Artificial Love (Thiam)

Chapter 18

Liam was supposed to be officially announcing his courtship with Hayden. The ball was supposed to be in their honour. He was supposed to look at her like she set fire to the sun to keep them warm.

All he could look at was Theo.

There were two totally separate lines of thought about Theo too. The first was the emotional element.

The emotional element was the obvious one. The 'what the fuck' of it all. And genuinely, what the fuck? Liam was starting to really accept that he would never understand Theo at all. Maybe he had been naive, in imagining that something would change after that night in Theo's room. When he'd woken up and curled around Theo, the casual moments of a kind of intimacy that had nothing to do with sex. They'd slept like that. Surely that... meant something? He felt stupid even thinking those thoughts consciously, like he should be hiding that kind of vulnerability even from himself, but he couldn't help it.

He had really believed something had finally cracked. That maybe he'd gone some way to finally getting over some of Theo's seemingly never-ending walls.

But then he'd said he wanted to keep it a secret, and fucking hell, Liam realised he was just as stupid and out of his depth with Theo as he always had been. Theo didn't want him. Theo never had wanted him.

Theo was an unreadable artifact without a cipher, a storm that never seemed to ease. For as hard as Liam tried, he still felt as though he didn't really know Theo at all.

Years of long, wary days together. Years of dark, agitated nights. In all that time, as hard as he'd tried, Theo was always an arms length or more away. Always just out of reach. And Liam really hadn't known, at least not consciously, how long he'd spent reaching.

But he had. He'd been reaching forever, and apparently was showing no real signs of stopping. He kept telling himself it was a bad idea.

He kept telling himself he should be more distant and less available.

But he hadn't been unavailable when they'd hooked up in Liam's hotel room shower the day after they woke up together in Theo's bed. Or the day after that, when they'd made out hurriedly against the stacks of books in the library. Or for the three times the three days immediately after that.

He hadn't seen Theo in two days, and in all honesty, he was realising how weak he really was as he failed to look at his partner instead of her cousin.

It wasn't like Hayden wanted to be with him either though, so that made things a little easier.

He knew she wouldn't be offended. She was on to him though. They were dancing around the obnoxiously nice garden when she kicked him softly in the shin. He knew it wasn't meant to hurt, but the front of her pointy shoes didn't feel great.

"Ow." He grumbled, knowing what was coming before it came.

She snorted, "I know he's the pretty one in the family, but could you at least pretend to be looking at me?" She asked, her voice low and teasing. Liam swallowed.

"I don't suppose you'd believe me if I said I wasn't looking at him?"

"Not even remotely, no." She grinned at him and he sighed, shaking his head uselessly. "It's fine, Li, you know I don't care. You're just not exactly being subtle about it."

He nodded, staring at the ground.

The second line of the thought, the one that kept butting into his head obnoxiously, was how good Theo looked.

Ridiculously, annoyingly good. Theo had always been good looking. Even when they were kids, Liam had lamented that girls their age would always look at him instead of Liam. Of course, back then, he hadn't placed the source of his jealousy quite right. And then again, as he got older. He would look at Theo with so much resentment for being prettier than him. How wrong he had been. How stupid and bisexual he had been.