Chapter 57: You Have A Brother?
The drive to Sophia’s took fifteen minutes and there were no traffic so it was a smooth ride back home.
She gave him the address without ceremony, plugging it into her phone and angling the screen toward him, and Liam pulled out of the parking lot without comment. He noticed the direction they were heading after the third turn — the neighbourhood shifting incrementally, the buildings losing their polish by degrees, the streets getting narrower and more lived-in.
Sophia sat with her bags between her feet and her elbow on the window ledge and said nothing about it.
Liam said nothing about it either.
He pulled up outside a low-rise apartment block — functional, dated, the kind of building that had been standing for thirty years without ever being the subject of a renovation conversation. The entrance was clean though, the small strip of garden out front tended if not manicured.
He parked the car in the lot.
Sophia reached for her bags immediately, the movement carrying a faint briskness that hadn’t been there twenty minutes ago. "Thanks for the ride. I’ll be ready by seven—"
"I’ll carry those up."
"You don’t have to—"
"Sophia." He was already out of the car.
She looked at him through the windshield for a moment, then opened her door.
She didn’t say anything on the way up the stairs. Not defensively silent — just quiet, in the particular way of someone preparing themselves for something. Liam followed her up one flight, bags in hand, and kept his eyes forward and his face neutral because he understood without being told that this was a moment that didn’t need commentary.
She unlocked the door and pushed it open.
The apartment was decent. Genuinely — two bedrooms, a clean living space, furniture that had been chosen with care even if not recently. The kitchen was tidy. There were plants on the windowsill that were actually alive. It wasn’t his building, but it was a home. Someone had made it one deliberately.
What hit him first was the television.
Specifically, the console beneath it and the teenager occupying the full length of the sofa in front of it — dark-haired, lean, somewhere around sixteen, wearing the expression of someone who had decided years ago that the world required constant suspicious evaluation.
The boy looked up.
Looked at Sophia then looked at Liam.
The stare he directed at Liam was the specific stare of a teenage boy who has identified an unknown variable in his immediate environment and is deciding how much energy to allocate to the problem.
Liam raised a single eyebrow back at him.
"Say hello," Sophia said, setting her keys on the hook by the door.
The boy said nothing. He turned back to the screen with the deliberate pointedness of someone making a statement.
Liam looked at him, then at Sophia, then back.
"You’re just like your sister," Liam said.
The boy’s head turned slowly. The look he produced could have stripped paint.
Liam held it without adjusting his expression by a single degree.
Sophia had already disappeared down the hallway toward her room with the bags, the sound of a door opening and closing carrying back into the silence.
The boy unmuted his game.
Liam looked around the living room, clocking the setup — decent sized screen, controller on the armrest, a small stack of game cases on the shelf beside the console.
"Get lost," the boy said, without looking up. "This isn’t your house."
"Correct," Liam said. He moved to the armchair adjacent to the sofa and sat down. "We’re going to be seeing each other more and we don’t have to get along."
The boy looked at him sideways. "Are you her boyfriend?"
"Are you her son?"
"What? Ew, no—"
"Exactly," Liam said.
The boy stared at him. Something behind the armour flickered — a single involuntary twitch at the corner of his mouth that he shut down immediately and replaced with a scowl.
Liam looked at the console.
"What are you playing?"
The boy glanced at the screen, then back at Liam with pure suspicion as he had no idea why Liam was faking interest in what he had going on.
He took in Liam’s jaw, the clean shirt, the general presentation of a man who had clearly never touched a controller in his life.
"You don’t game," the boy said. Statement, not question.
"Games are for nerds," Liam said.
The boy blinked. Something shifted in his expression, this not only hurt his pride but his feelings as well. Liam could tell right away.
"It’s a good thing I am one," Liam added.
He reached over and picked up the second controller from the cushion beside the boy, turning it over in his hands with the casual ease of someone who knew exactly what he was holding.
The boy watched this happen.
The scowl was still there. But it had changed quality slightly — less guarded and more curious.
"You actually play?" he said.
Liam looked at the screen. "What’s the map?"
A pause. The boy’s jaw worked slightly, the internal war between teenage suspicion and the basic human instinct to talk about things you care about playing out in real time across his face.
"Ranked match," he said finally. "Solo."
"Not anymore, tag me in!" Liam said.
The boy looked at him for a long moment.
Then, with the elaborate casualness of someone trying very hard not to show they’ve made a decision, he reached over and changed the lobby to duo without another word.
Sophia appeared in the hallway, changed into a casual outfit from the bags, and stopped at the living room entrance. She looked at her brother. Looked at Liam with a controller in his hand. Looked at the screen.
"Did he give you trouble?" she asked Liam.
"We’re fine," Liam said.
The boy said nothing, which was its own answer.
Sophia looked between them once more with the suspicion of a woman who had expected to come back to a minor diplomatic incident and found something else entirely.
She leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms.
"Don’t teach him anything bad," she said.
"Relax," Liam said. "I’m a nerd, remember?"
The boy made a sound that was almost, very nearly but not quite.