✧ prequel to The Search for Lily Myers → read that one first! ✧
7:04 p.m.
Wednesday, September 2nd.
No one knows it, but at this moment, three things are certain:
Lily Myers is about to disappear,
Liam Duke is about to have his heart broken,
and...
Liam continued pretending that everything was fine in hopes that it would help his internal conflict about Caroline go away. If only it were so easy.
He was fidgety every time he saw her that week, feeling like he was treading on broken glass that was going to cut him at any second. But he tried to hide the fact that her mere presence was stressing him out. He couldn't let her notice. All that would do was make her mad and make everything worse.
If he got broken up with, he was also going to lose his friends. He knew where Jess, Josh, and Callum's loyalties were at the end of the day. As soon as Caroline rejected him, they would too. He admittedly didn't always get along with them, but they were all he had. So he tried to deny everything he was feeling, put on a smile, and play along for as long as he could.
But at night, he couldn't sleep. After changing the bandages on his wrist, he would lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, his thoughts going around in circles as he frantically attempted to make sense of Caroline's behavior and what he could do to salvage their relationship.
He couldn't stop replaying their first dates, the long conversations they would have late at night when they should have been asleep. He picked through all of it, trying to decipher where they went wrong. Did she ever care for him at all or was it all a pretense? He had thought he was so in love with her, but now he wasn't sure if he even knew what love really was.
Maybe he truly was just a stupid teenager who thought he deserved more than he did. She had apologized, wasn't that enough? He just had to learn how to forgive. To accept her for who she was and not the ideal person he wanted her to be.
Perhaps none of it was really her fault. There had to be some deeper reason for this that Liam wasn't grasping. He was no psychology expert, but he knew that no one was that angry or that defensive for no reason. He wasn't blind. Caroline expressed her emotions in these extravagant ways, but as soon as anyone tried to talk to her about it, she closed herself off. She had built up walls around herself that she wouldn't let anyone through, not even him.
And no one built up walls until they had learned their lesson the hard way. She always refused to talk about her parents. All of the times Liam tried to approach the topic, she shut it down vehemently. So he had his suspicions.
No one was inherently violent. It was learned behavior.
He didn't sleep at all on Thursday. He buried his head in his pillow and stayed there all night, sweat beading on the skin under his freshly-changed bandage. The hours blurred together, night slowly bleeding into day. But Liam simply stayed there, gradually numbing to his own pain and worrying about who was hurting Caroline instead of why she was hurting him.
When he slumped downstairs in the morning, there was a cup of coffee waiting for him in the kitchen. He grabbed it and chugged the whole thing in thirty seconds before he went out to his car. Jo couldn't see him in his current state; she would know he hadn't slept.
He was in dire need of a distraction, but he knew that his friends had just what he needed if he could just survive the day.
One of Caroline's friends from student government, Chase, held a party at his place every Friday night. Liam knew that he was expected to go per usual and despite the awful week he was having, he wanted to. He and Caroline were currently the reigning beer pong champions and he wasn't going down without a fight, bad hand or not.
Besides, she wouldn't do anything to him in front of that many people.
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