The Way We Learned to Love ✓

16 - liam

may-september 2017 : 3 years ago

The summer Liam spent with Natasha was some of the most fun he'd ever had. And it was real fun, not the sort of stupid stuff he used to do with Caroline and call fun just because they brought alcohol with them.

Nat worked 9-5 on weekdays, but they would see each other in the evenings. They usually ended up at his place; as nice as her apartment was, he could never relax when he was right down the hall from Jessica's. Being in that building put a lump in his throat and a phantom pain in his wrist. And if Jess saw him with another girl, it would surely get back to Caroline. He didn't know what she would - or could - do, but he didn't want to find out the hard way. He had learned his lesson about going down that road.

Natasha knew that something serious had gone down the night they met sheerly based on the state she found him in, but Liam never told her anything else about it. Despite this, she was gracious and didn't push him to come over. She assured him that she didn't mind hanging out at his place and would gladly take it over the alternative of a college dorm. It wasn't like his parents were ever home, anyway.

It wasn't the sort of relationship he ever envisioned himself being in. It didn't check off all the boxes, didn't fit within the narrow confines of what he previously assumed dating was always like. But dropping the expectations was oddly liberating. He could just ride the wave and see where it took him, unconcerned with what life on the other side might look like. He finally gave himself the chance to just live in the present, not the past or the future.

There was no neat sequence of events, no one thing that led to another. Neither of them even officially asked the other out. They just started seeing each other and eventually reached the mindset of if we're together all the time and there's repeatedly kissing involved then maybe we should just call ourselves something besides friends.

Maybe they shouldn't have labeled it. Maybe that would have made things a little smoother when they ended. But they both wanted to at the time. Calling her his girlfriend made it more meaningful to him, made it sweeter while it lasted, so Liam never regretted it.

There were some unavoidable formalities that came with sticking a title on it, formalities that made him quite nervous. When Mom and Dad asked if they could meet her over dinner, Liam wished he had a way to say no. He didn't want Nat to have to endure that, particularly not after they expressed their mutual distaste for their pretentious parents.

"I'm sorry we have to do this," he told her as they walked up to the front porch that evening, both dressed in significantly nicer outfits than they would ever be caught in when it was just the two of them.

"No worries. I've got this."

He should have known she had a plan - she always did.

"You look great."

Great was an understatement. Liam imagined that she would be the type of person who felt out of their element when forced to get dressed up, but she was clearly confident as always tonight. As she should have been - she looked like something out of a fairytale in that dress, deep blue like the night sky. It looked black until it caught the light just right, but when it did you felt as though you were somehow looking at the universe embedded in a piece of fabric.

She smiled. "You don't clean up too horribly yourself."

Neither of his parents said anything too cringy and Nat held her ground wonderfully. None of it was a lie, but she fed them exactly the kind of stuff they would want to hear, telling them all about her parents' and brother's picture-perfect suburban lives in Upstate New York while Liam nodded along as if he already knew all of this information. He was impressed - she had even gone and researched whatever data analytics was so that she could sound interested in Dad's company.