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She laughed again.
‘I wasn’t at my best either,’ she said. ‘Balloons terrify me and I had to contend with far too many of them for my liking.’
‘I didn’t know you were actually scared of them. I thought you were just embarrassed.’
‘Well, that too.’ Her smile mirrored his. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked down at the floor and back up to him. ‘I should get back to my friends.’
‘Sophie.’
‘Liam.’ She smiled.
But Liam looked serious, his eyes locked onto hers. ‘I don’t think I can be friends with you.’
She put the tray back down on the bar. She felt a knot in her stomach and a pain in her chest. ‘What?’ She frowned.
‘Wait. I didn’t mean … Let me start again.’ He was playing with his hands and looked down at them before looking back at Sophie and pushing his curls back off his face. ‘I don’t think I can just be friends with you.’
The butterflies in Sophie’s stomach woke up like an unexpected alarm had just gone off and she was suddenly very aware of the beating of her own heart. Words eluded her despite a part of her wanting to reach out and hold him and tell him she felt the same way. She might be scared, terrified in fact, to allow herself to feel something, to put herself at risk of losing something again. But it didn’t stop her from wanting him.
Liam leant forward and ran his thumb across her cheek.
‘I just want you to know that I’ll wait until you’re ready.’ He bit at his bottom lip again. ‘As long as it takes.’
Sophie’s heart lurched. It wasn’t over. Despite everything, Liam was telling her things were salvageable, that he’d wait until she was ready.
She reached up on her tiptoes and rested her hands on Liam’s shoulders before kissing him on the side of his mouth. She pulled back until Liam was in focus, trying to read his expression. Outside the two of them, Sophie could no longer hear the Christmas music or the raucous laughter of her friends and colleagues. The barman putting Liam’s drink down in front of him made Sophie fall back into the moment.
‘You’re not going to call him, are you?’ Liam looked down at the card that lay on the bar between them.
‘I have to get back to my friends.’ Sophie picked up her tray of drinks, smiled at Liam and turned to go, leaving Mike’s card on the bar behind her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sophie spent the next twenty-four hours basking in the glory of having judged a romantic social situation perfectly at the exact moment it had actually happened. She was pretty sure it had never happened to her before.
After her conversation with Liam at the bar, she had spent a pleasant evening chatting to her colleagues, who she quite liked, it turned out, and catching Liam’s eye across the room. Every time their eyes met, one of them would look away. It was an odd game, but Sophie enjoyed it. By the time she left the bar to go home, she was fairly sure she was in love.
At the end of the school day on Thursday, Sophie was still in a Liam-based daydream.
‘What is up with you?’ Kate asked. ‘You’ve been in an odd mood all day.’
‘Nothing,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m fine.’ This time, she didn’t want to share what had happened. She and Liam had a little secret of their own, and Sophie was enjoying keeping it that way.
‘Ooh, twelve o’clock,’ Kate said, jabbing Sophie in the arm and pointing across the playground. Sophie turned to see Liam walking across the yard.
‘Hi, Soph,’ he said. His lovely voice saying her name made her happy. She felt Kate move away as she turned to greet him.
‘Liam, hello.’
‘Cassie’s been telling me all about her new friend Jocelyn,’ he said, barely able to conceal his joy at this new revelation. Cassie ran up behind him, smiling.
‘Yes, well, Jocelyn’s a lovely girl and they seemed to be the best of friends by the end of yesterday,’ Sophie said, smiling at Cassie.
‘You helped me,’ Cassie said. She still looked timid and shy but with her hair tied back again there was something a little braver about her today; she seemed more open somehow.
‘Well, thank you. This is the happiest I’ve seen her in a long time.’ Liam looked down at his daughter. She returned his look with a smile. It was such a different reaction to the one Sophie had received only a few weeks earlier.
‘I didn’t do anything. Like I said to Cassie yesterday – Jocelyn is lucky to be friends with her.’ She added a conspiratorial wink in Cassie’s direction, and she giggled.
