Liam Hayes 𝄞 Sidelines

The party was exactly what Liam expected it to be, which was to say—a catastrophe dressed up in strobe lights.

Drugs, alcohol, the bass rattling through the floorboards and up into his chest like a second heartbeat that wasn’t his. People grinding against each other in that particular way that seemed to require the complete surrender of personal dignity, and somewhere in the thick of it all, Julian and Musa moved through the crowd like they’d signed the deed to this house themselves. Which was rich, really, considering it had been Julian’s idea to have the whole band sneak in through the side gate whilst the host was too off his face to notice.

Liam stood near the wall—the universal position of I am here but I reserve the right to leave at any moment—with a red cup in his hand that he had no intention of drinking from. It had started the evening as Coca-Cola. He couldn’t say with any confidence what it was now. Some passing stranger had poured something into it about forty minutes ago and Liam had simply let it happen because at least it gave his hands something to do.

He let his gaze drift across the room. Nelly was out on the floor, dancing with the particular ferocity of someone who was actively refusing to think about something. He’d heard, vaguely, through the osmosis that occurred naturally within their group, that things with her and — well. He didn’t know if they were on or off again this week. He genuinely couldn’t keep track, and more to the point, Nelly had a very specific look about her tonight. A kind of don’t written into the set of her shoulders and the angle of her jaw. Not don’t talk to me because I’m sad. More like don’t talk to me because I will actually bite you. Liam respected that. He respected it enormously.

He looked away. Where’s Jax?

He scanned the room, and it took approximately four seconds before he found him. Of course. Of course his best friend was tucked into the corner with his girlfriend, the two of them existing in that sealed little bubble that couples constructed around themselves at parties—visible to everyone and available to no one.

Liam looked away from that too.

He was becoming rather skilled at looking away from things.

He’d been staring at the middle distance for approximately three minutes, doing a passable impression of someone who was contemplating rather than simply waiting for the night to end, when Julian materialised out of the crowd like a fever dream made flesh. His shirt was gone. Liam had no idea when that had happened or where it had gone. His skin was sheened with sweat, catching the strobing light in ways that made Liam want to avert his eyes on a purely aesthetic basis. And his eyes — glassy, red-rimmed, pupils doing something structurally inadvisable — told the complete story of what Julian had consumed this evening without a single word needing to be spoken.

Oh fuck.

“Liam!” Julian’s arm came down across his shoulders like a falling tree, heavy and sudden and damp in ways Liam did not care to catalogue. The smell hit him immediately — sweat and alcohol and something sweeter underneath, chemical, coating the back of his throat. “C’mon! Don’t just stand there like a gargoyle, man—”

“Julian—” Liam attempted, already manoeuvring to extract himself. “Why’re you— why’re you standing like that—” Julian’s grip tightened with the preternatural strength of the very intoxicated. His eyes, wandering and glazed, landed on the cup in Liam’s hand. Before Liam could do anything about it, Julian had plucked it free and knocked the whole thing back without pausing for breath. “Why the long face? We were brilliant tonight. We were—” He gestured expansively with the now-empty cup. “We did good—yeah? Set was good. Crowd loved it. We’re basically rich now.”

By rich it was six hundred dollars. Between five people. At a party we broke into.

“Mm,” Liam said.

“You’re not — you’re doing the thing—”

“What thing.”

“The thing. The face.” Julian made an attempt to illustrate by pulling an expression that was presumably meant to mirror Liam’s, though it was difficult to tell, given the state of him. “Live a little, yeah? We earned it—”

“Right,” Liam said. “Listen, I’m going to — I need some air.”

Julian said something else. Liam was already moving.

The crowd swallowed him the moment he stepped away from the wall, and for a moment it was worse—elbows and shoulders and the bass so loud it stopped being sound and became something physical, something pressing against his temples from the inside. He moved through it carefully, sorry, excuse me, sorry, navigating by instinct toward the far side of the room where he could see, through the glass, the dark rectangle of the balcony beyond.

The slider was heavy. He got it open, stepped through, got it closed behind him. The cold hit him like a correction. He stood for a moment and simply breathed. The air out here was proper air— winter-sharp, carrying the distant smell of rain and the city underneath everything. The noise from inside became muffled, felt rather than heard. The bass was still there, distantly, like a memory of itself.

Right, he thought. Better.

He reached into his jacket pocket.

The cigarette pack was a bit battered, one corner soft from weeks of being carried around and rarely opened. He shook one loose, put it between his lips, and found his lighter—that scratched-up old thing he’d had since he was eighteen and which he kept meaning to replace and never did. He cupped his hand against the cold air. The lighter caught.

He brought it up toward the cigarette, the flame a small warm point in the dark—

The slider opened.

The sound burst back in for a moment, that wall of bass and noise, and Liam startled— genuinely startled, the lighter jerking in his hand—and on pure reflex he pulled the cigarette from between his lips before he’d even taken a single drag. It slipped from his fingers. He watched it fall. He stepped on it, grinding it out against the balcony floor with the toe of his shoe.

Then, feeling faintly ridiculous, he turned his head.

His eyes landed on her.

—and stayed.

There was a beat—the specific beat of the brain catching up with the eyes, registering, recalibrating. Have I seen her before?

“Uh—” he started. Cleared his throat. Say something normal. Tried again. “Sorry. Um.” His hand, still holding the lighter, dropped to his side. “I— uh... are you here for some fresh air too?“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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The thing about denial was that it worked best when you committed to it fully.

Liam had been committing to it all week.

It’s not a date. That was the rule he’d established somewhere around Tuesday, when the anxiety had started doing that particular thing where it colonised every quiet moment and refused to vacate the premises. It’s two people going to a carnival. Friends do that. Friends go to carnivals all the time. This is completely normal and there is nothing significant happening.

The fact that it had taken him the better part of a week to actually send the message — the fact that he’d typed it out and deleted it so many times that the words had stopped looking like words, just shapes, just letters arranged in a configuration he could no longer trust — was something he was actively not thinking about. The way his hands had gone slightly unsteady on the keyboard. The way he’d read the message back approximately eleven times before sending it, and then immediately wanted to throw his phone into the Yarra River the moment it left his outbox.

That had not happened. None of that had happened.

The band had been — well.

Merciless was probably the accurate word, though he supposed he could be generous and call it enthusiastic support.

Musa had laughed until she’d had to sit down. Julian had made a speech, arms wide, as though addressing a theatre full of people, about the poetic tragedy of their quiet, untouched Liam finally being felled by a girl — which, frankly, Liam could have done without, especially the untouched part, delivered at a volume that suggested Julian had no concept of indoor acoustics. Jax had been decent about it. Nelly had been genuinely, almost suspiciously lovely, which meant she’d either grown as a person or she was saving her material for later.

And Julian — there had been one evening, late, when Julian had been uncharacteristically sober. He’d sat across from Liam with that rare clear-eyed focus he occasionally possessed, and he’d said something that had actually landed somewhere useful. Something about the fact that wanting things was not, in itself, embarrassing. That the embarrassing part was letting the fear of wanting make you small.

Then he’d done a line off the coffee table and the moment had passed entirely.

But it had stayed with Liam. The sober part.

What’s the worst that can happen? he’d told himself. She says no. He survives. At least he’d have tried.

Except — and this was the part he hadn’t quite admitted to anyone, including himself — some quiet cowardly corner of him had been half-hoping for the no. A no would have been clean. A no would have meant he didn’t have to do this, didn’t have to show up and be a person in front of someone whose opinion of him had somehow, without his permission, begun to matter quite a lot.

She’d said yes. And now here he was.

The carnival was loud in the specific way that carnivals were loud — not just volume but texture, layers of it, the mechanical grind of rides and tinny music from six different directions at once and the blur of voices and squeals and the smell of fried sugar hanging over everything like weather. Liam moved through it with the particular expression of someone calculating how many exits were available.

This is fine, he thought. Completely fine.

The thing was — with the band, with the stage — the noise was different. On stage, the noise was something he made. He was inside it, part of its architecture, and that meant he had some relationship with it, some control. Here the noise simply was, indifferent and enormous, and he was just a person standing in the middle of it with no instrument in his hands and entirely too much to think about.

What if he messed up? What if he said something strange? What if she—

“You’re thinking too loud, Liam.”

Jax’s voice, flat with the specific exhaustion of someone who had been managing Liam for the better part of a decade. He pressed the sweet popcorn into Liam’s hands, then the cold drink — sweating already with condensation, artificially coloured something that didn’t exist in nature. Liam hadn’t even registered they’d cleared the queue.

When did that happen.

“You’re just going out with her,” Jax continued, in the tone of a man reading from a document he’d prepared in advance. “Not proposing. And you said it yourself — friends.” He put audible quotation marks around the word with a precision that felt almost aggressive. “So stop finding reasons to stand here holding snacks and go. She’s waiting.”

Liam looked down at the popcorn.

“Right,” he said.

“Now, Liam.”

He found her where he’d left her, which was — he’d told himself when he’d suggested he and Jax make the snack run — the considerate thing. The queue had been long and the carnival floor was worse than it looked and he hadn’t wanted her standing in it. That was the reason. A practical reason. Not the other reason, which was that having Jax as a buffer for five minutes while he reassembled himself had felt very necessary.

He was cutting back through the crowd, popcorn in one hand, the cold cup sweating against his palm, when he saw her. She was there, where he’d expected her to be—

But she wasn’t alone.

Liam’s feet didn’t stop. He kept moving, because stopping in the middle of a crowd for no apparent reason was strange, and he was trying very hard not to be strange today. But something in his chest did something that he didn’t particularly care for.

There was a guy. Some— Liam didn’t know him specifically, but he had the look of someone who was known, in the way that certain people at certain campuses were simply known, like a geographical feature. Tall. Comfortable in his own skin in that particularly irritating way. And she was laughing at something he’d said—

That sound, even half-swallowed by the carnival noise around them.

He wanted to be the one doing that. The thought arrived without invitation and sat there, unhelpfully concrete. He wanted to be the one that put that particular look on her face.

The condensation from the cup was cold against his fingers. He tightened his grip slightly.

Don’t be weird about it, he told himself. Don’t make a face. Don’t hover. Just walk over. Normal speed. Like a normal person.

He closed the remaining distance and arrived at the edge of their space with what he hoped was the energy of someone who had not just been having a minor internal crisis in the middle of a carnival.

The guy glanced up as Liam stepped in, eyes flicking over him quickly—taking him in, categorising, dismissing.

“Oh—hey,” he said, easy, like Liam was an afterthought he was polite enough to acknowledge. “Didn’t know you were—”

Liam didn’t let him finish.

“Hey.” He held out the popcorn toward her, then the drink. “I finally got us the snacks. Sorry I took too long— the line was pretty brutal.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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