E
I glued my eyes to the spot where Scott had been standing just a few moments earlier and pushed myself to my feet, walking over to collect the books and papers he had dropped on the ground, doing everything in my power to avoid glancing Liam's way. I didn't have the nerves to turn to him, not when I felt so shaken and exposed. Not when I was in just enough pain for my head to be too clouded for me to think quite straight.
There was no way I could've made myself look in his brilliant blue eyes and talk to him about everything that had just happened, or anything at all. Maybe he knew that, or maybe he didn't, but he made me do it anyway. He crouched down next to me and began to shuffle through the loose pages that I hadn't managed to snatch up yet. "These are really good," he said after a pause.
I let my eyes fall shut for moment while I steeled myself for the suddenly inevitable conversation, before reopening them and sinking into a more comfortable seated position. I had a feeling that maybe I wouldn't be leaving as soon as Scott had predicted. "Thanks."
"Where'd you learn to draw like this?"
I shrugged, not really in the mood to talk about about Ben with a practical stranger. "Why do you even care?"
It was Liam's turn to shrug as he stared at the papers in his hands like they might hold the answer to my very simple question. "I guess . . . because it's something about you, and since I want to know you, it's an easy place to start."
My heart felt like it almost stopped beating for a moment when the words left his mouth, and it took all of my self control not to gape at him like an idiot once he finished talking. When I finally managed to speak again, my voice was barely louder than a whisper. "Why do you want to know me?"
"I don't know. You're becoming friends with Mason, and he's already my best friend, so I'm guessing there's going to be a bit of overlap there, and knowing each other would definitely make it a lot less awkward. Oh, and because you're one of only six people in the world who knows that I'm secretly a werewolf."
Suddenly my throat felt immensely dry, and it seemed that no amount of nervous gulping could help. I could barely push out a scared, "Oh, yeah. Ok."
Liam frowned at my negative reaction to his answer and sighed before continuing. "I didn't mean that in a bad way . . . or maybe I did. I'm sorry, I don't really know. This is all so new and confusing and really, really weird, and I just don't know how to feel about it all."
"Well that makes two of us," I said softly as I cast my eyes back down to the drawings of wolves in my hands.
Silence fell over the room for a minute while we both sat there, so caught up in our own thoughts that the awkward tension that had filled the air earlier began to dissipate without us even realizing it. When I finally snapped out of my own head and began to resume my menial task of rounding up all my work so I could leave, Liam seemed to remember he had been helping me before and jumped up to assist me once again.
"You know you can leave, right? I can pick these up by myself."
"Yeah, but I kinda feel like I should; you've had a rough enough night already."
"And you were the one who dumped them all on the ground in the first place." I said, smiling lightly again for the first time that night since Mason had handed me my bracelet and started the entire chain reaction that had lead me to the very moment I was in.
Liam forced out an embarrassed laugh and sent me an apologetic look. "Right. Sorry about that, I got a little caught up in the drama of the moment. I didn't even think about the fact that someone would have to clean it all up."
I shrugged as I stuffed my pile of papers into my backpack and held a hand out for Liam's. "It's not that big of a deal, just means I'm going to have to find a first aid kit here instead of using the one at my house."
"What do you mean? Why do you need a first aid kit?"
I glanced down at the angry red burns on my wrist, and Liam's eyes followed. All in all, it couldn't be any worse than first degree, and with my weirdly high pain tolerance, I'd been able to bear the stinging for a while, but I knew I needed to treat and ice it before it got any worse than it already was.
"When did that happen?" he asked softly, no longer smiling as he set the papers in his hands down and inched closer to me.
"Violet got a swipe in at me before Scott showed up." I said simply, keeping my eyes peeled on my wrist and the floor below it.
"Does it hurt?"
I glanced back up at him for a moment, and his bright blue eyes were swirling with a storm of emotions that I couldn't begin to decipher. It surprised me enough that I answered with complete honesty. "Yeah, it's starting to sting like a bitch."
"Can I see?" he asked gently, holding a hesitant hand out to me.
I pulled my arm out of reach and shot him a questioning look, "Um, why?"
"Scott told me a lot of crazy stuff about this whole werewolf deal, and there's something I want to try." he said simply.
I shook my head, keeping my arm rigidly by my side, "I am not letting you bite me or anything if that's what you're thinking."
Liam's face paled to the same shade as the whiteboard on the wall behind him and he was quick to reassure me that there was no way in hell he was going to do anything close to biting.
Against all my better judgement, I decided to believe him. I decided to trust that he wasn't going to hurt me, and cautiously eased my wrist into his open hand.
While his brows furrowed in what I assumed was concentration, mine furrowed in confusion. For a minute, nothing happened, and I was starting to feel immensely stupid, but then whatever he was doing actually started to work.
The dull throbbing in my wrist began to fade away ever so slightly, and the longer he held my hand in his, the more the pain seemed to be seeping away even more.
"What are you doing?" I asked in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
"I'm taking your pain. Scott said it's one of the good things I can do now."
"Wait . . . does that mean I'm hurting you?"
When Liam didn't respond right away, I knew what the answer to my question was, so I ripped my hand away from his and tried my best to ignore the angry way my stomach had suddenly started flipping over.
"Why did you do that?" I breathed out after an uncomfortable few seconds of silence.
Liam shrugged, averting his eyes from mine, "I wanted to see if I could, and I wanted to help you."
"Why?" I asked again, confusion evident in my voice, as well as a few other emotions I would rather pretend weren't there.
"I don't know!" he blurted out, frustration blossoming on his face as he ripped his eyes up from the floor and pointed them straight into mine. "At least something good has to come out of all this, right?"
"All what?"
"Everything!" he said loudly as he bounced on the balls of his feat, just like Ben used to when he was overwhelmed. "Everything that's happened in the last few days has sucked so much, but if I can do something good because of it, then maybe it doesn't actually have to be so bad."
I took a ghost of a step closer to him and hid my trembling hand behind my back before speaking again. "Is this about . . . you know . . . Friday night?"
"Yeah." he said, deflating and sounding so defeated that I almost couldn't believe he'd practically been shouting a few moments earlier.
"Do you still feel like you did then? Like, uh, like a . . ."
"Monster?" he finished for me.
I nodded. Then he nodded too and my heart broke just a little bit.
"Yeah, it's kind of hard not to." he sighed. "I mean, you saw me in the woods. You saw me this afternoon. I don't know how you can look at me after that, because even I can barely look at myself when I know what's inside me now."
I let out a nervous, slightly strangled laugh, and my eyes darted down to the drawings on the floor of the very thing Liam was talking about. After a minute of trying hopelessly to think of something to say to reassure him that he wasn't actually a monster, I gave up. I couldn't lie to him, not when we were being to strangely open with each other, so I told him exactly what I'd been thinking for the past few minutes. I told him the truth.
"I don't think there's any easy way to say this, so I'm just going to get it over with okay?" I didn't wait for him to answer before I continued. I didn't want to lose my nerve. "After the woods Friday night, and after the locker room earlier today, there's no way around it, Liam; there's definitely a little bit of monster inside you."
Liam recoiled from me like I'd slapped him, and opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a hand to stop him.
"I'm not done. Yeah, there's a little bit of monster in you, and you didn't ask for it, but you're stuck with it now, and I guess that really sucks, but that's not everything you are. There's a lot of human in you too. Good human too. Just because . . ." I trailed off, suddenly worried I hadn't quite found the right words yet.
"What?" he asked softly, almost like he was scared of what I was about to say.
"Just because you have all those extra qualities now, the fangs and glowing eyes and whatever else is going on, doesn't mean that they're the only things that define who you are anymore. I think that just because now when you get really angry you lose a little more control than you used to, it doesn't change who you are underneath it all. And I don't really know you, but I can tell from these last few minutes that you're not just a monster. You're still Liam Dunbar. Don't forget that."