Washing up with Liam had to be a joke, washing up while Liam stood there would be a better description. He just stood there by the draining board with a tea towel over his shoulder.
"Hey Sophie?"
"What?" There was no way in hell I was going to hold a conversation with him.
"I wasn't trying to fight with you earlier." I scoffed. He couldn't have been serious. "I just thought that you thought that we thought you would be really dodgy coming from Fleeting and Richmond. I was trying to point out we weren't like that."
"Then why were you being so defensive?"
"I wasn't. I was trying to send, um… what d'you call them? Those message things." I raised an eyebrow.
"Subliminal messages?"
"Yeah. You were the one who came up with the fight!" I thought back. I suppose I had been a little bit argumentative. I chewed my bottom lip and stared intently at the foamy sink.
"Oh, well, yeah. Sorry." As much as I tried, I couldn't make it sound sincere.

Whenever I think or realise that I'm wrong then I get really embarrassed and quite shy. This can be very difficult when other people are abusing the fact that you're wrong and you've lost all courage to stop them.

I was too busy being embarrassed at first to notice the small drops of water hitting my cheek. Liam had wiped the excess water from the plates on his hands and had now proceeded to flick water at me.
"Do you mind?"
"No. Do you?" his cheeky grin had forced me to smirk back at him.
"Yeah I do a bit."
"What are you going to do about it?" He punctuated his question with another splash of water to my face. This time from the sink itself.

"You wouldn't want to know, O'Donovan!" I turned back to the sink, an evil plot playing on my mind. All it would take was another- "LIAM!" spatter of water to the face.

I grabbed the nearest tea towel, dunked it in the sink, and before he knew what was happening, shoved the sopping cloth down the front of his t-shirt and ran off.
"Sophie!" I couldn't tell if he sounded mad or not. Still, Tracy was coming through the front door; so I took no chances and bolted through. Glancing back I saw Liam appear at the doorway, smiling. I didn't want to get caught though, as he held the same tea towel, creating a puddle on the floor.
"Sophie Timely! Just you wait!" Not wanting to wait and see what he was going to do, I put my head down and sprinted towards the low roof of the garage.

I totally misjudged how long it would take me to get up and over it. I had one leg dangling as I hoisted myself up onto the roof. But Liam grabbed my ankle, and before I could do anything about it; I came crashing down into his arms and a sopping wet tea towel was rubbed all over my face and hair.
"You know, running mascara is such a good look on you!"
"I bet." I was becoming more and more aware of the fact that Liam's arms were under my legs and around my middle.
"Um, do you want to put me down now? Not that I'm not grateful for your valiant attempt to stop me from climbing on the roof."
And then he blushed. Actually full out, red-in-the-face, blushed.
"Oh! Erm, yeah! Sorry..." As he put me down I had to almost physically repress the urge hug him. I don't even know why. Horrified at my thought of hugging Liam, especially for no reason, I straightened out my damp shirt that had ridden up a bit from climbing, and swiftly made my way back towards the house with my head held high.
Sometimes I just don't do myself any favours.

"They didn't believe me. No, they didn't believe me, do do do!" A little bit of Johnny Mercer always got me in the mood for a little Edwardian research. I had decided to do an illustrated diary of my great, great grandfather's life, up to and including his death in 1918, two weeks before the war ended. Well, I think it was him. My Nan had a picture of him and a name I noticed he was holding the same pocket watch as my brother's. Nobody knew anything about him, or his wife. And I couldn't ask my Nan because I only found the photo when we were clearing out her flat before her funeral. So he might be a great, great relation of some sorts, but I like to think of him as my great, great granddad.

I was a tracing a pattern for a 1906 tea dress when there was a knock on the door.
"Come in!" I turned to see who it was. Harry was there clutching a bag of what appeared to be grass, and the ever present Jeff. "Hi Harry, can I help you?"
"Me and Jeff want to have dinner with you." It took all my resolve not to correct his grammar mistake.
"Dinner? But we've already had it!" I could see where this was going, but I could tell he wanted to explain and tell me what to do, so I went along with it.
"Giraffes eat later. I've got Jeff's dinner here and he likes me to pretend that I'm eating with him. But tonight we want you too." he had stepped over the threshold of my bedroom and looked around. I couldn't tell if he was scared or mesmerised by my decorating.
On the piece of wall above my head I had stuck pictures of my mum my sister, various family shots (I had cut my dad out), and in the middle was the latest photo of my brother and the dog that was apparently very fond of him in the camp.
On other parts of the room were countless pictures that I had drawn, cut out or copied from various scenes in history. To someone who looked at it at a glance would probably be creeped out.

Having regained his senses he thrust the bag of grass at me and declared he was going to get the plates. So he wasn't that terrified then.
He returned soon after with three plastic plates, a yellow, orange and pink one.
"I didn't know your favourite colour, but I got pink because Carmen said girls like pink."
"Well some of them do, and I like pink, but I don't have a favourite colour!"
"I see you got to have tea with Jeff this evening." I looked up and Liam was leaning on my doorframe.
"I see that you've put on a clean shirt and come to my room to stalk me!"
"Nope, I was merely trying to find where the lost grandmother was, the music was coming from in here so she must be hiding.
"Very funny." Liam must do this a lot because Harry hadn't turned a hair; he instead passed me the pink plate of grass. Liam in the meantime had pressed the button on my iPod to see what was playing. "Do you mind?"
"Kinda, who listens to this stuff?"
"Me."
"I don't even know who half of these people are!"
"Oh well, it's not your iPod, and I do!" You know those thoughts I had of hugging him earlier? Yeah; they were completely gone now.
"No, seriously; who are the Andrew Sisters? Are they really underground?"
"Well, two of them are six feet under!" I had to laugh when he dropped my iPod as if it encased their bodies.
"Erm, how about I take this," he proceeded to tentatively pick it back up, "and put some music on it?"
He had obviously never heard real music.
"It has music on it."
"Sophie, would you like some more?" As small as he was, Harry couldn't have sounded any more like an old man at that moment and I had to bite my lip from laughing outright. Liam just laughed.
"You know Harry? I'm kind of full, but it was a very pleasant dinner, thank you!"
"Okay, bye then!"
"How do you do that?"
"Do what Liam?" I was doing nothing to hide the annoyance in my voice.
"Take everything so seriously?" I scoffed.
"I do not!"
"Yeah you do." Liam was quite at home in my bedroom, leaning on my bed frame, scanning through all my songs on my iPod. "Okay the only song I've actually heard of on here is Pack Up Your Troubles, but it's not even the right version!"
"Oh, yeah, I have the "rewrote for general sale", I couldn't find the marching tune anywhere!" He shot me a look that immediately told me I was beginning to ramble about something that wasn't right, in his eyes. "What?"
"I meant the Eliza Doolittle one."
"That? Ugh, hate that song." I took my iPod and put it back in the dock. "Look, you don't think this is a good song?" I flicked through until Oh! Johnny Oh! came on.
"Wasn't that in Narnia?"
"Yep! But it was written in the 1910's. It's about this boy who wasn't able to go to war, and because of that the girls all went crazy for him, even though he wasn't much of a looker."
"I don't get it." Trust him.
"They wanted to have sex with him because there was no one else around!" Immediately a huge cloud of confusion covered his face.
"But I thought they were all prim and proper back then?"
"Well, unless people didn't get to hear about it, anything went!"
"So to make sure they didn't hear about it, they wrote a song about it?" I shrugged and said:
"Well, the sisters were American, and they didn't mind so much. It has to be said the British were really uptight!"

A/N

So I am alive...

I have basically slept my summer away. In between learning lines for Helena in the school play (Midsummer Night's Dream) and preparing for an audition (I got the part, Jill in the Panto "Mother Goose, COME SEE IT!) and trying not to become glow in the dark
with sun burn, I have written this. And I felt bad about the last two chapters being so short that I wanted it to be long!

But I usually fell asleep writing it (you have no idea how many times I have woken up with my phone stuck to my face!). But it's here now, so please review; even if it is just to yell at me for being so slow, and you're also very welcome to throw virtual rotten fruit at me. I will take it with my head bowed. Over my laptop/phone. Writing the next chapter. :D I WILL TRY TO BE GOOD! So yeah, I'm gonna stop now...