A Love Like Ours

Chapter 24

"So, then what happened?" Mads asked through her laughter.

And I grinned, chuckling myself because telling the story really didn't do the memory any justice. "Well, we let him believe that a 'squird' was an actual thing. Obviously."

It was silly really, but on the last tour the boys and I had done—a smaller one, just Europe and North America—Niall, Louis, and I had decided to mess with Liam, and told him that scientists had discovered an animal that was a cross between a squirrel and a bird.

And boy, did he want to believe it.

"That's insane," Liam had said, an excited smile on his face. "They only just found it?"

"No, mate," Louis said, not a flicker of amusement on his face. "They're breeding them now."

"What?!" Liam exclaimed, eyes wide. "How does that even work?"

"Well, I don't know, Liam," Louis said, as if he were annoyed Liam was asking. "I didn't necessarily want to know the specifics of it, if I'm honest,"

"Apparently, they're going to try and get them out in the wild next," Niall added, barely concealing a smile.

"Jesus. What do they look like?" Liam asked then.

I fielded that one. "A little like those flying squirrels, you know? They've got like, the webbing underneath their arms, but their tails are much shorter, not so bushy. And they've got beak-like noses."

"And feathers," Louis added, and we shared a grin as Liam processed that.

"Wow," he breathed, "It's amazing what science can do, isn't it?"

"It truly is," Niall said emphatically. "The things ya never thought possible, and suddenly they're so easy to believe."

"Exactly!" Liam had shouted, and then muttered, "squird," like he was testing the word out. "I even like the name they came up with for it."

We had all shared a glance then, and if Niall hadn't looked away when he did, his smiling red cheeks surely would have given us away.

"It has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" I had asked.

And Liam had smiled at me when he agreed.

"Well," I said, shifting around a little bit in my seat and hiking my leg up onto the couch to better face Madelyn, "it didn't take him long to look up a 'squird' and figure out that we'd made the whole thing up, but it did take him longer than it should've. So, we all had a right laugh about that."

Mads giggled again from where she sat at the other end of the couch in Glenne's living room. "I'm sure you all still get a good laugh out of that."

"Oh, for sure, we take the piss about it every chance we can get," I said with a grin, enjoying the way she grinned back. Even as she shook her head.

"Poor Liam," she said, and gave me a wink, "to be saddled with such shit friends."

I chuckled. "I don't know what you're talking about. He never had it so good before us."

With the fireplace going, and the otherwise dim lighting, Glenne's living room felt downright cozy. The plush blue suede couches, the soft beige carpeting, the warm mugs of tea we'd been sipping from—it was the most comfortable I'd felt in a while, and I was pretty sure it wasn't entirely down to the room.

Glenne and Jeff had been sitting with us after we got back from dinner up until about an hour ago when they'd gone upstairs to sleep. And I hadn't checked the time in while, but I knew it was well past midnight, and that I should probably head out at some point before morning. That didn't really matter though. Not in this space between us. Not where our outstretched legs touched in the middle of the couch. Mads and I were just talking—we'd been talking all night, and for weeks and months before that—but still, somehow, none of it seemed like enough.