Page 34 of Veiled in Brick

Liam’s eyebrows shot up at my use of the endearment, and added, “Er—darling, how about we just sit?”

I ignored his inquiry and when I looked back to her, I realized that my use of the endearment seemed to have worked for I caught a glimpse of insanity in her eyes. I leaned closer to her, Liam’s hand still firmly gripping my wrist, and whispered:

“He doesn’t even remember your name.”

She moved so quickly that I didn’t even notice what had happened at first. All I felt was a hot, stinging pain flashing across my wet face as a resounding smack echoed throughout the bar. My eyes were still closed as I listened to Liam’s voice admonishing her angrily, followed by her heels clacking across the wood floor towards the exit, and then, the door closed behind her with a thud.

I was, without a doubt, slapped into submission. I could have run after her. Started a full-on fistfight in a nearby alleyway. Yanked her chocolate tresses from the roots. But, alas, the shock of the initial assault had left me almost paralyzed.

“Good God, are you okay?”

Liam tugged at my wrist to try to get me to turn to him, but my mind was still in a daze. I gingerly touched my left cheek, feeling the burn from her slap radiate into my palm, and tested opening and closing my jaw. It was tender already, and my head throbbed painfully when I nodded back to him.

I winced, angling my face towards Liam, and asked, “How bad does it look?”

I opened my eyes just in time to see him cringe, inhaling a breath through his teeth.

“The lighting in here’s shit, I can’t tell…but it looks, erm—red. Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

I brushed him off with a quick, “No, no—I, ah, probably shouldn’t have poked the bear on that one.”

He asked me gently, “What were you thinkin’, Zo’?”

I felt his thumb graze along my forearm in a consoling manner. It was oddly calming, but the sentence that he spoke was anything but.

I shrugged. “Get the crazy girl off your back? I dunno. It just happened so fast.”

I went to sit back down, but Liam shook his head, droplets of beer that clung to his blonde head flinging off of him from the movement.

“No-no, don’t sit, let’s just go,” he said, standing himself up. “We both need a change of clothes anyway, we can have another drink at my place, okay?”

I nodded, my mind still hazy, and I heard Liam apologizing to the bartender who had approached the table as I grabbed my things that surrounded me. The young man, whom I had never met, stammered out for us to not worry and that he would take care of the alcohol spilled on the floor. Liam thanked him quietly, ushering me out the door with a hand between my shoulder blades that felt shockingly warm compared to my cider-soaked shirt.

I placed one foot in front of the other blindly, head a blur, as Liam guided me down the street. We walked slowly, his guiding touch a blazing heat that scorched the back of my neck. His thumb brushed against my hairline in a consoling gesture, and it sent a shiver through me that I couldn’t suppress. I felt the comfort from his movement in my bones, and the sensation sent me reeling.

I was the type of person that thrived on being able to stand on my own two feet. I couldn’t put my finger on the specifics of why, but now, I felt like I had been swept off of them. With every step that we took and every gentle sweep of the pad of his thumb across my neck, I felt like I had slipped. I was falling. Careening downwards until I would, inevitably, break into pieces upon impact with the ground.

“Come on, get inside. I’ll grab you a towel.”

I mumbled some sort of agreement as Liam unlocked his door and pushed me inside it, and he strolled into his bathroom. I was left alone in front of his kitchen island, willing my mind to break out of the mist that had settled over my thoughts.

Not a minute had passed by the time Liam walked back to the kitchen with two towels. One was in his hand, poised to be thrown in my direction, and the other rested atop his shoulders—his very naked shoulders, as he had disposed of his beer-drenched shirt.

There were many instances throughout our friendship in which I was forced to suppress any outward attraction to Liam. There was no doubt that he was, for lack of a better term, hot, and I typically had no problem averting my eyes. I’d shift my focus and, if necessary, hum an internal monologue of baseball, baseball, baseball until the dirty thoughts that flooded my mind were whisked away. Right now, however, it was an impossibility. The recent memory of his comforting touch on the back of my neck jolted through me and sent me into a tailspin. Innocent as it may have been, it, along with the sight of his bare chest, made me weak.

He ran the towel through his hair and the jagged, pink scar along his left collarbone became visible, the evidence from when a bullet had impaled and shattered the bone completely apparent in the long gash. I found my gaze wandering, raking across his wide, muscular shoulders and downward. By the time I saw the flaxen happy trail leading from his belly button to his belt buckle, I had to force myself to close my agape mouth. I cleared my throat and tried to become as interested as one could be with the pattern in the wood grain of his apartment’s flooring.

I wanted to tell him to clothe himself before I had a goddamn coronary, but that could lead to further questioning that I didn’t think myself strong enough to answer—so I kept my mouth shut.

Liam chuckled out, “What are you doing?”

Fuck.

“Um—”

“Here,” he threw a towel at me as if it wasn’t blaringly obvious that I was just thinking of cleaning whatever beer splatter that remained on his chest with my tongue. I could practically feel the bristles of his chest hair tickling my lips when the towel landed at my feet. I shook my head, blinked my eyes once—hard—and bent over to pick it up. Liam ordered me, “Sit down, Zo’, let me look at your face.”

I scrunched my hair absentmindedly with the towel as I walked to his couch, sitting and turning my cheek toward him so he could look at it.

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