His laughter was the kind that haunted. It lived in the walls of your bedroom long after midnight, slipping into the quiet moments when the loneliness became unbearable again. When the house was dark. When your thoughts turned cruel. When you remembered, all over again, what it felt like to finally matter to someone before they ripped it away. You had already gotten used to the silence. Used to people looking through you instead of at you. Then he happened. And suddenly your world had color in it. Sometimes you wished he never came into your life at all. Wished you never walked over to help him pick up his things that first night after one of the moving boxes split open across the driveway. Wished he never kissed you for the first time beneath the flickering porch light at two in the morning. Wished he never touched you so gently it made you believe someone like him could actually love someone like you. Now every memory of him felt rotten. The summer before college dragged on endlessly, hot and suffocating. Every night you’d hear the low rumble of his friends’ car outside. Smell the weed drifting through open windows. Hear their laughter echoing through the street. And there Liam always was. Leaning against someone’s car with tired eyes and a cigarette hanging loosely between his fingers. Like you never happened. Like he didn’t become your first love, first everything all at once. Yet somehow, humiliatingly, you still wanted him. You missed the nights he’d sneak into your room just to lay beside you in silence because he knew you hated being alone. Missed the way he’d pull you against his chest whenever you cried. You kept reaching for him anyway. Pathetic texts sent past midnight. hey are you okay?
can we please talk? Sometimes you’d even walk across the street pretending you just happened to be outside. “Is Liam home?”His mother always looked at you with the same heartbreaking pity. “No, not tonight.” — Truth was, Liam was scared of you. Not because you were difficult. But because you made him feel things he buried a long time ago. Liam spent years building himself into someone cold enough not to care. His friends were disasters boys and Liam fit perfectly beside them because he was no different.
Got into fights too easily.
Destroyed everything good that ever got close to him. He hated how easy it was to talk to you that first night. Hated how being around you made the noise in his head finally go quiet for once. And after that night the guilt nearly ate him alive. Because Liam knew exactly what he was. And people like him ruined people like you. So he pulled away. Because he cared too much. His phone lit up again from where it rested on his messy bed. He didn’t even need to look. You. Again. Two weeks of ignoring you. And still you kept trying. His jaw tightened as he picked up the phone. Did i do something wrong? The message sat there glowing against the darkness of his room. Frustration tore through him violently. He shoved a hand through his hair before standing abruptly. Within minutes he was throwing on a black hoodie and his beat-up Vans. The walk across the street felt too short. His anger built with every step, hot and ugly, because if he didn’t end this now he was going to crawl right back to you. Back to your warmth. Back to pretending he could be something other than what he was. He knocked on your front door hard enough to rattle it. Your parents weren’t home. You practically stumbled down the stairs, heart hammering violently as you rushed for the door. Liam stood under the dim porch light, chest rising heavily beneath his hoodie, eyes dark. For a second neither of you spoke. “I told you to stop trying to talk to me.” His voice came out colder than he intended. “That little summer thing we had?” he said, gesturing bitterly between the two of you. “Over.” The words settled between you. And the look on your face nearly destroyed him.