately good in her eyes and to separate him from that goodness would be impossible, like having the day without the sun.

But what the two of them had in common was that they liked to hide themselves. It just broke her heart that he ever felt like no one would want the real him.

"You okay?" he asked softly.

She must have gotten more lost in thought than she realized. "Yeah," she promised. Her fingers found their way to the nape of his neck and carefully stroked through his hair. "Just thinking, that's all. How's it feel to be halfway done with college?"

"Don't remind me," he mumbled.

"Mhmm, fair. Responsibilty's no fun."

"I don't even want to be irresponsible," he admitted. "I've had enough of that."

Her thoughts inevitably drifted back to where they were just a moment ago and she tilted her chin up towards him ever-so-slightly. "I still don't believe you were ever beer pong champion."

His eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge."

Lily grinned at the mere thought of herself attempting to play beer pong. All of her balls would probably end up on the other side of the room. "I wouldn't be much of a challenge. Now if one were to host a Taylor Swift trivia night, on the other hand-"

"Who says I couldn't beat you at Taylor Swift trivia?"

She narrowed her eyes. Liam was really funny if he thought he would ever stand a chance. And she had the evidence. She cleared her throat slightly.

"Well, Jo seemed very surprised that day when you were playing 'Shake It Off' for me, so one therefore might deduce that you do not, in fact, partake in such songs on a regular basis," she stated matter-of-factly.

"Who says Jo knows what I listen to?" Liam tried, but he nearly cracked a smile at his own ridiculousness.

Lily shook her head. "You're not very convincing," she informed him, pressing her lips together to hold back the grin that threatened to form. "You're forgetting about the fact that you let me use your Spotify in the car just now and there was a sad lack of Queen Tay to be seen."

"Alright, you got me," he murmured, leaning in and letting his forehead rest against hers.

Her eyes flickered shut. "Good effort, though," she promised, her voice coming out much fainter now that he was so close.

Liam's fingers were light as a feather as they delicately ran along her waist with the same amount of care Lily might have used when handling her parents' expensive china. She waited for the welcome sensation of his lips on hers, but that wasn't what she got. He elicited a shrill squeal from her by tickling her sides instead.

"Stop it," she giggled. She was so freaking ticklish. She couldn't handle this. "Please?"

She attempted to tickle him back, but he wasn't relenting. She quickly ran out of breath, her eyes watering from all the laughing. She tried to squirm out of his grasp instead. "Liam-"

Lily was so focused on escaping the bombardment of tickles that she didn't pay careful enough attention to her surroundings. Her elbow suddenly collided with something on the counter and her laughter was broken by the piercing sound of shattering glass.

Her Coke bottle. She looked down in dismay at the billion tiny particles of tinted glass now swimming in a sticky, fizzy puddle of brown on the floor. Leave it to me to break something.

She cautiously stepped over the crime scene to fetch a roll of paper towels and glanced over her shoulder at Liam. "Do you mind grabbing those rubber gloves from under the sink so I don't-"

She didn't immediately comprehend what was wrong. Why he was just standing there like that with that stormy look in his eyes, fixated on the mess like it really was the bloody remnants of a crime and not just some spilled soda. But then she noticed how much color had drained from his face.

And how his hand was latched around his wrist, clutching onto it so tightly that she could see the tendons on the back of his palm protruding.

His wrist.

A bottle.

It was a bottle.

Caroline threw a bottle at him.

Liam managed to speak before Lily could do anything, his eyes still locked on the puddle rather than her. His voice was tight, straining to come out at all. "I- I just...I need to-"

He backed away, nearly stumbling over his own feet, and rushed out the back door.

Liam was barely conscious of his body hurdling out the back door, crumpling under the weight of his mind and sinking down against the wall. Tears came all at once, stinging his eyes like acid rain carving rivers down his cheeks. There was a ringing sound. All he could hear was the ringing and his labored breathing and the thumping in his chest. First it was just thumping and he tried to stop the thumping but the thumping wouldn't stop and then it was pounding, relentlessly pounding like a tell-tale heart and it was never going to stop unless he wrenched it out of himself.

His vision was drowned in red. Blood red. His own blood, trickling down his wrist in the same eerily graceful manner as flowing teardrops and then pattering onto the floor. He looked down and saw the glass lodged in his skin. Caroline and Jessica and Callum and Josh were laughing at him. Lily was saying something, but it was muffled. He couldn't really hear her—she was trying to speak to him from a world he was no longer in. He was trapped too deep in this hole this time. He kept slipping, slipping further and further down into the dark.

It was just the glass, the stupid glass. He stared at it. How did I never notice it was still there this whole time? He had to get it out. if he got the glass out then he would get out he would get out if he got the glass out so he started scratching but he couldn't find it.

The skin stung where his nails left raw pink trails in their wake. He was stumbling down that hallway trying to get away from Caroline and his arm was sticky from all the blood and he felt someone's fingers wrap around his to stop him from clawing at his wrist. It was Lily. It was Lily. Somewhere deep down he knew it was Lily but every cell of his body was screaming that it was Caroline.

His body recoiled under her touch as if she had pressed a red-hot iron onto his skin. He flinched, instinctively yanking his hand away as fast as he could.

"Don't touch me," he blurted, his voice sounding metallic in his ears. he swore to himself he was never gonna let her hurt him again he swore he was never "Leave me alone."

"I don't want to leave you like this," her voice insisted from miles and miles away.

He knew that voice, he knew that was her voice but every time he blinked he was still in this apartment and his wrist was still bleeding and he was going to bleed out if he let her trick him again. He kept trying to look towards her voice and see which girl was there but he couldn't. His vision was tunneling into this one spot and he couldn't move. He couldn't move. He couldn't think. Couldn't breathe. Just scratch scratch scratch.

"I want to help," she whimpered. "Please look at me."

He wanted Lily but was scared she wasn't there at all. He felt alone. And cold. The scorching afternoon sun was like fire against his skin and he still was cold. He was breathing out of a pinhole, the air coming in and out of him in labored gasps while tears continued to splatter onto his shirt. This couldn't be happening again. He couldn't take it again. He just wanted to be home, to be alone. Alone was safe. It was miserable but it was safe.

"Leave me alone."

Panic curled around his throat like fingertips digging into his skin and strangling him. He never thought he would feel like this again. It was going to kill him if he had to feel this again. He made it so far. He thought he was free. Lily shouldn't see him like this. The muffled voice was saying something else and he realized she was starting to grow irritated with him. Pain bloomed in his chest like a bullet wound as his heart started hammering against his ribcage even more, so hard he thought it was going to explode. He tried to make out what she was saying but he couldn't. His throat tightened and tightened and tightened and he blinked and suddenly she was there right in front of him. Caroline. She was watching him coldly and it was her fingers that were locked around his throat and he couldn't do anything but watch her.

"Please," he begged both of them. "Just go."

His tears momentarily blurred his vision but once they streaked down his cheeks, Caroline was gone. But he felt relief for only a fraction of a second before heard Lily's upset voice, her words flooding over him like icy water.

"If you had to go all knight in shining armor on me and insist you weren't gonna let my stuff get in your way, then maybe you should think about giving me the chance to do the same," she snapped.

And she was gone, the door slamming behind her. He looked at the empty spot next to him where she just was. Breathe breathe breathe.

focus on five things you can see four things you can touch three things you can hear two things you can smell on emotion you can feel. Five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one emotion you can feel. Five things you can see. Four things you can touch. Three things you can hear. Two things you can smell. One emotion you can feel.

"Lily-" The word left his lips much too late and was stolen by the wind, received by no one.

Cold clarity washed over his mind as his breathing slowed to a much more manageable tempo. And as his panicked thoughts dissolved, the anxiety was swiftly replaced by guilt.

He just told his girlfriend not to touch him, yelled at her to go away, and cowered from her like she had harmed him. She wasn't going to unsee or unhear that. And now she was somewhere inside on her own, probably scared out of her mind by his behavior and furious that he pushed her away.

A terrible, sore feeling gnawed at his stomach. She just wanted to help. He doubted she would have said what she did if she understood just how far off his mind was while she was trying to talk to him, but there was truth concealed in her angry words. He made her a promise and she was trying to reciprocate it, but he locked himself up and swallowed the key instead of letting her.

And she was already so afraid of being shut out.

Lily ran inside, unable to watch Liam in that state any longer while knowing she just lashed out at him for it. She fought back against the instinct to cry long enough to fumble around the cabinet for rubber gloves and Clorox and start purging the evidence of the mess she made. If only all that had panned out in the past few minutes could be wiped away as easily as soda was absorbed by a paper towel or fragments of glass were swept into a paper bag to be taken to the trash.

She resisted the lingering urge to go back and force him to let her stay with him until he was okay. But he made it abundantly clear that she wasn't helping and he certainly wasn't going to want to see her after she yelled at him like that.

She felt so hurt and so numb at the same time as she finished cleaning up the spill and washed the stickiness off her hands. The pain somehow felt old – a menacing presence that had hovered just outside her consciousness this whole time and slept dormant until the moment came for it to erupt. It had only been a matter of time before one of their issues reared its ugly head in a manner too intense for the other one to handle. She just imagined that she would be a little more prepared for the unexpected when the unexpected came.

Her stress compounded on itself now that her distraction was gone and she was left with nothing to occupy her hands with. Lily wilted back down to the kitchen floor like a decaying flower, tucking her head against her knees and loathing herself for how she treated him.

She hated how often she cried. She hated the sound of crying and how quickly your control over your own body was taken away from you as it released its anguish through sobs that rattled your lungs and scraped your throat raw. But none of her disdain for the act of crying could stop it from overtaking her while one question rang inside her skull over and over and over again.

What have I done?

Her boyfriend was outside having a major panic attack and she handled it in the worst way possible just because she was momentarily irked that he wasn't letting her help him. But who was she to say what would help? She knew nothing and she acted like she knew everything.

Every single boy who entered her life in any capacity appeared to have a talent for pushing her away at one point or another. It was her greatest frustration, her greatest insecurity, her greatest failure. But it wasn't until she was in shambles on her kitchen floor and alone once more that she finally realized that perhaps they weren't shutting her out at all.

Perhaps she was driving all of them away.

She was supposed to be infinitely better than all of those people who had done Liam so wrong, the ones who betrayed him and the ones who whispered hushed lies about him to their friends. Why did she assume she was any better? Had she not been thinking mere minutes ago that she didn't understand how anyone didn't want him just as he was? She was a hypocrite, a judge in the one moment he desperately needed to be spared from judgment.

Time always passed in odd ways when you were crying. Minutes felt like hours and hours felt like days because your body tired so quickly. Lily was unsure how long she was there for, but sobs eventually wound down to heavy breaths and sniffles and she lifted her head from her knees.

"How long have you...?" she hiccuped, surprised.

Liam was sitting there silently just a few feet to her side, his eyes and cheeks stained with the rosy hue of tears.

His voice came out hoarsely. "A couple of minutes."

She resisted the impulse to hang her head low while she braced herself for what he would say, for him to take a deep breath and look her in the eyes and explain how she had been most unhelpful even though she was already aware of it. The distance between them was palpable.

But he held out his hand. She slowly, carefully took it. And he wasn't so far away anymore.

The apology came pouring out of her. "I was awful, I'm so sorry. I was supposed to listen to what you needed and I didn't and I-"

"Lils, wait. It wasn't just because of-" He swallowed a lump in his throat and his gaze briefly drifted over to the bag of fractured glass that she hadn't yet taken out to the trash. "I was freaking out because nothing has made me like that since right after it happened. I wasn't prepared. I- I would have warned you if I knew, I promise."

"I believe you," she softly promised, holding his hand a little tighter. "I'm sorry for knocking the bottle over."

He shook his head. "It was an accident and I'm just as much at fault for it. I forgive you. I'm sorry, too."

"Don't be sorry."

"You were kind of right, though," he admitted quietly. "About what I said. It's not fair of me to leave you in the dark."

Lily used her free hand to quickly brush at her watery eyes as an involuntary sniffle left her. She couldn't blame him for anything. If she was in a position where she was that vulnerable, she wouldn't have wanted to be seen, either.

"It wasn't exactly the opportune moment to call you out on it."

He actually laughed a little bit at that, the sound like music to her ears. Her smile found its way back to her lips as Liam scooted over to her side and put his head on her shoulder.

He didn't say anything else just yet, but he lifted her hand to his lips and placed the lightest of kisses on it. She knew that was his way of telling her that they were okay.

"Come here," she murmured, stretching her legs straight forward so he could lay down and rest his head on her lap.

His fatigue was evident as he let his eyes close, but the fact that he did calmed her because it meant he felt safe enough to let his guard back down. She let her fingers lightly glide through the short soft locks of his brown hair and hoped he found it as soothing as she did when he did the same to her.

The sensation of having him curled up to her for comfort was a mostly unfamiliar one, but it felt right. Lily spent so much time where he was right now, needing him to be the stable one and ease her spirit. Some days she felt like a burden, like an emotional stability leech. But now she could finally see that he really needed her just as much as she needed him.

Staying there with him reminded her of just how much she admired this beautiful boy she was lucky enough to call her boyfriend. The boy who gave the best cuddles and always had the words she needed to hear. The boy who liked flowers, the boy who was proud of himself when he did well at any of his old video games that they played together because he usually sucked at them so badly. The boy who wouldn't tell her yet that he was learning more Taylor Swift songs on the piano for her, who didn't know that she overheard him doing it one day. The boy whose presence enveloped her with warmth like a cozy blanket. The boy who already felt like home.

"Crap," she muttered, her thoughts suddenly yanked elsewhere. "Dinner."

Liam's eyes opened. "What about it?"

"We were gonna go out and I'm sure I look like a zombie. I should get ready."

He slowly sat up and rubbed at his sleepy eyes. "Were you really sold on Olive Garden?"

"No." She did love some free breadsticks, but there were plenty of free bread restaurants in the sea. "Why?"

"Why don't we just...We never finished that movie you picked the other night," he shyly pointed out. "We could stay in and order pizza or something and watch the rest of it."

Lily quizzically raised her eyebrows. "Do you mean to tell me you want to finish Mamma Mia?"

"I mean, not really. But it's only fair."

"Mhmm." A small smirk formed on her lips. "You're not any more convincing than you were earlier."

But lying or not, he was kind of adorable. She leaned in and gave him a swift kiss.

"I'll give you the benefit of the doubt," she informed him. "But only if we're getting delivery from that Greek place down the road. Gotta give ourselves the whole experience."

Liam smiled. "Deal."

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Oof. There was bound to be conflict at some point but oof. 

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