Catching Liam (Good Girls Don't) (13 page)

Damn Jess and her pseudo-medical student opinions. What I needed was for Liam to leave. I needed my parents to go. Jess and I could get through this on our own. We had before.

“Can you march?” Jess suggested.

“Tell him to go,” I told her quietly. “I don’t want him to see this.”

Jess looked up at Liam. He moved closer to us, but she shook her head. “She’s upset. I need her to calm down if I’m going to help her through this.”

Liam didn’t understand. “I’ll stay. I don’t want to leave her like this.”

He didn’t know what was going on, but something broke inside of me. All of this was inevitable since day one. Maybe if I had told him earlier, we wouldn’t be standing here now. Hell, he probably wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to witness an episode.

“Please go,” I said. I could barely move to look at him, but I saw the pain flash across his face as I spoke.

My dad put a hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the door. Liam glanced my direction, and my heart shattered. They shared a few quiet words, and then Liam walked out the door.

I knew he’d never walk back through it. It wasn’t worth it. I wouldn’t put him through this again.

My body started to shake, but I knew it wasn’t my body unfreezing. I was angry. At Tara. At myself. At Liam for finding out. At Liam for sticking around in the first place.

“Jills,” Jess whispered. “There’s a line on the floor. Imagine it. Move toward it.”

I tried, but I couldn’t will my muscles to respond. Furious tears rolled down my cheeks. I was broken. “Stop trying to fix me!”

“I’m not going to fix you,” Jess promised me. “We’re just going to take a step. Together. Remember how you lift your foot.”

I closed my eyes, Jess’s hands holding me steady. I imagined the muscles in my thigh. I visualized lifting them up. My left foot left the ground.

“Good. Now put it back down,” Jess coaxed.

I told my leg to step forward. I pictured my legs marching up and down. I counted the beats in my head, and my foot lurched forward. Another step came more naturally. With Jess’s help, I made it to the couch. I was scared to sit down. I didn’t want to freeze there.

“You can’t go this long without medications,” Tara said, standing over me. “Did you take any this afternoon?”

There was no point in telling her that I had taken my meds that morning or that the episode was probably brought on by our screaming match. This was one arena where Tara excelled at making me feel totally incapable of taking care of myself.

“Parkinson’s episodes can occur when a patient gets upset,” Jess lectured her.

“Don’t presume to tell me about this disease.”

“Then you know Jillian needs to stay calm, so that this can pass.” Jess was quiet and removed. Despite the fact that she had been helping me with this for the last two years, this was the first time she had to deal with anyone other than Cassie in the room. I couldn’t help being impressed by how smoothly and calmly she dealt with Tara. She was going to be an amazing doctor.

“Let’s give Jillian a chance to rest,” my dad suggested.

“I’m not leaving my daughter like this!”

“I have everything under control,” Jess said. She knew it was imperative that they leave if I was going to recover from the freezing episode.

“She needs to see a doctor,” Tara said. She wouldn’t budge, even as my father tugged at her hand.

“I’ll make an appointment tomorrow, Mom,” I promised her. I would have told her anything to get her to leave, and she probably knew it.

“I will take her, Tara.”

Tara hesitated, but she let my dad lead her toward the door.

“Call me.”

I managed a nod. There was no way I was calling her. Not after she basically called me a slut in front of Liam. My heart lurched and, for a second, it felt frozen, too. I tried to erase the look on his face, but I couldn’t. He knew something was seriously wrong with me now. I wouldn’t be able to write this off. He’d ignored it when I tried to hide my pill-popping, but it wouldn’t be long until he figured out that I was sick.

As soon as the door shut, the crying restarted.

“It’s okay, Jills.” Jess laid her head on my shoulder and rubbed my back in slow, reassuring strokes.

“He knows,” I croaked over my tears.

“And he’ll deal with it. You’ll deal with it together,” she said.

No, we wouldn’t. I didn’t tell Jess that though. I’d kept a lot from her about Liam’s and my relationship. She might have guessed that I loved him. But somehow the decision to let him go was even more personal. I couldn’t share this with her. Right now, it was my own private agony, and soon it would be his, when I could get up the guts to tell him it was over.

Within an hour, my body had relaxed enough for me to stand.

“You want to talk? Watch a movie?”

I shook my head. “I want to go to sleep.”

Jess followed me to my bedroom and insisted on helping me into the bed.

“Can you hand me my phone?” I asked her.

Jess gave it to me. “Tara?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

As soon as she shut the door, I texted Liam. The message was simple:

SORRY. BYE.

Then I shut off my phone and cried myself to sleep.

chapter twenty

Tara showed up on my doorstep on my seventh consecutive day of having my phone shut off. She stood so closely to the door that the only thing I could make out in the peephole were two eyes and an exaggerated nose. The last person I wanted to deal with was Tara, who started this whole mess in the first place. I was in favor of leaving the door bolted and chained, but Jess insisted on letting her in.

She stepped into the apartment and sniffed her nose as though she expected a foul stench to emanate from me. It was probably the stench of my inadequacy, or perhaps her face had merely frozen into a permanent mask of disappointment. She appraised me, her eyes still pinched together and her nose in the air.

“I expected to find a dead body in here,” she exclaimed in her most maternal voice—the one she brought out for traumatic occasions.

“That explains your face then,” I said before I could stop myself.

Tara shot me a frosty look that couldn’t quite break through the shell I’d been building up over the last few days. She was not amused. “Jillian, your phone has been going to voicemail for over a week.”

It had only been seven days, but who was counting?

“I probably need to charge it,” I said, shrugging my shoulders like this was no-big-deal.

“You promised to call me after your medications set in. It’s been over a week!” There was a slight tremor vibrating in her words as she spoke, but I dismissed it as more theatrics.

“I forgot. Things are normal.”

“Things are not normal. First, I catch you with
that boy
.”

I winced at the pure disgust that coated the words
that boy
.

“Then you yell at me!” she continued. “And it causes an off episode.”

As usual, Tara was more upset about my disrespect than my condition. She probably thought my Parkinson’s could be cured by good behavior. After all, if I hadn’t yelled at her, the episode would never have happened, according to Dr. Tara.

“I think that boy is a bad influence on you,” Tara said.

Across the room, Jess froze in her tracks. She’d been tiptoeing around the topic of Liam all week long. She hadn’t once asked me if I’d called him, and she knew damn well that I hadn’t left the apartment. I was counting on the sympathy card when it came to classes. Not that I cared one way or another. But Tara’s insistence on bringing up
that boy
cracked through the careful numb feeling I’d cultivated with a diet of bad take-out and reality television—the two most soul-crushing things in existence. I pushed past her into the kitchen and grabbed a glass of water. I drank it in two long gulps, focusing on the smooth chill as it washed down the tears trying to climb up my throat.

“I have class,” I lied to her as I set the glass on the counter. I had no intention of going to class, but she didn’t need to know that. Behind her, Jess shook her head at me.

“Nice try, Jillian. It’s Sunday.”

Shit, this was the danger of watching DVR’ed shows. I no longer knew what day of the week it was.

“And since I suspected that you were too busy applying your butt to the couch instead of going to class or seeing the doctor,” she continued, “I’ll be sleeping on your couch for the week.”

I pinched the skin of my arm hard. It stung so badly that tears pooled in my eyes.

“What are you doing? Are you having an attack?” she asked in a panicked voice.

“I thought maybe I was in a waking nightmare.”

Tara glowered at me and held out her palm. “Keys?”

“Keys?” I repeated. “Why?”

“Because I’m going to the car to get my bag, and I wouldn’t put it past you to lock me out and take Jess hostage,” she said in an even tone.

She had me there. It would have been an excellent plan if I had thought of it first, and if she hadn’t already foiled it. Further proof that Tara was an evil genius intent on my annihilation.

As soon as she was out the door, I rounded on Jess. “Tell her she can’t stay.”

“She’s your mom and besides that…” Jess trailed off.

“Besides that?” I prompted.

“You can’t stay on the couch forever.”

Jess’s betrayal stunned me. She had brought me ice cream and watched at least four hours of
The Vampire Diaries
with me, but now she was going to side with Tara.

“Fine.” I stomped off to my bedroom. By the time that I emerged, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, Tara had laid out her cosmetic and skin care routine on the bathroom counter.

“I’m going out,” I called, beelining for the door.

“Hold on, I’ll come with you,” Tara answered.

I hurried out the door and ran down the stairs before she could catch up with me. Since Tara hadn’t attended Olympic State, I took a back way toward campus that she couldn’t possibly know about.

Winter had descended on the small town in record time. Whereas last week, the air had a crisp bite to it, today the sun was totally absent in the gray sky. You could feel winter here like the soreness before the bloom of a bruise appeared. It never got horribly cold, but the days grew shorter and the darkness stretched longer, and then there was the near-constant spitting rain. I pulled my hoodie over my head and stuffed my hands into my pockets as the mist hit my skin. I didn’t bother to wipe it away; instead it collected in a thin layer of cool wetness.

It was the closest I’d come to crying since the night I broke things off with Liam. Part of me hoped that the moisture clinging to my face would unjam the anger and bitterness that sat like a weight on my chest.

The campus was dead except for a steady trickle of students entering and exiting the library. I decided a cup of coffee was worth the risk of running into a professor, so I followed my backpack-laden peers inside and joined the queue of students waiting for a caffeine fix. The line moved at the speed of smell, and I tapped my foot in a nervous beat on the floor.

How long would Tara be staying? Surely, I could get Dad to call her back to California, but my mother was stubborn. If she had fixed her mind on sticking around, no one was going to talk her out of it.

Her presence meant no late television or outings to Garrett’s. She would police what I ate and check my medication bottles constantly. There was a reason I hadn’t bothered going home last summer, choosing instead to work at a coffee shop downtown. Being home was like finding myself in a dystopian novel, and I suspected that the end to that story included me setting fire to civilization.

I didn’t say it was a happy dystopian novel.

Tara and I needed a couple of hundred miles between us, but she couldn’t see that.

“Jillian!”

I looked up to see Trevor cradling two coffees. We stared at each other, both of us trying to figure out what to say to one another without the buffer of Cassie between us.

“Hey!” I tried to sound enthusiastic, but it came out all wrong. Too high-pitched. Too loud. I’d forgotten how to communicate with the rest of my species.

“I was studying,” he said. He cast a glance, checking to see who was around him, like this was top-secret information.

“The library is a good place for that.” And now I was stating totally obvious facts, although to be fair, Trevor started it.

Also I was apparently twelve years old again.

“Are you with Cassie?” I asked, pointing to the two cups.

Trevor shook his head quickly. “No, um, study group.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. He acted like this was the first time he had set foot in this library. “Well, as you were.”

Even my joking voice sounded morose.

“I’ll see you later?” Somehow he twisted the farewell into a question.

“Sure.” I watched as he strode away. Cassie had weird taste—namely she liked guys whose attention came in the form of material affection. Something that had never really suited me. She wasn’t a gold-digger. It was more like she needed the promise that they would take care of her, and she found the gifts reassuring. And Trevor had fit that bill so perfectly that she’d gone from vacillating between a small trove of boys she’d collected to his girlfriend almost overnight.

But Trevor wasn’t all bad, even if he was acting really oddly. An unpleasant thought clicked in my head, and I immediately jumped out of the line and headed in the direction he had taken. About a dozen small reservation-only study rooms peppered the perimeter of the stacks, and I peeked into each looking for his curly blonde hair. By the time I reached the final room, I sank back against the wall. Apparently, I wasn’t just emotionally dead anymore, I was also paranoid.

The library was a large place with two floors that stretched across the quad. He could be anywhere in here. Furthermore, he said study group, not study room. Maybe I was just a horrible person who wanted to ruin other people’s happily ever afters.

When I got back to the apartment—because I honestly couldn’t think of anywhere else to go—I was coffeeless and cranky. Tara was sitting at the kitchen bar, nursing a generous glass of white wine.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled when her sharp eyes met mine.

“I’m not here to ruin your life,” Tara said, taking a sip. “I’m not going to escort you around campus and make sure you get to class.”

I eyed her suspiciously, wondering if Jess had worked some of her parental magic on her. Tara had been singing a different tune a few hours ago. “Then why are you here?”

“Because I was worried about my daughter,” Tara admitted in a soft voice. “Ever since you were diagnosed, you’ve stayed away from me.”

My mother had the bedside manner of a
Game of Thrones
character. As a kid, I always went to school when I felt sick because the school nurse would stroke my forehead and give me juice. “I’ve got this under control.”

She looked at me and shook her head. “Maybe you do, and maybe I’m overreacting. Last Sunday was…rough on all of us. But you really scared me.”

I’d never heard her admit to being afraid in her life. I had assumed that emotion was beneath her, but as her gaze lingered on me, I could see the terror in her eyes. I’d stayed away from home since my early-onset Parkinson’s diagnosis because I didn’t want to burden her, but I’d never considered that for Tara I’d merely cut her out of my life.

Honestly, in a way, I had done just that. She’d taught me not to depend on anyone else from a young age, and I’d assumed that I couldn’t depend on her.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” I told her. “I didn’t take my pills on time and I was feeling stressed out.”

I left out that our fight had brought on my anxiety that night. This was the closest we’d come to talking in as long as I could remember, so I didn’t want to jinx it.

“You’re distracted by that boy.” The disgust was absent from her voice this time, instead her eyes sparkled a little as she said it, as though she was inviting me to dish on my relationship with Liam.

I swallowed against the lump jammed in my throat. “That won’t be a problem anymore.”

“It’s my fault,” Tara said, tapping her wine glass. “He was nice, but I lost it when I found you in that bathroom. I guess sometimes I still see you as my little girl, but regardless, I shouldn’t have embarrassed you like that.”

“I sort of embarrassed myself,” I admitted.

Tara leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “Your father and I have screwed in bathrooms, too.”

I covered my ears and shook my head. “Maybe we should draw the line at our sex lives?” I suggested.

“Fair enough.” She swallowed the last bit of her chardonnay. “But love lives are another story.”

“I don’t have a love life,” I said with a shrug. “Never have.”

Tara snorted and stood up from the bar stool. “I saw the way he looked at you.”

“And how was that?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“Like you hung the moon.”

I rolled my eyes at her, but she simply smiled and headed toward the bathroom to begin her hour-long skin care ritual, leaving me alone with memory of Liam’s eyes on mine.

The Communications Department was deserted on Monday by the time I dragged myself across campus to face Markson. I’d hidden in my room for the better part of a week, but now I had to deal with things. My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway, and for a second, I was sure this was exactly how a death-row inmate felt. Dead man walking indeed. I needed Markson’s class to stay at full-time status with the university. But there was no way I could handle working with Liam after what happened last weekend.

Markson’s door was open, so I peeked my head in, half of me hoping he wouldn’t be there. No such luck. His office, if you could call it that, was a small desk crammed into a room the size of a supplies closet. Check that—supplies closets were probably bigger than this. He beckoned for me to come in, closing his laptop and settling back in his chair expectantly.

The only personal item in the room was a photograph of a large family, each person smiling, on a too-perfect beach. I looked more closely until I spotted him. Each member of the group shared Markson’s deep brown eyes and thick, oil-black hair. He was significantly less tanned than most of them though.

“My family,” he said.

“That’s not Olympic Falls,” I noted. The beaches around here were rugged, full of driftwood and craggy bluffs. The beach in Markson’s photo stretched into miles of white sand and clear water.

“They live in Puerto Vallerta,” he explained. “My mother’s side. My father grew up in Montana.”

“That sounds like a story,” I said.

“It is.” But he didn’t offer to tell it. “What can I help you with, Miss Nichols?”

I took a deep breath, ready to launch into a hundred reasons why I needed him to change my class partner. “I have a request.”

“I’m listening.” Markson folded his hands behind his head and waited.

It was strange to have someone who was only a few years older than me act with such authority. I’d gotten the impression from Jess that he was more laid-back, even funny. But then again, enough bad evaluations could change any professor’s approach to their interactions with students.

I needed to spit it out. “I’d like a new class partner.”