Page 60 of A Series of Rooms
The edge of the fork dug painfully into Liam’s skin. “I’ve been working a lot,” he said without looking at him.
“That’s an understatement,” Liam’s mom chimed in. “Poor Liam has been working himself to the bone at that diner. He’s even started picking up graveyard shifts.”
Liam didn’t like the trajectory of this conversation, but he was struggling to find his voice.
Nathan, apparently, found his first. “I wonder where all that money is going,” he said. Liam looked up at him, and into the fire burning behind his eyes. “Your college fund must be stacked by now. Unless you’re spending it somewhere else.”
There was no way the rest of the family wasn’t feeling the heat of whatever was simmering beneath the surface. Liam never thought he would be grateful for the Midwestern Artof Forced Polite Conversation, but he could finally breathe again once Mrs. Baker stepped in to steer the conversation back to safer territory.
“Well,” she declared loudly, raising her wine glass in Liam’s direction. “I think it’s great that you’re working toward your goal. Nobody your age seems to want to work for anything anymore.”
“Mom,” Ben groaned.
Even as the idle chatter moved on around them, breaking off into sub-conversations, the silent exchange between him and Nathan only seemed to grow hotter, nearing a boiling point that Liam didn’t know how to predict.
He kept quiet, unwilling to provoke a confrontation when Nathan was so clearly looking for one. Dinner was almost finished, and he had almost survived the whole ordeal with nothing more than a mental scratch, when Ben decided to upend the whole evening through another mouthful of food.
“Okay, for real,” he said, pointing his fork toward the gash on Nathan’s cheek. “Are you just not gonna tell us what happened?”
Nathan’s spine drew up, his shoulders rolling back. “It’s really not as exciting as you want to think it is,” Nathan replied.
A lie,Liam clocked easily. Nathan never was any good at that.
“That’s really not what I asked,” Ben pushed.
Liam watched Nathan’s jaw twitch again. “Wasn’t a big deal. I went into the city with some of Becca’s friends from school. We rented a hotel room. Things got out of hand.”
From the end of the table, Nathan’s father barked out a laugh.“‘A little out of hand?’”he repeated. “Is that what you call waking up to a three-hundred-dollar damage charge from the Marriott on my credit card?”
The sound of silverware clattering on ceramic had every eye turned in Liam’s direction.
The Marriott.
The pieces fell into place, one after another.
The tense conversation in the diner parking lot.
The caller ID from Jonah’s voicemail.
Nathan’s injury.
A defensive wound.
“What the fuck did you do?” The words were cold and flat, escaping in a whisper before he could stop them.
“Liam,” his mother snapped from beside him, but he didn’t look away from Nathan, who was staring back at him with eyes narrowed in confusion.
“What the fuck did you do?”He was suddenly yelling, and standing, through no active decision-making of his own.
“What are you talking about?” Nathan’s cool reply only fed the monster of rage inside him.
Something in the finality of the realization, the unblinking reality of what Nathan had presumably done to Jonah, severed Liam’s last thread of restraint. He had always known that the person pretending to be his friend sincechildhood was a lot of things, most of them unpleasant, but he had never taken him for a predator.
The world around him went red and messy.
The noises he registered blended together as one: Mrs. Baker’s startled shriek, the shattering of ceramic against a hardwood floor, the crunch of Nathan’s nose under his fist. Again. And again. And again. And ag—
“Liam! Liam— Okay, stop, that’s enough.” The arms around his chest might have belonged to Ben, but he couldn’t see, and he didn’t care. He swung out wildly, trying to escape, trying to catch another blow to Nathan’s bleeding face, but he was yanked backwards, out of reach.
