Chapter 7: Mall Haul and a Confession
The crash was a saucepan, falling from the counter where Mackenzie had been attempting, and failing, to reach a high shelf. It lay on the laminate floor, a dented, shining island in a sea of spilled orange juice and ice cubes. She stood over it, barefoot, wearing one of Liam’s old football jerseys that now swam on her smaller frame, the hem hitting mid-thigh.
For a suspended moment, she wasn’t Lexi. She was just someone who had dropped something, her expression one of pure, uncalculated annoyance. Her shoulders slumped. She shoved a strand of blonde hair behind her ear with the back of her wrist, a gesture that was all Mack—impatient, practical.
Then she saw them in the doorway. Her face recomposed itself, the performance sliding back into place like a visor. The annoyance melted into a pout.
“Oopsie,” she said, the word a sugary sigh. “My hands are, like, legitimately useless now. It’s the nails.” She wiggled her fingers, showing off the freshly done acrylics, matte black and sharp.
Chloe didn’t move. She watched her brother survey the mess with a blank face, then look up with that manufactured smile. “I was gonna make us, like, mimosas? To celebrate my haul. But I guess we’re doing juice-floor shots instead.”
“Your haul?” Liam asked, his voice careful.
“Duh. I texted Chloe this afternoon begging for a mall guide.” She stepped gingerly around the spill, her small feet avoiding the cubes. She beamed at her sister. “And she delivered. We just got back. My god, Chloe, thanks for embracing this! I mean, isn’t it like, way better having a sister than my stinky old self?” She laughed, a bright, practiced trill. “And like, I can’t believe the boys that were staring. At me. It was totally weird but also kind of amazing? You should’ve seen this one guy in the sunglasses section. He walked into a display.”
She swept past them, back into the living room, where a galaxy of new shopping bags now littered the floor. The earlier clutter of moving boxes was now adorned with tissue paper and glossy logos.
Chloe remained in the kitchen doorway, her body rigid. She hadn’t embraced anything. She’d met a frantic, excited text with a sense of grim duty, hoping to steer the spending toward normalcy—toward jeans, toward sweatshirts. It had been a failure.
Liam moved to the sink, grabbing a roll of paper towels. He knelt, a process that involved a low grunt and the audible strain of denim, and began sopping up the juice. The domestic task, in his colossal hands, looked absurd.
In the living room, the unpacking began. It was a ritual of rustling tissue and delighted little gasps.
“Look at this!” Mackenzie’s voice carried a revelatory thrill. She held up a silky slip dress the color of champagne. “It’s so simple. But it makes me feel like a billion bucks.”
“What did you get at Victoria’s Secret?” Chloe called out, her tone forcibly light. She hadn’t moved from her post.
“Everything,” came the cheerful reply. A moment later, Mackenzie reappeared in the kitchen arch, holding a scrap of black lace against her chest. It was a bodysuit, intricate and fragile. “This. Can you even? The girl said it was their bestseller. She said I had the perfect frame for it.” She did a slow, hip-rolling turn, the jersey hiking up. “What do you think, big guy?” She sauntered over to where Liam was wringing out a sopping mass of towels. She pressed the lace against his broad chest. The contrast was violent: dark, delicate web against solid, faded grey cotton. “You wanna see me in this later?”
Her voice had dropped, but it wasn’t the intimate whisper from the couch. This was for an audience. This was to prove a point.
Liam looked down at the lace, then up at her face. His expression was unreadable, a mask over a churning sea. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t blush. He just looked, with a weary, deep-set patience that seemed wholly new to him. “It looks expensive,” he said, his voice neutral.
Mackenzie’s smile flickered, just for a microsecond. She’d expected a reaction—awkwardness, anger, desire. Indifference was a weapon she hadn’t anticipated. “It is,” she recovered, snatching it back. “But worth it. My stream money’s gotta go somewhere.”
She flounced back to her bags. “Sephora was the real black hole, though. Chloe, you have to teach me how to do that winged liner thing. The tutorial girl made it look so easy but I just gave myself a black eye.”
Chloe finally moved. She walked into the living room and stood over the sprawl of purchases. There were velour sweatpants with ‘PINK’ emblazoned down the leg. A sequined top unsuitable for anything but a club. Perfumes with names like ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Daisy’. Stacked heeled boots she would certainly break an ankle in. It was the wardrobe of a teenager, a cosplay of a specific, marketable kind of woman.
“Did you get anything practical?” Chloe asked, her voice tight. “Like a winter coat? Or a pair of normal socks?”
Mackenzie rolled her eyes, a dramatic, full-headed motion. “Practical? Babe, I’m the hot girl now. Practical is a push-up bra and a thong that doesn’t show panty lines.” She pulled out a sleek, minimalist cardboard box. “See? Practical. It’s a Dyson Airwrap. It does curls. It’s an investment.”
She was gleeful, triumphant, buried under a mountain of affirming purchases. Every item was a brick in the wall she was building between herself and the past. Every squeal of delight was a nail in the coffin of the person she’d been.
Liam finished in the kitchen and loomed in the doorway, a silent monolith. He watched Chloe’s face as she surveyed the spoils. He saw the grief there, hard and sharp as a shard of glass. He saw the anger, too, at this erasure performed with a credit card and a giggle.
Mackenzie, oblivious or willfully ignoring it, held up a tiny, distressed-denim jacket. “This is so cute, I’m gonna die.”
“Don’t,” Chloe said suddenly, the word a cracked whip.
Mackenzie froze, the jacket in her hands. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t say you’re gonna die.” Chloe’s voice was low, dangerous. “It’s not funny.”
The room temperature dropped. The performative joy bled out of Mackenzie’s face, leaving something pale and uncertain. For the second time that evening, the character broke. She looked from Chloe’s fierce, pained expression to Liam’s stoic watchfulness. The shopping bags suddenly looked cheap, ridiculous. A pathetic fortress.
“I just meant…” she started, her voice small, losing its melodic affectation.
“I know what you meant,” Chloe cut her off. She didn’t yell. The quiet was worse. “You’re trying so hard to be okay that you’re literally buying a new personality. And it’s a shitty one. It’s shallow and boring and it’s not you.”
“How do you know what’s me?” The retort was fast, a spark of the old defiance. But it was weak. Watery.
“Because I’ve known you for twenty-eight years, Marcus.” The use of his old name was a grenade. It landed in the center of the room, and for a breath, no one moved.
Mackenzie’s eyes filled, not with performative tears, but with a sudden, shocking sheen of real hurt. She dropped the denim jacket onto the pile. She looked lost, standing there in the oversized jersey, surrounded by the evidence of her frantic, fragile new life.
“I…” she began, but no performance came to save her. No joke, no purr, no deflection. The raw confusion was terrifying in its honesty.
She didn’t finish. She turned on her heel, the sharp nails clicking on the floor, and walked quickly down the hall. Her bedroom door shut with a soft, final click, not a slam.
The living room was a museum of dissonance once more. The silent TV, the half-unpacked moving boxes, the garish new bags spilling their contents like guts.
Chloe stared at the closed door, her own anger dissolving into a shuddering wave of guilt. She’d drawn blood. She’d seen him, just for a second, and she’d attacked.
Liam walked over to the couch. He picked up the champagne slip dress, holding it by its thin straps. The fabric was insubstantial, almost weightless in his hand. He looked at it, then at the dark hallway.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he said, not to Chloe, but to the room itself. “We’re just hurting each other.”
Chloe hugged herself, saying nothing. The victory felt like ashes. From behind the closed door, there was no sound of laughter, no stream chatter. There was only a heavy, waiting silence, deeper and more unsettling than any crash.
The silence stretched, a physical thing woven from spilled juice, scattered shopping bags, and Chloe’s lethal words. Liam stood holding the slip dress, its silk whispering against his calloused palms. He looked from the fragile garment to Chloe’s rigid back, then toward the closed bedroom door.
He let the dress fall softly onto the couch. “I’ll talk to her,” he said, his voice a low rumble that seemed to vibrate in the quiet.
Chloe didn’t turn. “What’s left to say?”
“I don’t know.” He walked down the short hallway, each footfall a soft thunder. He didn’t knock. He just turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The room was dim, lit only by the pink salt lamp on the nightstand. Mackenzie sat on the edge of the bed, still in his old jersey. She was staring at her black nails, her shoulders hunched. She didn’t look up.
“You left your loot out there,” Liam said, leaning against the doorframe. The wood creaked in protest under his weight.
“It’s just stuff.” Her voice was muffled, stripped of its usual melodic polish. It was hoarse. “Expensive, cute stuff. But just stuff.” She finally glanced up. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. “She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you.” Liam eased into the room, having to turn his shoulders sideways to fit. He sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, his back against the mattress, because the idea of sitting next to her felt too loaded. “She’s terrified. She thinks she’s lost her brother. This,” he gestured vaguely at her, at the room, “feels like a stranger moving into his house.”
“I am a stranger.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. The jersey collar slipped, revealing the sharp line of a collarbone he didn’t recognize. “I look in the mirror and I jump. My own voice sounds like someone else’s podcast playing in another room. So maybe leaning into the stranger is easier. Maybe being Lexi is less… painful.”
Liam picked up a stray Sephora bag from the floor. He pulled out a box, a highlighter palette called ‘Starlight Symphony’. He turned it over in his hands. “Is it? Less painful?”
She was quiet for a long time. The salt lamp cast shifting, watery shadows. “No,” she whispered. “It’s exhausting. It’s like holding a plank position forever. My abs are gone, but my soul is fucking sore.”
A short, surprised laugh punched out of Liam. It felt alien in the tense room. She looked at him, and a ghost of a real smile touched her lips. It was Mack’s smile, wary and wry.
“See?” she said. “You miss me, too.”
“I never said I didn’t.” He put the palette down. “The bodysuit, though.”
Her expression shuttered, preparing for another blow. “What about it?”
He met her gaze, holding it in the dim light. He let out a long, controlled breath, as if stepping off a ledge. “It does look pretty hot.”
Her eyes widened. The performance didn’t snap back into place. Instead, a different energy sparked, one of challenge and a flicker of real connection. She uncurled herself and stood up. She walked over to where the black lace still lay atop a bag by the door.
She picked it up, holding it with more reverence this time. “Yeah?” she asked, her voice lower, more natural.
“Yeah.” Liam pushed himself up from the floor, an effortless uncoiling of muscle that still felt like a magic trick. He was suddenly, overwhelmingly close to her. The top of her head barely reached his collarbone. He reached out and took the lace from her fingers, letting his hand brush against hers. “It’s very… you. Now.”
He didn’t think. He just acted. He dropped the bodysuit on the bed, and in one smooth, swift motion, his large hand came down in a playful, firm spank on her backside through the loose jersey.
The sound was a sharp, crisp crack in the quiet room.
Mackenzie gasped, jolting forward a step from the impact. Then she turned, her eyes blazing with something triumphant and raw. She didn’t rub the spot. She just looked up at him, a slow, seductive smile spreading across her face. She stepped back into his space, her hand coming to rest on the hard plane of his stomach.
“Okay,” she purred, the performance returning but fused now with a genuine, shimmering heat. “Finally, you’re playing along, sexy.”