Say Yes by Kandi Steiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Living a Lie

Liam held my hand on the train ride home the next day, but he didn’t say a single word.

He looked out the window the entire trip, eyes flicking between the trees as they passed, and although he held onto me, he felt light years away.

I so desperately wanted to talk to him, to bring up what had been said in the throes of passion to make sure I hadn’t imagined it all. He had said he wanted more, too, hadn’t he? He had said he wanted all of me, that he needed me… right?

It was a childish thing, to want the verbal affirmation again, but I did. I had to know I wasn’t crazy. I had to hear the words from him in broad daylight, had to know they were real.

“You okay over there?” I asked when we were close to the Florence station, squeezing his hand in mine.

He turned toward me with his brows furrowed together, a deep line between them. But his expression smoothed when he saw me, and he leaned over to kiss my forehead before answering, “I’m okay. Just tired.”

I nodded, and then he was looking out the window again.

When we made it back, we filed off the train with our suitcases in hand, and opted to walk to campus, even though it was a good twenty minutes. It was still faster than trying to get a cab, and cheaper, too.

“Want to come back to my dorm?” I asked after about ten minutes of silence. “It won’t be the same as Elio and Antonella’s cooking, but I’m sure Angela could whip us up a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

The corner of Liam’s lips lifted marginally. “I’m actually pretty tired,” he reiterated. “I think I just want to get some rest. Class starts back up tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Probably best.”

We walked along in silence until we reached my dorm, and Liam put his bag down first before grabbing mine and setting it next to his. He framed my face in his hands, then, a slow breath leaving his chest as his eyes searched mine.

“Thank you,” I whispered after a moment. “For coming with me.”

He nodded, thumbing my cheek. “I had a great time with you.”

I should have felt elated at the words, but I couldn’t shake the way my stomach tightened in warning when he pulled me into him and pressed a long kiss to my lips. At the base of it, that kiss wasn’t different than any we’d shared before.

But it was laced with uncertainty, with warning and regret, and I felt all of that seep into my bones the moment he pulled away.

“See you tomorrow,” he promised.

I knew even then he was lying.

There was still a heavy cloud hanging over us when we convened for class again on Thursday, August first.

The Centennial Park bombing had shaken the whole world up, and after a few days off from classes, nothing felt the same as before it happened. But after a brief speech on the fragility of life and all we have to be thankful for, Professor Beneventi tried his best to distract us, giving us our last assignment that he explained would take up the last three weeks of our program.

Liam wasn’t there.

“Emotion,” he said, pacing the room with his hands behind his back. “We have studied many artists in our time together, and have tried our hand at recreating their work. We’ve painted landscapes and still-life, strangers and self-portraits, events and experiences.” He paused in front of my easel, his eyes connecting with mine. “And for our final assignment, we will crack ourselves open at the spine.”

I gulped.

“I want you to tap into your emotions, be they happy or angry or sad or somewhere in-between,” he continued, walking around the room once more. “Bring them to life. Give them color, and range, and depth.” He paused in the middle of the room, looking around at each of us. “Make me feel as you do without saying a word. Reach inside my broken soul and pour a little of yourself into the cracks.”

A girl by the name of Jessica raised her hand. “Should this be abstract? Or a self-portrait? Or?”

“Or,” he answered with a shrug.

Jessica frowned, confused.

“Emotion,” he said again, tapping her easel. “Don’t put parameters on it. Just feel it. Let it paint for you.”

We all seemed to leave class in a daze that day. Between the news of the Centennial Park bombing and the vague assignment that accounted for thirty percent of our grade, it was impossible not to feel a little shaken.

Angela and I curled up on our old couch later that evening, a bottle of wine between us as we watched Michael Johnson break the two-hundred-meter record and fall to his knees in disbelief at the feat. I was happy for the distraction, and the beauty of humanity as the men he beat bowed down to him and congratulated him earnestly.

I wondered after Liam, but tried not to angst over it. Maybe he was still tired. Maybe he took the day to rest. Maybe someone told him about the assignment, and he was already fast at work.

But he was absent the next day, too.

It was all I could do to focus enough to get through class and my internship at the museum. As soon as I was relieved from my shift, I half-walked, half-jogged across campus to Liam’s dorm and beat on the door until Thomas let me in.

“He’s been back in his room since you two got back on Wednesday,” Thomas said with a worried look. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re probably wasting your breath trying to find out.”

I sighed. “Thanks, Thomas. You okay?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Just worried about him. He hasn’t eaten much.”

“I brought a sandwich,” I said, patting my messenger bag hanging from my shoulder. “I’ll see if I can get him to eat.”

Thomas nodded, but his brows bent together even more than before. He didn’t believe I’d succeed.

I didn’t either.

I took a deep breath on the other side of Liam’s door before knocking softly and cracking it open just an inch. “Liam? It’s me. Can I come in?”

It was dark in the room, save for a soft orange glow coming from a lava lamp in the corner. I could see his silhouette on the bed, his arm over his eyes, body half-covered by a rumpled comforter. Pearl Jam played from his stereo speakers, and the room smelled faintly of marijuana.

When he didn’t answer, I took it as permission to enter, softly closing the door behind me before I walked over to sit on the edge of the bed. He didn’t even budge when my weight dipped the mattress.

“I brought you a sandwich,” I said, digging into my bag and pulling out the wax-paper-wrapped panini.

I sat it next to him, and he uncovered his eyes long enough to glance at it before he laid back down. “Thanks.”

It wasn’t rude, the way he said it, but it wasn’t exactly inviting, either.

I sat there for a while just looking around the room. My eyes caught on a discarded canvas tilted on its side in the corner. It was bent and warped like it’d been kicked, but behind the damage was a ghoulish image, muscle and ligaments stretched across bone, the skeleton not human, but not any animal I was familiar with.

I cleared my throat. “Feeling alright?”

“Fine. Just tired.”

“Tired,” I echoed on a laugh. “Sure. Okay.”

Liam removed his arm, then, frowning at me. “What, you don’t believe me?”

“No,” I said firmly. “Not even a little bit.”

“What’s your problem?”

“My problem?” I laughed, shaking my head. “You’re just going to pretend like you’re fine, like you were quiet all the way home the other day, and you skipped class two days in a row, and you’re laid up in a dark room because you’re fine?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, I do.”

Liam sat up straight, throwing the covers off him in a huff. “Can’t a man be left alone?”

“You’ve been left alone. For three days.”

Another sigh. “What, Harley? What do you want to talk about?”

“You know what.”

He swallowed hard, shaking his head before he reached for the water on his bedside table and drained half the glass.

“Are you just going to pretend like it didn’t happen?” I asked on a whisper.

“That what didn’t happen?”

I shook my head. “I guess that’s my answer.”

I stood, leaving the sandwich behind, but before I made it to the door, Liam called out my name.

“Wait,” he said after, dragging his hands through his hair. He balanced his elbows on his knees, one of them bouncing erratically. When he finally looked at me again, I saw the pain etched into his brows, the words he couldn’t say stuck in his throat.

I sighed, leaving my bag on the ground by the door before I walked back over to him. I reached for him slowly, tentatively, until he wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face in my stomach.

I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of him around me, soothing him with my hands running through his hair. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.” He pulled back, looking up at me.

More silence.

“Do you need me to say it?” I asked.

“Please, don’t.”

“I’m falling in love with you.”

You would have thought those words were bullets to his chest, the way he shrank away from me, wincing, shaking his head over and over like this was how it all ended.

“I’m falling in love with you, Liam,” I repeated. “And I know you’re falling for me, too.”

“I told you,” he croaked. “I can’t.”

“But you have been. And four days ago, you held onto me and looked me in the eyes and told me you wanted more, too.”

“I do, but—”

“Stop it,” I said, shaking him a little, begging him to look at me, but he wouldn’t. “Stop acting like you’re incapable of loving me.”

“But I am,” he said more firmly, standing until we were chest to chest. I backed up a bit at the dark look in his eyes. “I told you, Harley. I told you when we first agreed. You asked me for the summer. You said you could do casual. You said—”

“Yeah, well, I lied. And it looks like you did, too. So now, where does that leave us?”

He blew out a frustrated breath through his nose. “I can’t be with you, Harley.”

I ignored the way those words stung, because I knew he wasn’t saying them because he felt them. He was scared. He was freaked out.

He wasn’t the only one.

“Would you just stop?” I begged again. I reached for him, but he shrugged me off. “All summer long, you’ve told me not to be afraid. You’ve told me to embrace my truth, to be proud of everything that I am and everything that I’m not, to run toward my imperfection. Be strong,” I said, my voice deepening to mimic his. “Take life by the horns. Seize the day. Carpe diem, right? And yet look at you,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re running.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Stop acting like I’ve never been through anything hard in my life.”

He gritted his teeth, eyes focused somewhere across the room.

“You’re not the only one who’s been hurt, Liam. But you insist on ruining the rest of your life because of a tragedy that—”

“I shouldn’t be alive at all!”

His chest heaved with the declaration, his eyes wild where they pinned me, and it was all I could do to keep my jaw off the floor and my racing heart inside my chest.

“How can you say that?” I whispered. “How can you… believe that?”

Liam didn’t answer, just shook his head and looked away from me again.

“Life is a gift,” I said, carefully approaching him. I wrapped my fingers around his, needing connection, needing him to feel me since he wouldn’t look at me. “And yes, it hurts. It hurts more often than not. But we endure, and we live, because it’s all we have. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me all summer?”

“I said that for you, not for me.”

“Well, I’m saying it for you, now. This moment, this life, this,” I said, motioning between us. “Is all we have.”

“I don’t want it.”

Liam pulled his eyes to meet mine, his eyes glossed with unshed tears, jaw trembling — but his gaze held steady.

“I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask for the pain, and the guilt, and the fucking hellish monotony of just getting by.” He choked on those last words, the tears welling in his eyes so much now that I was sure I was nothing but a blur. “I didn’t ask for the agony of trying to move on when it feels like I’m forever stuck in that nightmare, like it will just replay itself, over and over, day after day, until I’m not here anymore.”

Tears sprang in my own eyes, and I squeezed his hand tighter. “Liam…”

“I wish it was me,” he whispered, rolling his lips between his teeth as he nodded vigorously, like he’d just realized a truth he’d been running from for years. “I wish it was me who was dead.”

I closed my eyes, releasing the tears. “You don’t mean that,” I said softly, blinking my eyes open once more. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bombarded you like this. I know you’re hurting, and everything came on so fast.”

He shook his head. “It’s not you. This has nothing to do with you.”

“Please, I’m sorry,” I begged, and I could feel it all slipping away, like no matter how I tried to hold onto him, it was useless now. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s get some fresh air and we can talk about this.”

“I don’t want to talk. I want you to leave.”

My face twisted in despair, and I shook my head as more tears fell. “You don’t mean that. You don’t—”

“I want you to go.”

“Liam, please—”

“I WANT YOU TO GO, HARLEY!”

I retracted my hand from his, flying back across the room like his scream had been a slap to the face. I covered my mouth with my hands, shaking my head as my tears fell faster than I could fight to keep them at bay.

“Go. Leave,” he said again, backing me into the door. “I don’t want you here. Okay?”

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered, sniffing as I let my hands fall to my sides. “You’re pushing me away.”

“I told you before we did this, before we did any of this,” he said, waving his hand around. “That I was fucked up. It’s not my fault you didn’t believe me. I left my own mother, Harley. My fiancée. And you think I have anything left to give you?”

“But you said you wanted it, too,” I whispered. “You said you couldn’t stay away from me, you said you needed—”

“Yeah, well, I say a lot of things when I’m horny.”

My jaw hinged open at that, and I shook my head, watching him like he was a completely mad stranger I’d stumbled upon in the park, rather than the boy I’d spent the whole summer with. This wasn’t him and I knew it.

But I couldn’t pull the real him out. Only he could do that.

“That’s what you want me to believe?” I asked. “That you’ve only said the things you’ve said to me and spent so many days and nights with me because you wanted to get laid?”

He shrugged, but he couldn’t look at me when he did it. It soured my gut and strangled my next breath to think what he said could be even remotely true.

After a long moment, I wiped my nose with the back of my wrist. “You’re right, I didn’t believe you when you said you were fucked up,” I said. “And I don’t believe you now when you say you don’t love me, either.”

His nostrils flared, jaw muscle ticking under the taut skin as he watched me. “Well, I don’t.”

I let my head fall back against the door, watching him for a long moment before I stood straight again. “You are a sad boy, Liam Benson.” I wet my lips, tasting the salty tears there. “This is what you really want? You want me to leave? You want to throw insults at me and diminish what we have to just sex? You want to throw away everything because you’re... what? Scared to even try?”

I waited a few seconds longer, hoping he would wake up, that he’d shake it off, that he’d reach through his stubborn pride for the girl who knew he could be more than he was settling for.

When he didn’t, I shook my head, grabbed my bag off the floor, and gave him what he wanted.

And I finally realized he could never do the same for me.