"Mm-hm," Nina says.
Liam is staring at the counter with the fixed intensity of a man who will not acknowledge what just happened. But the tips of his ears are red. This man who scans rooms like a threat map, blushing at the ears because I accidentally made a dirty joke in a coffee shop — something about that does something dangerous to my sternum.
"You moved in together pretty fast?" Britt asks.
"She needed help with the renovation." Liam's voice is level again. "I had availability."
"He had availability. You make it sound like I booked a contractor."
"You did ask me to fix the locks."
"After you told me they were insufficient. That's not romance, that's a compliance issue."
His mouth twitches. Visible. "The compliance issue was romantic."
Britt presses her hand against her chest. "You two are adorable."
We are not adorable. We are two people lying to a stranger in a coffee shop, and his forearm is warm under my hand, and I just called him my boyfriend without flinching, and he heard me say it, and his jaw went soft — not the tactical clench but something unguarded — and I didn't flinch.
Neither of us flinched.
I find him on the back porch at dusk.
He's in the Adirondack chair — the one with the cracked slat that I suspect will be mysteriously fixed by morning — and there's a paperback in his hands. He sees me through the screen door and does that thing. The fast motion. The book disappears— behind his back, under his thigh — like a teenager caught with contraband.
Too late. I saw the cover. Some kind of thriller.
"Was that a book?"
"No."
"It was absolutely a book."
"It was a field manual."
"Field manuals don't have embossed titles and a quote from Publishers Weekly."
His jaw ticks. His hand drifts toward the street — his tell. The jaw ticks, and he gets very interested in checking a perimeter that doesn't need checking.
I sit in the chair next to his. The evening air is warm. Somewhere down the block, someone is grilling.
The paperback reappears. Slowly. Like a truce. He opens it to a dog-eared page, and his other hand rests on the chair arm, and I can see the scar.
Thin. Pale against the tan of his skin. It runs along his left forearm from wrist to just past the elbow — not surgical, not clean enough. The quality of something that happened fast and healed slow.
My eyes trace it before I can stop them. He catches me looking. His hand doesn't move. He doesn't pull his sleeve down, doesn't angle his arm away. He holds still and lets me see it, and that stillness says more than any explanation would.
I don't ask. There are questions that belong to a real girlfriend, and I'm not that.
He reads faster than I expected — a hungry efficiency, like a man who doesn't get to do it often enough. Every few pages, his thumb smooths the corner before turning. Careful. Like the book is borrowed and he wants to return it in good condition.
"Good book?" I ask.
"Decent."
"High praise."
"The protagonist makes tactically unsound decisions."
