AN: I don't even care about the summer event anymore. The fact that I called Sam/Liam a long time ago, and actually saw that it's now almost canon, made my week. Very happy over here.
She could see his sandals making their way into the shop and not pausing for the waiting room; as they would have if he were being polite. He had her at a disadvantage, stuck lying under a car as she was. And, most likely, that was exactly as he'd planned it.
Sam could do nothing but ignore him and keep working.
The sandals stopped a few inches from her forehead.
"My head still hurts," Liam told her, "You have a hell of an arm."
"Thanks." She stuck her arm out, "Can you pass me the socket wrench?" She pulled it back under when the tool fell into her hand.
"I want to know what your deal was," he said, tapped his foot twice.
Sam paused for a second. Her eyes darted over the undercarriage as she tried to come up with something, anything acceptable. It took her a moment, but she finally settled.
"For wasting all that time on a robot you knew we couldn't do," Sam said, started work again, "I told you not to start before the rules even came out."
The loss of his pet project was still fresh, and he quickly forgot about her pause –if he'd noticed it at all. Liam sighed, "But we lost last year because I didn't have enough time to calculate the trajectory. I needed more time to do all of the math… It really would have been awesome."
"What was so much better about this one?"
Liam had been given an invitation to talk about what he'd wanted to all day and, naturally, he'd leaped upon it with all the eagerness he could muster.
If he hadn't come in asking direct questions, the chances were very high that he hadn't heard what she'd yelled at him. And, with enough prompting to go elsewhere, he'd forget all about the bruise he'd come across town to complain about.
Which was all probably for the best. Sam still wasn't quite certain why the idea of being spared from his constant hounding for dates had prompted her to violence. Why it seemed to bother her so much that she was the only person in Gaia he wouldn't try to get into bed. All those other girls would probably tell her to count her blessings and move on.
This whole thing was just confusing, and she'd be very happy when her workload had her sufficiently distracted and forgetful.
Sam threw in the occasional 'wow' and 'uh huh' to keep him talking.
It was probably better that they were like this. They could spend hours on mechanical chit-chat; there was no pressure to change because that was what was expected out of a higher relationship.
Maybe, in his own way, Liam was trying to preserve that. He needed someone to be normal with, so he'd kept them friends and didn't ask her out to the prom. Instead, he'd gone for every disposable girl he could find.
But she was probably giving him too much credit.
"Hey, I'm really backed up," Sam said finally, "Do you think you could work on a car or two before you take off?"
"You know my rate," he said, tapped his sandal again.
"I'll order pizza in a minute and there's beer in the fridge."
His sandals made their way across the floor to one of the waiting cars. "Perfect."
And, for the first time all day, he was right.
