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I look towards him in question when he goes silent, wondering if I had started another argument. I hope not after we have finally cleared the air between us.
I’m not sure what I expected to find when I face him, but it isn’t the hunger in his eyes as he looks at me. The strange sensation I’ve experienced a few times since his return resurfaces.
He is handsome, I can’t deny it, but the type of handsome you would think of an older man to be. He isn’t old by any means, but too old and too close to family for me to find him attractive; and yet the way he looks at me—not just now but in a few separate moments before this—makes me think that perhaps he doesn’t think of me as family in the same way that I do him.
It both surprises and creeps me out to think that he is looking at me with desire. He feels like an uncle, and yet the look he is surveying my way makes me question what I am truly seeing. Surely it isn’t what I think.
Ringing.
It turns out that it’s my phone chiming with a text that puts the odd moment to an end.
I grab my phone and stand, wanting distance from Liam and his uncomfortable gaze.
“Things got a little confusing for you there, didn’t they?” Confusing for me? Right. Of course this is being blamed on me.
I’m not confused. I’m creeped out.
I look at him, my eyebrows shot up, attitude I’m sure covering my face.
“Confusing for me?” I repeat. “And why would that be? What am I confused about?” The damn cheek on this man!
“I’m more of a man than that boyfriend of yours for su-“
“Don’t even bother, that’s bloody disgusting!” I exclaim, cutting him off before he has chance to say any more. I stand and walk away, heading back towards the house.
Just as I’m about to reach the kitchen door, he shouts over to me.
“Charlie!”
I begin to turn, though if he thinks I’m going back over there then he’s as crazy as every man around me makes out he is.
“It got confusing for me too.” He’s quiet now, but it confirms what I had already known or at the very least, suspected. The desire I sensed oozing from him wasn’t in my imagination; he really has changed and not for the better.
My mind can’t fathom that both the man that saved and the man now looking at me with eyes filled with hunger are the same. How could he save me from that torture and abuse and yet look at me with the eyes of a man wanting more than he should?
I can’t tell Dad how uncomfortable he makes me, but I also don’t want to be around him. I feel uneasy and vulnerable and I hate that.
I check my phone. Midnight. I seriously need some sleep.
Just as I go to drift off , my phone vibrates with a call from Alice.
"Hey, everything OK?" I ask as I wrap myself up and get comfortable.
"Yeah, I was just wondering if you wanted to come over soon. Kira's missing movie nights with you,” she says with a small laugh. I hear Kira, her sister, mumbling something in the background.
"I will soon. I feel like we've hardly seen each other lately,” I tell her glumly, realising how terrible of a friend I've been.
We used to see each other daily but lately I feel like my mind has been overrun with problems, Gray’s disappearance, and the unrelenting tension between Crow and I—and now, of course, the proposed marriage.
"Did you find anything out when you were doing your sneaking?"
"Nope, I got caught. If you ever need a spy, do not ask for my help. It will not end well." I laugh, listening as Alice and Kira begin bickering about something before she comes back to the phone.
"I don't think I'm ever having kids. I feel like Kira is enough to deal with for one lifetime." She sighs.
Alice and I talk for a while, her telling me the incessant gossip that she overhears at the Club and me informing her of the constant chaos that sits around me before we finally hang up and I very nearly pass out from exhaustion.
Fourteen
