Chapter 53: Welcome To My Home.
The door swung open and Sophia stepped in ahead of him like she owned the place. She got three steps into the living room and stopped.
Liam dropped his gym bag by the entrance, toed off his shoes, and watched her take it in. She turned slowly — not dramatically, just a woman letting her eyes move around a space at their own pace. The clean lines of the furniture, the books stacked with intention on the shelf, the kitchen visible through the open plan with every surface clear and every appliance where it belonged.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay what?"
"This is not what I expected."
Liam moved past her toward the kitchen. "What did you expect?"
"I don’t know." She turned again, taking in the full room. "Pizza boxes. A gaming chair, something on the floor that you haven’t dealt with in three weeks."
"I’m a rich man pretending to be poor," Liam joked from the kitchen. "The apartment was always going to be clean."
Sophia laughed at the counter and set her bag down carefully by the sofa — not on it, next to it, with the cautious precision of someone conscious of the fact that she was soaked through with sweat and the furniture looked expensive.
"Seriously though," she said. "This is — it’s really well put together. Like someone actually thought about it."
"I did actually think about it," Liam shrugged.
"Men don’t think about it," Sophia pointed out, letting Liam gauge the kind of men she was used to.
"I’m not most men, remember?"
"You’ve mentioned." She came to the kitchen threshold and leaned against the frame. "How old are you again?"
"Twenty-five." Liam said bluntly.
She looked around one more time and shook her head slowly. "Twenty-five."
Liam filled a glass from the filtered tap and set it on the counter in front of her. She reached for it with both hands and drank with the focused efficiency of someone who had been significantly more thirsty than she had let on. She finished three quarters of it before setting it down and exhaling.
Liam kept his expression neutral.
She noticed him noticing.
"Don’t," she said.
"I didn’t say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was going to say I should have brought a bigger bottle," Liam said. "But I didn’t want to make it awkward for my dear guest."
Sophia pointed at him and he refilled the glass before she asked.
She drank half of that one too, then set it down and rolled her shoulders. Something in her posture had been slightly off since she sat — a conscious tension, the way people hold themselves when they’re trying not to take up too much space. She shifted her weight and her jaw tightened slightly.
Liam watched it for a moment.
"You aren’t used to being alone in a house with a dashing young man?" he said.
Sophia gave him the look that particular comment deserved. "I’m fine."
"You’re sitting like you’re trying to hover two inches above the sofa without touching it."
She wanted to say something but recalled her first thought and chose peace.
"I’m sweaty," she said finally. "I don’t want to make a mess."
"It’s a sofa."
"It’s a nice sofa."
"Sof-ia," Liam said with a proud look on his face and the silence that followed was proof of how stupid that joke was but it did what it was meant too.
It made her laugh and Sophia laughed without a care in the world when she did.
Liam pulled out the stool on the kitchen side of the counter. "Sit here then. Easy to wipe down if you are really worried."
She relocated without argument, which told him the sofa tension had been genuine. She sat with both elbows on the counter and looked at him across it like they were on opposite sides of a bar.
"You live alone?" she asked.
Liam considered it. "Who knows."
She frowned. "That’s not an answer."
"It’s the only one you are getting until I confirm it isn’t bait,"
She studied him for a second, decided not to pull that thread, and finished the second glass of water.
He took the glass, refilled it without comment, slid it back.
She looked down at it, then up at him. "Do I look that dehydrated?"
"You look like someone who ran for forty minutes and then stood outside in a mild wind and then sat in a car."
"So yes."
"Third glass," Liam said. "Doctor’s orders."
"You’re a lawyer."
"Close enough."
She laughed and drank the third glass at a more dignified pace, and Liam leaned against the opposite counter with his arms loosely crossed and said nothing for a moment. She was more relaxed than she had been at the door — the kitchen seemed to suit her, or maybe it was the water, or maybe it was simply that the apartment had turned out to be a real place inhabited by a real person rather than whatever she had been half-preparing herself for.
"Okay," she said eventually, looking down at herself. "I genuinely feel bad about your kitchen stool."
"The stool has survived worse."
"I’m soaked through," Sophia said and Liam resisted the urge to make a sex joke because he hadn’t established that dynamic with her yet.
"You could freshen up," Liam said. It came out straightforwardly because he meant it straightforwardly.
Sophia looked at him.
"I have a bathroom..." he continued. "... hot water, pressure that actually works. The full infrastructure."
"Oh please, with your twelve-in-one moisturiser?" she said.
"Hey! It is twenty-two-in-one," Liam said immediately. "For your information. It covers everything."
The laugh came fast and open, her head dropping slightly, one hand coming up to her mouth.
"Twenty-two," she repeated.
"Cleanser, toner, exfoliant—"
"Please stop."
"Serum, moisturiser, SPF—"
"Liam—"
"I’m just reading the label."
She was laughing properly now, the loose unguarded kind, and Liam let it run its course before continuing.
"I’m serious though. There are clean towels. And I can find something for you to change into while you’re done. You’ll be twenty minutes max and you won’t have to sit in the Uber home as I can drop you off when you’re done."
Sophia looked at him with the specific expression of a woman running a quiet cost-benefit analysis. Her eyes moved briefly around the apartment again — the cleanliness, the order, the general evidence that this was a person who took the details seriously.
She looked back at him.
"Something I can actually wear?" she said. "Not just a gym shirt that goes to my knee?"
"I have options," Liam reassured her.
"Define options," Sophia questioned.
"Joggers. Clean t-shirt. Takes thirty seconds to find."
Another pause. Shorter this time.
"Quick shower," she said. "In and out."
"Towels are in the cabinet above the sink."
Sophia slid off the stool, picked up her bag, and followed him down the hallway. He pulled two clean towels from the cabinet, set them on the rack, and left her to it without ceremony.
He was halfway back to the kitchen when he heard the bathroom door click shut behind him.
Liam stood at the counter for a moment and was surprised by how smooth things were progressing.
