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He held out his fist to her. She spoke in her best professional voice, “Well, Mr Masters, it has its place. But there are problems with it too. Relying on pornography for arousal in place of focussing on the person or people you’re with can be detrimental. It could create a block between partners, lessening the intimacy between them and reducing satisfaction with sexual encounters, especially if the impossibly high standards set in porn are to be believed.”
Liam scrunched up his face in mock sympathy and Adelaide’s gut sank. She’d left herself open for his next comment. “Aw, poor Addy. Can’t King satisfy you like those girls get satisfied in porn?”
“Shut up,” she warned, narrowing her eyes at him. Liam laughed and tugged on a half curl, watching it bounce as he grinned a devil-may-care smile. “Are you working today or are you just going to annoy me?”
“Eh.” He shrugged and meandered into the kitchen. “I was going to have a shake then do a bit. Want one?”
“Steak in a glass? No thanks.” The protein powders Liam added to his morning shakes kept him in shape—which Adelaide often appreciated as he sat at the table shirtless—but she wasn’t one to drink them.
“Mhmm.” He shrugged, and messed around in the kitchen, before placing a milkshake glass in front of her, complete with bamboo straw and a drizzle of what looked like caramel on top of the froth.
“Frozen mango, banana, a few macadamia nuts, low fat milk, and a dash of maple syrup—the real stuff. Nothing else added.”
She smiled, sure that it was one of those swoony shy smiles complete with cartoon-character-esque long eye-lashed blinks.
Adelaide appreciated the kind gesture more than he would know. She’d skipped breakfast and was starving, her stomach rumbling louder with each passing minute. But she was on a roll and was loath to interrupt her progress by ducking home to grab something to eat. He’d made her favourite too—mango and banana smoothies were a staple for her in summer. Liam had obviously noticed too, although she had no idea he’d even seen her drink one. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.” He kissed her forehead, and went back into the kitchen repeating the process, and adding scoops of protein powder before he turned on the blender. With glass filled to the brim, he slid into his seat, and opened his books to get started. The sound of pages turning, the scratching of his pencil against paper, and the click of the eraser against his calculator were the only sounds in the room apart from the tapping of her fingers against the keyboard. Adelaide finished her shake and moved to the kitchen to rinse the glass. She glanced up at Liam and her gut sank. He was worried. Sad, maybe. She wanted to smooth out the furrow in his brow and laugh with him until those turned-down lips were smiling again. She wanted to reach out and hold his hand. Tell him he wasn’t alone.
“Hey, you okay? Is everything all right?” she asked gently, giving him the opening to confide in her. He was a private person. He rarely shared things that were bothering him, but Adelaide suspected it was more a side effect of his parents’ parenting than of Liam wanting to put up walls. He was like a puppy dog. He wanted love and affection, and he beat himself up harder than anyone she knew if he thought he’d let down the people close to him. The final game of the season was still weighing on him, but this was something different. This was almost fear in his drawn expression and pursed lips.
When he registered the question, Liam snapped his eyes up to hers and slowly placed his mobile face down on the table. He nodded, a short, sharp movement of his head. “Yeah, s’all good,” he answered, a hitch in his voice.
She didn’t believe him for a second, especially not when the speed at which he was tapping his eraser topped pencil against his notebook had increased. Adelaide flicked her eyes down to his hand and she raised an eyebrow. “Okay, ’cause I believe that.” She sighed and went back to her seat, clasping her hands together on the table. “I understand if you don’t want to tell me. I really do. But I’m here if you do want to talk.”
“I’m just working out how many marks I need in the exam to pass my statistics class. But it’s all good. It looks like I should be sweet.” He flashed her the same fake-arse smile he gave to reporters when they asked him a ridiculous question, and Adelaide resisted the temptation to narrow her eyes at him. Liam may not have noticed her for the last decade or so, but she had memorized every expression and nuance. He was lying, but she wasn’t prepared to call him out on it, not when they were slowly moving from her being Eli’s little sister to Liam’s friend.
He looked down and flipped the page of his textbook. The glimpse that Adelaide got, showed it filled with formulas and paragraphs of text. It could have been written in a foreign language; actually, most of it was probably in Greek, which explained why, when Adelaide looked closer, she didn’t understand one iota of it.
Liam got to writing, the cute furrow between his brows deepening as his pencil scrawled across the page. Turning his phone over, he punched in something, wrote it down then flipped to the back of the book. Long, straight fingers scanned down the page until he found the answer he was looking for. He shifted back to his notebook and bit his lip as he dropped the pencil and rubbed his temples.
She asked, “Does it make sense? It looks complicated.”
“Oh, sure.” His voice came out at a higher pitch than normal again, and he cleared his throat before adding, “Yeah, I think I’ve got it. Statistics sucks, but it’s all logic. As long as you can follow the basic rules, it makes perfect sense.” He sounded too enthusiastic, too excited by it, but Adelaide had seen how hard Liam worked at his studies. She admired him. It was the off-season now, but he still worked out every day, he still had all the promotional obligations that went with keeping his sponsors happy, and, on top of all that, he managed a near full-time class load.
Adelaide rolled her eyes. “I’m just glad it’s you and not me. This stuff” —she pointed to her laptop and headphones—“is difficult, but to me it’s interesting. Statistics just sounds hard.” He made a rumbling noise of agreement as he closed the textbook in front of him, shunted everything to the side, and opened his laptop. Adelaide knew he had another assignment due soon, so even though she wasn’t convinced everything was 100 percent, she was glad he could focus on it.
Eleven
Liam
Three months later - September
F
inal marks for the semester were being posted that day. Liam knew that out of the three subjects he’d taken, he’d already passed one before submitting the final assessment. The second shouldn’t be a problem either. He’d contacted his professor and had a heart-to-heart with her, freaking out about the result. The prof had looked up his mark and assured him that while she couldn’t give an exact grade, he had most definitely passed. He wasn’t holding out hope for the third. Statistics had beaten him once again. For all the bullshit he’d told Adelaide a couple of months earlier about simply following the formula and reaching a logical conclusion, he neither knew how to follow the formula nor did any of the conclusions he came up with ever make any sense to him.
Results were always posted at 9:00 a.m. sharp. It was quarter past, and his phone had already vibrated with notifications. But Liam couldn’t bring himself to look. As long as he didn’t know the outcome, he still had some hope that he hadn’t done too badly.
He took a swig of beer. It was too early to be drinking, but whatever. He’d done nothing but sit in his backyard moping since the epic disaster that his final exam was. Being unable to answer two out of the five questions wasn’t a good start. It was a fit ending to a shit-tastic subject.
“Fuck it,” he mumbled and brought up the app on his phone. His gut sank when he saw his marks, the credit and distinction for the two other subjects he was studying outweighed by the blunt Fail written next to statistics. He needed to start thinking backup plans. He clearly wasn’t cut out for a business degree. Liam tossed his phone onto the table and chugged the rest of the bottle.
*****
The pounding of his head roused Liam from near unconsciousness. A pickaxe was being punched into his skull, right behind his eyes. The pain made his ears ring. He winced, his eyes still closed, not daring to open them in case the room was too bright. The pain spiked anyway. He unstuck his lips and tore his tongue away from the roof of his mouth, the putrid taste making him want to gag.
He couldn’t remember what he’d drunk the night before, but he did remember taking lick, sip, suck to a whole new level. As he peeked out from under his arm, testing the level of light in the room before he lifted it away from his eyes, he became aware of the heat surrounding him. Sweaty, stiff sheets were tangled under his sprawled-out body, and the skin on his abdomen stretched and pinched when he shifted his hips. It was about the only thing he could move. His legs were stretched wide, his sides pressed down.
