Page 16 of Never Over
I giggle, running on, shoving my doubts in a closet in my rib cage.
We make it to the breezeway and skip down the stairs as music cascades across the venue. The sky is glowing periwinkle, brightened by all the flashlights on cellphones above us. I feel like I’m racing through the cosmos, a tiny star among thousands. When we reach the ground level, my feet stumble and I nearly trip before I catch myself. Harry collides with me from behind.
“Where now?” he asks.
“Maybe we descended too quickly,” I admit. I’m just north of five six and every shadowed figure is blurring together.
“He’ll be at the front of the crowd,” Folly reasons. “I’m going to stay back here, just to be safe, but you guys keep going.”
I squeeze her hand, catching some of the brightness in her eyes. Harry grabs mine and pushes forward. We haul ourselves through the crowd of song-drunk fans, weaving into the dense throng. Eventually, we make it to the metal fencing that blocks general admission from VIP, and on the other side of the barrier, the bodies thin. Security guards are spaced every twenty feet along the fence.
“Do you see him?” Harry asks.
My eyes search.
It should have taken me longer than it does to find him. My eyes shouldn’t have gone to him so naturally, but they do.
His neon vest is only part of it.
Liam Bishop.
His smile, that voice, brown hair, rough hands—it’s all marked, a dark and expansive tattoo, permanently inked somewhere inside of me. Every word memorized. Looks we exchanged, innocent at first, but curiouser and then downright hungry near the end of it.
It serves me now as my memories find their metal, magnetize, and pull me straight to him.
Beneath the vest, he’s in a purple staff T-shirt and jeans, standing with another man close to the stage, his arms crossed over his chest, posture relaxed. Liam’s body seems to have softened since college. He’s still toned and athletic, no doubt, but now he lacks the intense muscle his baseball training required. His hair is a bit shorter than I remember, tickling his ears. Brown curls, tuggable. The headset is firmly in place. I only catch his shadowed profile, half aimed at the stage, half aimed at the crowd.
Liam turns his head, and we lock eyes, and I’m not exaggerating when I say all the air between us gets sucked away. So does the light, and the sound. My whole world narrows to the look on his face, just as surprised as my own.
All I had to do to find him was show up. All he had to do to find me was blink.
For the first time in four years, Liam smiles at me. It’s soft, unsure, but I canseeit plain as a rocket flare across the darkness and distance between us.
I try to jump the fence.
“Woah, we’ve got a breacher!” the security guard shouts. He grabs me by my waist and pulls me back to the general admission side, locking my wrists in a vise behind my back.
“Ow!” I shriek, and behind me, Harry screams, “Let go of her!”
The guard twists me out of Liam’s view, starts to march me away. “Escorting the breacher outside,” he says into his earpiece.
“Wait, wait”—I strain against him, but the guard’s grip only tightens—“you don’t understand, I was just looking for someone.”
“Someone famous?” the guard mocks.
“Wait a minute!” Harry says, trailing us.
“Hey, hey, STOP! Vladimir, STOP!”
Liam.
“Vladimir?” I ask. “Cool name.”
“I am Russian,” the guard says, spinning me back around.
Liam is at the fence, chest heaving from exertion. Worried lines crease between his brows as he leans into his palms.
“She’s mine!” he calls out. And then, like he’s correcting himself, “She’s with me.”
