Chapter 19

ROWAN

Charles excuses me from my lunch duty. "No problem. I know Teo will help if I need extra hands. Just don't forget to be safe."

Maybe I'm as bad as Liam, jumping to a protective conclusion. "I'm one hundred percent safe with Liam." I've never been more certain.

Charles only smiles. "I meant, be safe if you're going anywhere you might actually need this." He taps my hard hat. "But that's very good to know about him."

The hat almost falls off when I run after Liam, slipping over my eyes when I duck under a barrier cordoning off the library hallway. Light spills through a window at its far end, spotlighting where Liam leans against a wall built from the same stone I'm reminded of each time I see him—and whenever I'm alone, to be honest. There really is something so substantial about him. Something incredibly strong and solid.

He must be having a good tinnitus day—he hears me coming.

Liam straightens and it's still surprising how such a small shift in his expression can make huge changes. He's on high alert, entirely focussed on me hurrying down the hallway towards him, so of course I almost stumble. My hat does fall. He catches it before it can strike floor tile gritty with evidence that Maisie was right about work inside the library already starting. He places the hat back on my head, ignoring my attempt to straighten it myself. "Look up."

I do, which means I catch the moment where he stops studying the fit and his gaze drops.

To me.

He lets out a small sound, and sure, I've got a musical vocab to rival the emotional one Charles threads through his classroom, but describing that not quite oh? This almost-sigh? I don't have words for Liam, full stop. I just know I want to hear more from him and I can, now that almost everyone is in the dining hall or in the playground.

A final few students hurry in that direction. Their footsteps cut off as that hallway door closes behind them, and for once its thud doesn't register. I only go still because Liam's gaze is fixed on my mouth, and I'm nowhere close to frozen.

I'm splashed with warmth that comes from more than the puddle of sunshine we stand in. A sudden flush only makes me warmer the moment I blurt, "I can't kiss you."

His eyebrows rise as if to ask, "No?"

I shake my head, almost sure he's teasing me even without speaking. "No. No kissing. Not when I'm technically on duty."

More footsteps echo—proving my point, I guess, because he backs off, but only to move a barrier. He also lifts yellow and black tape that spells stay away as vividly as wasp stripes. His hand around mine doesn't send the same back-off message. It pulls me into a library empty of books and missing its shelves. It does have a new supporting wall and steel beams. The only sign of demolition is that gap in the back wall. It's bigger now, shrouded with thicker construction fabric than last week's netting, and that's where he leads me.

We're both deeply shadowed at this end of the library. Even more so after the door to the hallway swings closed with another click that doesn't matter, a thud that isn't as loud as my heart, which skips when Liam finally speaks. "Who says I want to kiss you? Bit presumptuous, aren't you?" He sniffs. "I said I had something special to show you, that's all, not that I wanted to get my leg over. Thought you might be interested in what I found in the foundation."

He's all I'm interested in seeing more of, and I can't pinpoint how that happened. I mean, I know exactly where it started. I've closed my eyes each night for weeks to see Liam holding out rope-scuffed hands that I placed a lamb in. And I've got a pretty good idea about where that wanting-more urge locked in. If I close my eyes right now, I know I'd see swaying poppies or him beside a quarry.

There's no way I'm closing my eyes around him right now, and not only because he says, "I know how to behave in a school," while drawing me closer to another barrier labelled DANGER. He doesn't spell that for me. I don't worry about that, not even a little. Not with his hand still on me. It wraps mine tighter, which sets off an internal drumroll of anticipation.

It also makes me stupid. Or maybe this is the fun side Charles told me to let out more often. Either way, I ask, "So, this special thing you want to show me isn't something sex-related?"

His eye roll prompts a laugh that hardly sounds musical or attractive. If anything, it bursts from me like a blackbird did from those rosebushes back in a garden where he got on his knees, only I sound fucking unhinged, not full of song that I can't keep in. He seems to like my wild cackle even if he sniffs again like he's offended.

"Sex-related? In a building full of kids? What kind of professional do you take me for?"

He lets go of my hand, which I don't like half so much, so I poke for more fun from him. "For the kind of professional who's lured me into a danger zone for no good reason?"

"You're safe."

I know that—can feel it all the way to my bone marrow. I also spot what a dust sheet covers beside us. "Maybe you saw that old librarian's desk and wanted to bend me over it."

Mission accomplished: his laugh wheezes. He also perches on that desk edge and threads a dusty finger through my belt loops. One step more and I'd be exactly as unprofessional as what last led to me disappointing a headmaster. But here's another of those small sounds from Liam that I can't get enough of, and I'm between his legs, the peaks of our hard hats clashing.

All it would take is another small adjustment, a tiny tilt of our heads, and we'd be close enough to do what he said was presumptuous. Right now, kissing him feels necessary—I want it more than breathing. More than making him wheeze out more laughter. He must want that too. He slides his hat off, his voice a rich, low rumble. "If you'd been my school librarian, I'd have been much more of a reader." His voice pitches even lower, which does strange but good things to my stomach. "And if I'd had a teacher half as pretty as you, I'd never have left the fucking classroom."

I still insist, "I'm not a real teacher." All I've done here is play my heart out. Or lie alone in bed, scrolling back through photos he started sending during the job in Blackpool, the last featuring his surf this morning. That prompts a nosy question. "But how is it going, working with your new friend, Dom?"

We're still so well-matched in our denials.

"He isn't a friend. I mean, he's a good guy." He still has a finger through my belt loop. "Actually, I did share breakfast with him after surfing. It… It was a better start to the day than I expected." He touches his ear, which I guess means he had a noisy night. Then he threads a finger through my belt loop again, and we couldn't be closer.

I need to pull back to add some distance.

I will.

In a minute.

The thing is, for all that talk of wiring and brains, I'm not wired for resisting this magnet. Liam stares at where my hand has slipped without permission. My thumb traces the top of a furrow at his hip that I already know would point to his pelvis if he was naked. I can't stop this urge to be tactile around him—to play, to tap and strum and stroke—but we're also matched that way.

He lets go of my belt loop to skim the back of a single finger up my shirtfront, and I wonder if he thinks of what it covers as his own personal canvas, blank and waiting for more of his sketches. My stomach feels taut under his barely there touch, quivering and tense despite him not making actual skin-to-skin contact. "But yeah," he says hoarsely, "Dom's made me welcome. They all have."

His hand drops. He also straightens, and anyone walking in right now would only see two men having a discussion. Or they would, if Liam's lips didn't almost brush mine before I grasp that he's getting to his feet from his edge-of-the-desk position, not closing in for a kiss. He sidesteps, moving further away from me, not nearer, and the wings that always want to spread whenever I'm around him settle back into their dusty ashes until he says, "How the fuck do you keep making me break all my own rules?"

"Rules? Like?"

He scrubs at his face, and now probably isn't the right time to tell him that only streaks it with dust, not when he's back to sounding serious. "Like, no more stupid heroics. Or no more?—"

I don't know what I expect him to say next. It isn't, "No more getting attached."

He lifts that construction fabric aside, his back to me, before turning with a hand extended, and here's a mix of emotions that children have already shown me today. I've seen Maisie just as determined, haven't I? And Hadi just as sure that he'll fail. All of that flickers across Liam's face, and if all I ever get out of these weeks at Glynn Harber is learning how to read what people show me like he does now, it won't have been wasted.

That means I also do what Charles has shown me, being explicit so children understand him.

"Attached to me?"

Liam closes his eyes, dusty smudges beneath them suggesting he's definitely lost sleep, and maybe not all of it down to tinnitus. "Who else?" His eyes reopen, nothing hidden. "Of course to you."

He holds out his hand and adds two more words that slay me.

"Trust me?"

He's already made that easy—so easy—which is how I end up breaking every be-safe rule by kissing him, and it's only been days since we did this in his camper in a moorland car park, but I missed it. Him. I still keep it brief. Our lips barely brush, but at least it means I'm close enough to hear this.

"Missed you, Row."

He turns me before I can tell him the same. Liam holds me from behind, and not for any over-a-desk reasons. He only wraps his arms around me to make sure I don't fall into a gaping hole in the floor that proves he wasn't lying.

Something special is wedged deep in this school's foundation.

"What is that?"

His hold on me tightens and he tilts me further. "What do you see?" That doesn't sound testing. The cage of his arms promises that the only thing he's interested in catching is me, so I look harder.

"Is that...?"

I see it then, can make out what fills this compartment that Liam's uncovered. His lips brush the back of my neck as I see staves dotted with notation on old, yellowed paper.

He's found some new music for me.