i don't wanna hold it against ya // but i want you holdin' on
In the dark, seated at the edge of his bed, Liam waits for her.
He's no stranger to this, waiting—waiting for her, specifically. For Sonya, Liam is always waiting. Waiting for her to ring. Waiting for her eyes to meet his across the table in the café where they always meet on nights like this. Waiting for her to sidle up to him on the walk to his flat, her arm linked with his. Waiting for their bodies to clash in pleasure, once, twice, three times, on a good night.
Waiting for her to gather her things and sneak out before the sun comes up, on footsteps she thinks are quiet. Maybe they are.
Maybe Liam's just become too in tune with them.
These days, for Sonya, Liam is—stupidly—always waiting. He's begun to resent time, with the way it ticks and ticks and ticks away and seems to bring him nowhere closer to being something more to Sonya Williams, for whom his feelings are becoming harder and harder to mask. The depth of them has stretched far enough beyond friendship and casual sex that while he's sure there are lines that have been drawn, lust and affection have blurred his vision so entirely he can't quite make out the boundaries anymore.
Sonya is terrifying. Or rather, his growing feelings for her are terrifying. Sonya is brilliant; she's an intelligent, quiet storm, warm and unexpectedly sexy and far better than the men she spends time with—the men she wastes her time with, in Liam's opinion, while Liam waits for her hopes to be dashed again so he can be called upon to piece her back together for a night. Casual sex that's begun to feel less casual every time they meet, mixed with something resembling friendship. The unbreakable cycle.
It's what's got him sat here, on his bed, elbows digging into his thighs, hands clasped between parted knees as he waits for her to join him.
Liam breathes out a long sigh, the only sound in the quiet of his bedroom. He hunches his shoulders as a chill shoots its way up his spine; he's still shaking off the weather from outside, December alive and well and leaving him cold down to the bone. He'd been bundled up in his heavy coat with a scarf wound around his neck, but those were both abandoned in the doorway with the help of Sonya's swift hands as Liam's French Bulldog, Fletcher, barked and barked at their ankles until they tripped their way, lip-locked, into his bedroom.
Fletcher currently sits at Liam's feet, strangely quiet. He must've snuck into the room after them, Liam unaware of the fact until Sonya disappeared into the loo and Fletcher came bounding out from his hiding place behind the opened bedroom door. Now, Fletcher's cozied himself up against Liam's calf, and when Liam sighs again, so does Fletcher, a large exhale for such a small dog. It gives Liam something to laugh about, leaning down to pat his companion on the head.
"You're going to have to clear out in a moment, Fletch," Liam whispers, a smile in his voice as he thumbs at Fletcher's perky ears. Fletcher's presence is something of a comfort, a distraction from the nerves tying his insides in knots, but the last thing he wants is him hanging around while he and Sonya are...intimate.
Fletcher tilts his head to the side, studies Liam like he's absorbing this information, and Liam chuckles.
"Right, then, out you go," he orders, snapping his fingers and pointing towards the opened bedroom door. "Go on, now."
Fletcher studies him for a moment longer, then pops up onto all fours and skitters across the floor towards the door, and Liam watches with a grin until he's disappeared into the darkness.
Alone again, Liam's eyes become trained on the floor, his mind racing as he thinks about how the evening's unfolded. He took Fletcher out to take care of his business, and before he knew it, his feet had led him back inside to retrieve some things—his coat, his scarf, his gloves, Fletcher's sweater and lead. Then he was pulling on his things, coaxing Fletcher into the sweater, attaching his lead, and making the short walk to Caruthers, a café near his flat where he satisfied his late-night coffee cravings.
He'd been a frequent visitor in his uni days, camped out in the corner at his favorite table revising until the early morning hours. Now, he ducks in on evenings when the desperation for caffeine is too great, still unbelievably incompetent at brewing his own coffee at home for a man in his mid-twenties.
He and Fletcher had jingled their way through Caruthers's main entrance and were in the process of shaking off the late evening's snow when Liam's eyes fell upon Sonya, sat alone at a table—his table—with a large mug cradled in her hands. Her eyes seemed to be lost in the swirling abyss of cappuccino he was more than certain filled her cup—her usual was an order he knew now like the back of his hand.
Liam had stopped in his tracks. Warred with himself in his brain. Then, against his better judgment, his feet led the way to where she sat, and he slid into the seat across from her and held her gaze when her eyes looked up to find his.
He looks up now as the door to the loo creaks open, steadying his eyes on Sonya as she slinks into view wearing nothing but her undergarments. She reminds him of a cat, feline in the way she moves, light on her feet with a graceful but powerful nature to the swing of her hips. He sits up straighter as she drifts into the shadows footstep by footstep, flexes his fingers, his hands already aching to clutch at the ample curves of her waist, her bum, her thighs.
He's told himself he wouldn't do this again, but ah, fuck, here he is, about to take her into his bed, his heart, again.
It's been this way for some time now, this...arrangement they have. He's known Sonya for the better part of two years, much of the beginning of which they'd spent as acquaintances. She was part of a greater circle of mates from work. For a while, she was just Sonya, the wallflower of the lot with this quiet intensity he hadn't fully noticed until one night that, somehow, painted her in another light.
He can't even recall what caused the switch. He'd looked at her across the pub where they were gathered with that circle of mates and it was like a light flickered on—a spark, and suddenly, Sonya Williams, this woman he barely knew, was the woman he found himself wanting to spend a little more time with. For the first time in well over a year, he'd found himself fancying someone.
Sonya, however, quiet as she was, had never been close enough to him to even so much as allude to taking an interest in him. So even as Liam inserted himself into her life and conversations a bit more when the gang gathered together for drinks or celebration, he found himself unable to risk their budding friendship and settled for subtle pining instead, watching as she began a tumultuous relationship with a man called Brandon that ended after several months. Sonya's heart was crushed to bits.
Liam spent a lot of evenings with her after that, queuing up Netflix while Sonya curled into his side on his sofa, her head on his shoulder. It was strange, the closeness between them that came on quick—he still didn't know her well, not like some of his other mates, but they'd become more than acquaintances, familiar and kind to one another, and his crush on her dialed down as a friendship began to develop. They'd struck up a conversation about her relationship with Brandon one evening, Sonya desperate for a listening ear as she tried to sort through what went wrong so she could put it behind her, and with the way his last serious relationship had ended on a rather sour note, Liam understood the importance of having a shoulder to lean on and had willingly offered his.
One particular night, while Sonya was on the mend, there'd been quite a bit of wine involved and it led to Sonya sobbing through the ending credits of a romantic comedy while Liam reached over to give her arm a comforting stroke, fingertips ghosting her skin. And then Sonya's gaze washed over him, and his breathing was labored as her hand fell upon his thigh. And then she was straddled across his lap, brown eyes boring into his. And then they were all but fucking with their clothes on, Sonya writhing in his lap as he cupped her face and kissed her full lips while she wound her hips down towards his, a torturous grind that made Liam come in his pants.
It'd been awkward afterward, a silence that seemed to stretch endless as the horizon as she slid from atop his thighs to sit beside him on the sofa. There was more silence and Liam thought he might die from humiliation when Sonya finally broke the tension, clearing her throat and mumbling something about it being late. Then, she gathered her things, patted Fletcher on the head by the door, and left without another word.
But the sounds of her heavy breathing, her moans, echoed in Liam's mind for many days.
He didn't see her again for about a fortnight or so, until they'd run into one another at Caruthers. He'd bumped into Sonya at the counter, as she finished her order and he stepped up to place his. He should've placed her, the long twists her hair was styled in at the time as familiar to him as breathing, but he started a bit as she turned and their eyes met.
Her eyes were wide, a mirror image of his own, he'd wagered, and she pressed her lips together for a long moment, her eyes searching his face, before greeting him. "Hello, Liam."
"Hello yourself," Liam had replied, the response sounding as daft to his ear as he imagined it must've sounded to Sonya. Things had been so easy between them, but one session of dry-humping in his flat had made them unable to speak to one another. "How are you?"
Sonya opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it and clamped it shut. She motioned behind herself, towards the counter, and finally said, "Buy you a cup and we'll chat?"
Liam had agreed, and they'd sat at that favorite little table of his in the corner and had a chat. About that night—she'd been vulnerable, he'd provided her comfort, it had happened, but it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't even sex, not really. They could get past it, right? Couldn't they still be friends?
The questions danced across the hills and valleys of Liam's thoughts, twining themselves around the wiring of his mind until he convinced himself that yes, they could get past it. They could still be friends. Even as Sonya relayed to him that she'd decided to try dating again, he shrugged off the uneasy feeling that began to settle in the pit of his stomach.
Stupid, that. He'd moved past it, feeling something for Sonya. Sonya, his mate.
Sonya, his mate, who, after a rather disastrous first date with some wanker called Jeffrey, rung him and asked him to meet her at Caruthers to grab a drink, then walk to his flat to debrief. Liam had laughed until his belly hurt as she recounted the evening's less-than-satisfactory events that ended with a kiss she hadn't wanted nor enjoyed once she'd been subjected to it. Lips like a fish, she'd said, though she'd wagered that even a fish could kiss better than poor Jeffrey.
Sonya, his mate, who leaned in during a pause in their conversation as they sat on his sofa, her eyes dancing between his eyes and his lips. Sonya, his mate, who allowed him to close the remaining space and press his mouth to hers. Sonya, his mate, whose quiet intensity became less quiet and more intense as she crawled into his lap again and snogged him senseless, until he scooped her up and carried her to his bedroom and made her come—this time while inside her, without their clothing on.
And thus began the cycle, one Liam's come to know well—takes almost a strange sort of comfort in its consistent routine, in fact. Sonya puts herself out there, it crashes and burns. She rings him in need of company, they meet up and she follows him back to his flat. She lets him shag her brains out, then they go back to pretending there's nothing more than an easy-going friendship between them.
As if the way they fuck and then disengage for a week, a fortnight, a month, is rational behavior between two people claiming to be friends. As if Liam isn't well-versed in the language of her body and the birthmark on her hip that he traces with his tongue every time he has the chance to part her thighs. As if she hasn't acquainted herself with his cock and his kinks so well that she's figured out how to give him a blow-job that has him coming in her mouth in five minutes flat.
As if this stupid, stupid dance they've engaged themselves in isn't destined to fuck Liam up far more than he'll readily admit.
The shadows cast across the expanse of his bedroom play a game with Liam's mind as they dance across the planes of Sonya's deep brown skin, a stark contrast to his pale hands when they're finally granted a chance to grasp at the curve of her waist. Liam thumbs at the elastic waistband of her lacy knickers and thinks about leaning in, dragging them down with his teeth, dropping to his knees while she spreads her thighs for him and using his tongue to bring her to climax right there at the foot of the bed, with one of her legs hooked over his shoulder, while they're both bathed in moonlight.
It's been about a month since the last time she rung him, and he's craved her intensely since.
There was a time, when this had first become a habit between them, that Liam tried to date. He slept with other women, on-and-off, chasing after the high that came every time Sonya made him climax. But after a while, he began to realize it made him feel a bit empty. After a while, he began to realize that the only woman he really wanted to sleep with, the only woman who plagued his thoughts, was Sonya.
That realization was bloody terrifying.
Liam has never been one to let himself need anyone the way he's found himself needing Sonya—hell, even Fletcher's grown attached, having taken a liking to her presence far quicker than any other woman Liam's brought into their home. The time that stretches between her calls has begun to wear him thin, and the irrational jealousy that clouds his judgment every time he has to endure another story of her latest attempt at dating a man who isn't him is, well, absolutely maddening.
Back and forth, back and forth, they swing like a pendulum, and Liam is sick with desire now—for her body, yes, but also the one thing he reckons he'll never gain if they continue to carry on like this:
Her heart.
Being with Sonya, in this space, is so fucking easy. They don't have to get personal, even though the sex—recurrent, habitual sex—is intimate and begs for personal. It's easy, in the shadows, where he can pretend she won't leave him before the night's end, that she'll stay through the night simply because he asks, because in the haze of moonlight there's an air of deception that whispers to him, says, there's no fear in asking.
He trails a hand up from her hip, grazes her side, enjoys the way she trembles before he reaches around for the clasp of her bra and unfastens it. As it drops to the floor, he imagines her undergarments in a spare drawer in his dresser, her clothing in his closet, her toothbrush beside his in the cup on the sink. Her coming home to his place after work some nights, or staying over on the weekends—a visit longer than the meager hours she spends with him now, with the lights off, with her walls up. Getting to know her little quirks beyond the snippets she shares in conversation or the sounds she makes when she comes. He wants more. Stupid, probably, to want more when he's unsure of how to read her feelings towards him, but he wants more. He can't help himself.
"You all right?" Sonya asks suddenly, piercing through Liam's contemplation.
He blinks and looks up, into her eyes, and studies her expression with furrowed brows, his thumb sliding along the juncture between her pelvis and thigh. "Fine. Why?"
Sonya shrugs, reaching up to push her fingers through his hair, damp and wavy from the snow. It's rather affectionate, her touch in his hair—the only time she's ever had hands in his hair is when he's had his head between her thighs—and Liam fights the urge to let his eyes droop.
"Just a look you've got," she says, "like your mind's elsewhere." She arches both brows at him in question. "You good?"
Liam nods his head slowly, refusing to give himself away, and slides both hands to rest in the curve of her back. Then, he pulls her closer, into the space between his thighs. Tilting his chin upward, he stretches his neck to swirl his tongue around her nipple, then he manages a smile. "Sonya."
It's soft, the way he says her name. The sigh that comes from her mouth as he teases her breast again is softer.
"Hmm?"
"Kiss me."
She gazes back at him for a long moment, then fulfills his request, leaning down to meet his mouth. Satisfied, he eases her into his lap, kisses her good and unhurried, until they're both breathless and his arousal is obvious beneath the weight of her arse, his cock thickening in his lap, and she's tugging at the waistband of his joggers.
"Undress," she says, her voice hoarse.
It's Liam's turn to oblige as she climbs off of him. He stands, yanks his shirt over his head. Pulls down his trousers and his pants in one go. Kicks them off his ankles before hooking his thumbs in the waistband of her knickers and tugging them down.
Both of them, naked now. Nothing between them.
Well, nothing except a heft of feelings weighing heavily on Liam's mind and heart, but he'd rather not get into that now.
Besides, there's no time for it, with the way Sonya lowers herself to her knees and knocks the wind out of his lungs when she takes him in her hand without warning. She thumbs at the head of his prick, eyes cast upward towards him all the while, and strokes him until he's fully hard, then she takes him into her mouth.
It's—Jesus Christ, it's more than he can stand, the slide of her tongue along his erection, the graze of her teeth, the warmth of her hand and mouth around him. He gathers the hair falling into her face together in his hand while he places the other atop the mattress to brace himself, groaning as she works the length of his shaft with her tongue and hollowed cheeks. It seems she's determined to make his knees buckle in an earth-shattering orgasm but he pulls her up before she does, muffles her complaints with a hard, desperate kiss before he pulls her into the bed with him.
Liam is always waiting, but he doesn't wait now. He doesn't wait to lay her down, to part her pretty thighs and return the favor with his tongue until her hips are bucking up against his mouth. He doesn't wait to slick the condom on, to help her climb astride, to slide up between and thrust inside her and make her moan and whimper—to fill her up, over and over until she's crying out his name, his mouth crushed against hers to muffle the sound, his hand curled around the back of her neck, her nails in his back. He doesn't wait for her to make the full come-down before he's flipped her over to lie beneath him, pushing back inside and coaxing her into another orgasm. The second one comes quick, and he comes, too, sweaty and spent as they both collapse against the mattress.
The quiet sets in afterward. Liam dreads this part. Many times, the words to ask her to stay have tingled on the tip his tongue, but he knows the weight of implication if he says them, if she does stay—that this back-and-forth means more than both of them are playing at. That he'd be admitting he wants more than her body on the nights when she's willing to lend it to him. It would make things...real. And while the more Liam thinks about it, the more he wants it, it's not entirely clear if Sonya does.
Breathing heavily, Liam pulls out, discards the condom, and returns to the mattress again, on his back, fumbling with the covers and wrestling with his thoughts while he waits for Sonya to do the inevitable. He's watched this film play out over and over, knows the upcoming scene by heart. He waits for her weight to leave the mattress as soon as his eyes have grown heavy, listening as she shuffles around in the darkness of his bedroom to pull on her clothes. Then comes the easing open of his bedroom door before it's pulled shut, and the distant sound of the door to his flat opening and closing follows. Into his bed and out she climbs, another hit to his ego as she takes yet another piece of him when she goes, like a thief in the night.
The only things Liam wishes she'd steal is more time. More kisses. His heart, perhaps, but quietly, over time and without either of them fully realizing, he's already begun giving her that.
After several moments of too-much-silence, Liam allows himself to spare a glance her way and is surprised to find her eyes waiting for him in the dark. Passing headlights beyond his window offer a burst of sudden light, and in her eyes, he finds a look he's not quite sure he's seen before.
It's unsettling, but oddly comforting all at the same time, and there's a surge of confidence—of courage—that settles upon him when the night gives way to darkness again. Before he loses his nerve, he moves closer and lets her name and his desire dance right off the tip of his tongue.
"Sonya."
Her eyes seem to answer before her mouth does. "Yes?"
On an exhale, he lays his heart out in one word. "Stay."
He's met with silence. In the dark, it's hard to make out the expression molding her beautiful features, and the quiet makes him nervous, so he begins to ramble. "Only if you want. I mean, I know you...you probably have to go, and I can call you a taxi, if you'd like. Whatever you fancy. Stay. Or don't stay. But I—what I want is—"
"Liam." Sonya closes the remaining space between them, presses her mouth to his, and any remaining words on his tongue are effectively swallowed.
Her body tangles with his own as the kiss deepens, and Liam sighs into her mouth as he wraps his arms around her, fingertips clutching at the curve of her spine.
"I'll stay," she breathes, when their mouths finally part, and the thrill that floods Liam's veins makes him delirious with pleasure.
Trying to play it cool, he nods and kisses her again. "Okay." A pause, then another kiss. "Good."
As he continues to pepper light kisses to Sonya's mouth, enjoying the way her body feels against his with no barriers between them, she murmurs against his lips, "What the hell are we doing?"
Liam pulls back to meet her eyes. Hers are focused and questioning, and all he can offer her, right now, without scaring the shit out of both her and himself, is a shrug. "Fuck if I know," he replies. "Just go with it, yeah?"
Sonya nods slowly and closes the distance between their mouths again, lets him kiss her breathless, until exhaustion pulls them both under.
*
In the morning, Liam greets sunrise with empty arms.
It takes him a long moment to process it, his mind and his eyes both heavy with sleep, but then the loss of her socks him square in the chest, and Liam grimaces. Across the room, his bedroom door has been pulled closed. Beside him, the bed is cold, feels as if it has been for a while, and as the weight of truth sinks into Liam's entire being, he groans and pushes the bedsheets off, crawls from the mattress and trudges towards the loo.
A shower revives him, if only marginally, and as he stares at his reflection in the mirror while brushing his teeth, he frowns around the toothbrush in his mouth, feeling foolish. He'd asked her to stay, she'd said she would, and he'd stupidly believed her. He could hear the uncertainty that trembled in her voice when she asked him that question—"What the hell are we doing?"—and still he held onto the hope that she'd remain in his bed until morning. Grasped at that wafer-thin chance with desperate fingertips, only to be disappointed.
At his first request of a stay for longer than it took the pair of them to carry out their usual coital dance, she bailed, and the other question that has been nagging at Liam's mind—if what he's feeling, if what's growing inside him, bigger than friendship and sex, is reciprocated—has been answered.
He doesn't like the answer very much.
Brows pulled together, mouth still set in a disheartened frown, Liam rinses his mouth, then trims up his beard and finishes the rest of his morning routine, the splash of cold water on his face that he saves for last providing a more sobering effect than usual.
Solemnly, he rummages through the basket of clothes saved for this weekend's wash in the corner of his room, pulls a pair of joggers and a t-shirt from the top and gives them a half-hearted sniff before pulling them on. Then, he pads his way towards his closed bedroom door, until...wait—is that—?
Liam stops in his tracks, the sound of a percolator greeting his ears, and the smell of coffee follows.
With furrowed brows, Liam opens the door and steps through, makes his way to the kitchen, and the sight makes him stop again.
Leaned against his counter, next to a busy coffee maker, is Sonya.
Her back is to him, her hip leaned against the countertop. She's draped in one of his long t-shirts, warm brown legs long and lovely beneath the hem that barely covers her bum. He smiles as Fletcher comes clattering into view, his little nails making a ruckus on the floor as Sonya drops to a crouch to greet him, patting his head while he cranes his neck to lick at her wrist.
Then, Fletcher looks Liam's way and offers a bark, his way of saying good morning.
Sonya's eyes follow.
Liam doesn't know what to say at first. He's overwhelmed by the sight of her in his kitchen, as if he's never seen her in here before, as they made popcorn or popped the cork off a bottle of wine (or two) for a Netflix marathon back when she was freshly broken-hearted after things ended with Brandon. It hasn't been that way between them in a while. After that first night of crossing the line, the most Liam's seen of Sonya in his flat has been on his sofa or in his bedroom, under the cover of shadows, and seeing her now in his kitchen in broad daylight, feels...he can't describe it, exactly. Right. It just feels right.
"Good morning," Sonya finally says, straining to be heard over the sound of the percolator finishing its job, loud and boisterous in its announcement that the coffee has finished brewing.
"I thought you left," is Liam's reply, which is hardly an appropriate response to someone's "Good morning," but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. He thought she left, spent the first half hour of his morning wallowing in self-pity, and she was in his kitchen all along.
"I did, actually," Sonya says, and confusion sets a deep crease in Liam's forehead until she clarifies. "Walked to the petrol station around the corner. Couldn't sleep. Purchased some coffee and filters after I dragged this thing out from your cupboard and realized you had none."
It's now that she pats the top of the coffee maker affectionately—the coffee maker that once belonged to Liam's former flatmate, Ritchie. Ritchie left it behind when he moved to Essex after accepting a job in Harlow, and when Liam, a loyal customer to Caruthers and embarrassingly quite shit at brewing his own coffee, moved into his new flat, he'd stowed it away without a second thought.
It seems, however, that Sonya has found it and dragged it back into the light and Liam's thoughts, and shit, right now coffee sounds good, coffee smells good. He aches to pour a cup.
But maybe he aches for something a bit more.
Liam takes slow steps towards Sonya, who waits for him beside the counter, frozen in place. As he closes in, Liam doesn't know what do with his hands—well, he knows what he wants to do: he wants to clutch at her hip with one, curl the other around the back of her neck, drag her in for a sweet good morning kiss that never ends.
It's absurd, how seeing her in his kitchen like this has made it easier to admit what he wants to himself—he wants her. In the mornings. Afternoons. Late nights. He can't stomach another night having to recap her latest date, knowing it wasn't with him. He wants to feel worthy of more than just her body—he wants her heart and her mind and her laughter and the look in her eyes that seems to settle him, steady him, level him, every time.
Sonya is a quiet storm, all right—quiet in the way she moved in, a storm in the way she overtook his thoughts and his senses with commanding presence, all without warning. He never saw her coming.
He doesn't stand a chance now.
Sonya's eyes are rich and brown in the morning sun that fills his kitchen with light. The warmth in them is matched by the soft smile that plays at her lips while Fletcher barks for attention down by her ankles.
"Oi, hush, you," Liam says, directing the comment at Fletcher, who barks again before Liam shoots him a stern look a father might give his son, then shoos him away with a hand. "Give us a moment, Fletch."
Sonya laughs as Fletcher barks and barks and barks in protest, but eventually gives in, flattens his little nub of a tail and spins around to run off in the direction of Liam's bedroom—to burrow into the sheets on his unmade bed, Liam would wager, as he often does on the mornings when Liam isn't quick enough to pull the covers up.
With Fletcher gone, there are no more distractions. Nothing between them to offer a buffer. Liam, still trying to figure out what to do with his hands, finally shoves them into the pockets of his joggers and picks incessantly at the lint lining the inner seam.
Sonya tugs at the hem of the t-shirt she wears, fingernails adorning a sparkly, chipped blue varnish that pops against the white of the shirt.
A memory flashes through Liam's mind, of those sparkly, chipped blue fingernails clutching at his back, and he can feel his eyes glaze over. Jesus. He'll never tire of it, of sleeping with Sonya. But it strikes him fully now, that his heart is as open to her as his door, and sleeping with her just isn't enough anymore.
Sonya's question flashes through his mind again. What the hell are we doing?
Standing close, Liam thinks, but not close enough. He takes another step forward.
Sonya wrings her hands tighter in the hem of the t-shirt, further exposing her thighs.
Liam's pulse races. He steps forward again.
"Do you want coffee?" Sonya asks, her eyes on his for a moment before skittering away as she turns towards the cupboard, pulling open a few doors until she finds the cabinet that houses Liam's large collection of mugs. She brings down two—a white one with Father Christmas wrapped in colorful Christmas lights (he received it in a gift exchange one year), the other plain and black, with a chipped handle—and sets them on the countertop, then moves to reach for the coffee pot.
"Yes." Right, then. Time to stop fucking around. Liam's feet pull him towards her, like opposite poles of a set of magnets, and he's practically tripping over his tongue as he sputters out, "And I-I want you."
Sonya's hand halts midair, hovers, then settles down upon the countertop. She presses both hands to the surface, smooths them across, and Liam watches as her shoulders hunch with her slow intake of breath, then lower on her just-as-lengthy exhale.
Behind her, Liam fidgets and fumbles to find the words to say next, his feet getting tangled in the hem of his too-long joggers as he tries to close the distance between them completely. He reads her posture—the tension in her limbs, the way she won't turn around to look at him. Her body language says he's already mucked this up royally, but hell, may as well go down in a chariot of fire, yeah?
"I don't know what we're doing," he says, the words tumbling out so fast they're practically on top of one another—hardly a decipherable statement at all—but he's laying down all his cards on the table now. "I don't know what this is, Sonya, but I know that I—I want you. And not just for—well. I want you. I think—I'm sure—I have for a while now."
Liam's eyes drop to his feet, and he's digging for the patches of lint lining his pockets again as the quiet settles thick and heavy between them. He can't think of anything else to say, the words he's managed to rustle up—ineloquent as they are—leaving him feeling raw and exposed enough as it is.
"Anyway," he says, after what feels like an eternity with no response, "I'll take that coffee."
There's a chorus of sounds that follows: the open and close of the refrigerator door, the pouring of coffee, a drawer opening, sugar being shuffled about in its container, the clanking of a spoon against the ceramic of a mug. When Liam dares to chance a look upward, Sonya's back is still to him. She's busied herself with stirring sugar into the cup of coffee sat on the countertop before her, and Liam watches with attentive eyes as she screws off the top on the carton of half and half sat beside the mug, serves up a heavy-handed pour that turns the coffee from the shade of Sonya's deep brown eyes to a soft, milky brown.
Just the way Liam likes it.
Liam feels his brows pull together as she turns to face him, the mug of coffee cradled in her hands. She steps close, offers it to him, watches him take a sip.
His eyes flutter closed in delight, then open again to find hers. It's perfect.
Liam lets the coffee burn a path through his chest, pleasant and warm, and studies the warmth he finds in Sonya's eyes, too. Unexpected and quiet, just like her.
She slides the mug from his hands. Sets it on the countertop. Closes the space between them again. Curls both arms around his neck, making the shirt she's wearing ride up. Bites at her bottom lip as Liam's hands settle upon her waist. She looks into his eyes for a moment. Then, unmistakably, hers fall to gaze upon his lips.
When her mouth meets his, Liam lets out a satisfied groan and chases after her tongue when she pulls back to whisper against his lips, "I want you, too."
"Sonya," he whispers back, catching her mouth in another kiss, then taking her bottom lip between his teeth. He smiles, enjoys the laughter in her voice when she's pulled herself free.
"Liam," Sonya mumbles against his mouth, her breathing heavier now.
"Stay?" He pulls back, searches her face. Reaches up a hand to glide fingers against the edge of her jaw. "Stay, please. As long as you like. We can talk, sort ourselves out. I'll make you breakfast."
A pause. Like almost always, he waits.
"You have bacon?" Sonya inquires, a comical arch to her brow that makes Liam chuckle.
He nods, gathers her up in his arms to pull her close again. "I have bacon."
"And eggs?"
"I did my shopping yesterday. There's eggs."
"Bread for toast?"
"An easy one to satisfy, you." He chuckles again, presses a kiss to her nose, the purest kiss they've ever shared. "Yes, bread for toast."
"We could fuck this up," she says suddenly, deviating from the topic of breakfast towards the issue that hangs over them like a cloud. "Making more of this. Of us."
To say that Liam is not terrified of the same would be an outright lie. Both his and Sonya's track records with dating are dismal, a how-to guide on taking a chance on someone and coming out worse than you went in. It's the reason their arrangement worked so well, or so they'd convinced themselves—it was enough for them, reaping the physical benefits without those troublesome hearts getting in the way.
Both have been playing the fool, long aware but in denial of the fact that their hearts were in the way all along.
"We could," Liam agrees. They could, but maybe they won't. "Will you stay?"
Sonya sinks into him, until her body feels melded with his own—they're pressed so close that if he closes his eyes, he'll never be able to tell where her skin ends and his begins. The feeling is insatiable. Why didn't he say something sooner? Christ, they've been wasting so much bloody time dancing around one another. Dancing around their what-ifs and could-bes. But that's over now.
When he pulls back, just enough to take in her face, the sincerity in Sonya's eyes is unmistakable, and this time, he believes her entirely.
"Yes, Liam," she mumbles, leaning back in to kiss at his jaw, his chin, his lips. "Yes. Yes. I'll stay."