Chapter 30
CAL
Friday night, and the pub is packed the way it only gets in January when everyone's hiding from the cold and cabin fever has settled into bones.
Our booth is the usual arrangement: Ramsey and Poppy on one side, Rome and Erin on the other, Lily tucked beside Erin. I'm next to Ramsey, across from Lily, the standard three and a half feet of table between us that might as well be an ocean.
Ramsey has his arm around Poppy, his fingers tracing absent patterns on her shoulder while she leans into him laughing at something Erin said. His mouth presses to her temple mid-laugh, automatic, and she doesn't even register it because it's so constant it's become invisible.
Rome has Erin tucked under his arm, his hand on her thigh visible above the table, and every now and then he leans over and murmurs something against her ear that makes her smile go wide and private.
He does this openly, casually, because Rome Moreland does not give a single damn who watches him love his woman.
I sit across from Lily and keep my hands on my fucking beer.
She's wearing something dark and fitted tonight, her hair down around her shoulders, and there's a spot on her neck just below her ear where I put my mouth this morning. I can see it from here if I look, which I'm trying not to do and failing at intervals of about forty-five seconds.
"Stop looking at her." Ramsey's voice is low enough that only I can hear it, his arm still around Poppy, his eyes still on the table, his beer still in his hand. "You got a death wish?"
"It's physically impossible," I confess, because it is. I'm not made to look away from her. The strain of doing it gets worse every day.
"Try harder."
"I am trying," I hiss back. "This is me fucking trying."
Trying and failing, miserably, catastrophically, in full view of anyone paying attention.
I am next to two couples touching openly, existing openly, loving openly.
And I'm sitting here with my friends pretending I don't know what Lily's skin tastes like at three in the morning, pretending I hadn't held her face and watched her sleep eighteen hours ago.
Pretending she's Rome's little sister and nothing else while my chest cracks wider with every minute.
Lily is talking to Poppy about the bachelorette, her hands moving, her eyes bright. She looks happy, but her smile is thinner than it used to be. I've been watching it fade by degrees over the last few weeks, the wattage dimming so slowly that nobody else would notice.
I notice because I can't look away. Every now and then, when conversation pulls everyone else's attention away for a second, her eyes find mine across the table and stay there. The hunger in them is something she used to hide better.
I'm furious at the booth arrangement. At the distance.
At the pretending. At the fact that Ramsey can kiss Poppy's temple in front of God and everyone but I can't put my hand over Lily's without calculating the risk first, without running the math on who's watching and what they might see and whether Rome's angle of vision includes the space between our fingers.
I'm tired. Deep-to-my-bones tired, and it's not about work or sleep or anything that rest could fix. It's about hiding. About performing a version of myself that doesn't include her. About sitting three feet away from the woman I want and pretending she's not the center of every thought I have.
She catches my eye again, angled through her lashes mid-sentence with Poppy. Half a second. Gray eyes, warm mouth, the faintest pull at the corner of her lips that only I can read.
I love her.
The thought arrives without ceremony, undramatic, just a fact dropping into place with quiet finality.
I love her. I'm in love with her.
I've been in love with her for months, maybe longer, and I called it everything else because calling it what it was meant admitting I was exactly the man my father was.
It meant admitting that the woman I loved was leaving, and that nothing about that changed just because my heart had made up its mind.
I love Lily Moreland, and the timing is catastrophic. The most inconvenient feeling in the most inconvenient place with the most inconvenient person.
The reasons why I'm wrong for her are still the same. I'm still a simple firefighter in a small town who still lives and will forever live with his dad, in the house where my mother died. I have nothing to offer her, but a life smaller than the one she's been building toward since she was a kid.
But I want to keep her forever. Here, in this town, in my house, in my bed, in my car with her playlists and her bare feet on my dashboard.
I want to cook her breakfast and drive her to work and watch her argue with my father about everything until we're all old and gray and Dad is telling stories about Mom to our kids.
Our kids. I'm thinking about kids? I'm losing my mind, lost it months ago probably, there is no more doubt about that.
My beer is warm. I haven't touched it in twenty minutes.
"Cal." Lily's voice cuts across the table, pulling me out of my own head. "You haven't touched your beer. Want some water?"
I hate when she calls me Cal. I understand the distance she's faking in front of everyone, the performance we're both giving, but I hate it anyway. I'm so lost in her that I'll take whatever she throws my way, even the wrong name, even the casualness that keeps us safe.
"No, baby, I'm okay."
The second the words leave my mouth, I know what I've done.
Her face says it all, eyes going wide, lips parting. I’m having an out-of-body experience. I'm watching it happen from somewhere outside myself, noticing how everyone at the table goes still. Everyone processing what I just said at different speeds.
Poppy's hand freezes on her glass. Ramsey closes his eyes briefly, a man watching a car accident in slow motion and knowing he can't stop it. Erin turns to Lily with worried eyes. Lily stares at me, her expression caught somewhere between horror and surrender.
I keep my eyes on her, but I don't need to see Rome's face to know what it's doing. I know what Rome looks like when he's angry. I know every suspicion he'd swallowed over the last year confirming itself at the very moment.
He stands up. No announcement. No scene. Just pushes back from the booth and walks out, his coat still hanging on the back of his seat, the door swinging shut behind him before any of us can move.
Erin reaches for his arm and misses, her fingers closing on empty air.
Lily starts to get up, and I see the panic in her face, the desperate need to follow, to fix, to explain. I stand first, crossing to her side of the booth before she can slide out.
"Stay here." Her eyes are wide and scared when they meet mine, and I lean down and press my mouth to her forehead, not caring anymore who sees. "It's going to be okay."
Her hand comes up and grips my wrist, holding on for one second before she forces herself to let go.
I grab Rome's jacket and follow him out the door.
I find him on the sidewalk, hands in fists at his sides, facing the street. His breath makes clouds in the January cold.
He's not pacing, not moving at all. Just standing there, perfectly still. The stillness is worse than if he'd been throwing punches. I can work with punches. I don't know what to do with this.
I stop next to him and hold out his jacket. He grabs it with force, shoving his arms through the sleeves with angry, hurried movements that speak louder than anything.
"How long?"
"Since summer."
He lets out a curse aimed at the empty street.
"You promised me."
"I know."
"You looked me in the eye and you promised."
"I know, man. I know."
His face in the lamplight is exactly what I expected and still hard to take when he turns to me. Hurt underneath the anger. Betrayal underneath the hurt. This man who doesn't let people in had let me in, and I had taken the one thing he'd asked me not to touch.
"I tried." I owe him honesty. "I know it doesn't look like it. I know from where you're standing it looks like I said one thing and did another, and you're right. But I tried, man. For a year. I lived my entire life around staying away from her."
I force myself to hold his unbelieving stare. "She tried too. We both tried, and it didn't work."
I betrayed him and I hate that. If he wants to punch me, I'll let him. If he wants to hate me, I'll let him do that, too. He was my friend and I hurt him.
"She's twenty-two," he says finally, like it's a mantra, like saying it will make it mean something.
"She is."
"And you're almost thirty."
"I am."
"You've got nothing to say about that?"
"I've said everything there is to say about it to myself, for months," I say steadily, though frustration coils at that.
"But she's a grown woman, Rome. And the age gap is the same as yours and Erin's. You know that."
I watch him fight with it, watch the argument he wants to make crumble against math he can't dispute. He knows it.
The anger leaves his face in stages. First the heat, then the tension in his jaw, then the stiffness in his shoulders. What replaces it is worse. He looks tired, like a man who'd been carrying something heavy for a very long time and just been told it didn't belong to him anyway.
"She has a future, Cal." His voice is quieter now, stripped of the edge, almost gentle. "Medical school is just the start of a very long, grueling career that takes her away from here. She's worked for it since she was a kid. She's so close."
"I know."
"Whatever you two have, it ends here. When she leaves, it ends. You don't ask her to stay because that girl is one word away from wanting to stay here. You don't become the reason she gives up what she's been building."
Each word hits in the exact place that was already bleeding, because Rome isn't wrong. I've been telling myself the same thing for months, lying awake at night running the same calculations.
"I'm sorry I hurt you," I tell him, and I mean it with everything I have. "I'm sorry I broke my word and that is the whole truth."
I respect him, this man who gave up everything for the woman we both love.
"But I'm not sorry about her. There's no version of this where she and I exist in the same world and don't happen."
The cold presses in around us. Inside the pub, someone laughs and someone else raises their voice over the noise, and the normal world keeps going while the two of us stand on a sidewalk and rearrange the terms of a friendship.
"If you hurt her," Rome says finally, his voice low and certain, "I won't have a conversation about it."
"I know."
He nods once, pulls his jacket tighter around himself, and turns and walks down the sidewalk without looking back.
I watch him go until he disappears around the corner before I go back inside. Erin is already standing, pulling on her coat. She knows where she needs to be.
"Go," I tell her. "He headed down toward Main Road."
She squeezes my arm as she passes, quick and wordless, and then she's gone, chasing the man she loves down a cold street.
Lily is watching me from the booth, her face pale, searching mine for damage, trying to read how bad it was.
I hold out my hand. "Come on."
She takes it. I pull her up and out of the booth and don't let go.
Her fingers lace through mine, and I walk her through the pub and out the door and into the cold night holding her hand in full view of anyone who wants to see it.
I'm done hiding. Done sitting across from her at tables and pretending the distance is fine. Done keeping my hands on my beer when they belong on her.
The walk to her apartment doesn't take many minutes. Neither of us speaks the entire way home. Inside, I lock the door behind us and turn to her. She's already there, already reaching for me, her cold hands on my face, pulling me down.
"Is he okay?" she asks against my mouth.
"He will be. Erin's got him."
"Callahan…"
"I know." I pull her closer, as close as I can get her. "But he loves you. Everything will be okay."
"Are you okay?"
I kiss her instead of answering, because the answer is complicated and my mouth on hers is simple.
I pick her up and she wraps around me, her legs circling my waist, her arms around my neck, and I carry her to the bedroom.
I love her. I love her and she's leaving, and Rome is right, and I'm going to let her go when the time comes because that's what she deserves. I would rather lose her to a life she chose than keep her in one she didn't.
But not tonight. Tonight she's here and I'm here and the door is locked and I have hours before morning makes everything real again.
There is so much I want to say to her. Things like:
I can't stand the idea of you leaving
I can't stand the thought of not kissing you
I can't stand not seeing you at my house, in my kitchen, arguing with my dad about woodworking techniques you know nothing about.
So I redirect. I pour all my hurt into something else, something I can give her that won't shatter us both.
I undress her slowly. Every piece, every layer, my mouth following my hands across her skin. I kiss the freckles scattered across her face, the birthmark below her left breast, the curve of her hip where my handprint had been and has faded now to nothing.
I'll leave another one. As many as she'll let me. Some record of my hands on her body that will outlast whatever is coming.
All I want is to sink into her, feel her as close as I possibly can. Instead, I strip off my own clothes and get under the covers with her.
She pulls my face to hers and kisses me, and I can taste salt and realize she's crying.
"You're everything," I breathe, the words unplanned. "You know that? Every fucking thing, Lily."
I hate every tear she sheds just as much as I love her, which is completely, catastrophically, without any hope of recovery.
Her hand is over my heart, her fingers drawing patterns I can't follow. Some secret language written on my skin that only she knows how to read.
"Rome will come around," she murmurs against my chest.
"I know."
"He's just scared."
"I know."
"Are you scared?"
I press my lips to her hair and breathe her in.
"Terrified," I admit.
She tips her head back and meets my eyes, her eyes still damp.
“Me too."
I kiss her forehead as she leans back against me.
Her small apartment is warm and quiet and ours for a few more hours. Outside, winter presses against the windows, waiting for morning to make everything real again. But in here, morning feels very far away.
I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry for a single second with her. Not for the sneaking or the lying or the promises I broke. I'm not sorry for falling in love with her, even knowing it's going to end, even knowing I'll have to let her go.
I close my eyes and listen to her fall asleep in my arms, which is and has always been the only sound that makes my whole body go quiet.
I hold on. For now, I hold on.
And burn.