Chapter Nineteen
Graham
W hat are we doing here?” I mutter, pulling open the door and stepping into the gym. I spot her immediately on the other side of the room.
Already, my breathing is ragged from the sight of Lily in a white tank top and black athletic shorts. I thought she was kidding when she texted me this morning to challenge me to a boxing match at In the Ring.
Got another challenge for ya, George, her text said . If you’re not too scared. Or you can forfeit this challenge and take the hit. There are some nice apartments in Portsmouth.
Not completing a challenge is out of the question. Not with the wedding fast approaching. Lily knows she can’t literally force me to leave town. But what will happen when she realizes her plan to drive me so crazy that I move of my own accord doesn’t work? Now, I’m wondering if this is her way of forcing us to duke out our differences once and for all.
We haven’t seen each other much of late. I’ve even found myself missing her ridiculous challenges. After the fluffernutter cookie incident, I thought she was softening toward me. But after the night we almost kissed while we danced at the Regency Ball, we now seem to be avoiding each other at all costs.
Walking toward a small bench in the corner of the gym, I drop my bag with a little more force than necessary. At the sound of the thud it makes, Lily pivots toward me. A smirk flashes across her pretty face. The look tempts me to kiss her for the reminder she just gave to my heart that I haven’t lost all of myself after all.
“George, you made it,” she says.
I should be frightened at her tone—a little giddy tinged with a sense of adventure—but my muscles clench in anticipation instead.
“Warm up,” she instructs.
I unzip my hoodie, carefully laying it over my gym bag. Glancing up discreetly, I watch Lily watching me in the mirror. She doesn’t realize that I can see her, so I take an extra moment to arrange and fold the sleeves of the sweatshirt. Her eyes take on a dreamy quality, as if she’s doing a math equation, and my arms and shoulders hold all the answers.
Interesting.
It would have been smarter not to show up today. I don’t trust myself not to pull her close and whisper all the things that feel as if they could climb out of my skin when I’m around her. I want to let the burn of her kiss sear me right through and push away my fear. I want to wrap her up in forgiveness and love for the rest of my life.
But that’s the problem. I’m drowning in a one-sided love that will always be more empty than full until she chooses to admit what she has felt all along. I need more than an explanation; I need action. I know she has something in her system that haunts her about our time together.
Everything I feel radiating from her might as well be worth nothing if she can’t admit it to my face. I know she won’t be making a confession of love for me today. The second I walked through the door and saw her expression, I knew I was in for it. Still, I’ll admit that the satisfying thud of her gloves as they meet the weight of the punching bag again and again while her ponytail bounces behind her is distracting and wildly attractive.
I’ve never pictured her in this environment, even with her snarky hints that she’s capable of taking someone down on the mat. I’ve heard her telling other people that she’s happier than ever now that she’s getting her aggression out. But I’ve yet to see her in action. As I watch her now, it’s clear that, despite my presence, Lily is focused on maximizing each and every punch. Her gloves land hard on the bag, rattling it in its foundation. I don’t know whether to applaud Edgar for his training or flat out level him to the ground (or try to).
I’m not a violent man by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel the instant bristle toward anything (or anyone) that has taken me away from her over the past few years.
In short, I’m in for it today.
My approach startles Lily. She knocks into the bag, and it swings back a bit, lightly hitting her in return before she’s steady again on her feet. I’d laugh, but there’s nothing funny about what’s about to go down in this space.
Edgar—who has a good bit of weight and muscle on me, might I add—walks out from the direction of the lockers just then, and Lily gives him a wave. Instantly, I want to add him to the list of men I’d level, if necessary.
“Hey, Edgar,” she calls.
He flashes her a grin, and it’s confirmed that I hate him. “Hey, Lils,” Edgar replies with an easy familiarity. He casts a cool glance my way and gives me a brief nod before returning his attention to her. My hands clench into fists. It shouldn’t surprise me, given how gloriously sharp and fiery Lily can be, that another man might be interested in her. Of course he wants to stay on her good side.
Rolling back my shoulders, I try to muster the confidence of a man who was asked to be here today. I’m not just some out-of-towner who hasn’t ever worked out. I work out every day. Surely, today’s challenge should be more than manageable—I think.
Lily pulls the Velcro tighter on her gloves. She’s gearing up to go into battle, and while the punching bag is her current target, I wonder if her aggression toward the bag is about me.
I approach gingerly, my hands working to adjust the boxing gloves I pulled out of my bag. Are they brand-new? Yes. Did I buy them specifically so that Lily couldn’t hassle me about borrowing a pair? Also, yes.
She motions to the second punching bag a few feet away and continues to hit one of them. At the moment, this may be a warm-up, but the stiffness in her limbs tells me she’s been waiting for this conversation for a long time.
“So,” I try to begin casually, “when exactly did you take up boxing?”
She huffs out a laugh and picks up the pace of her punches. If I don’t start soon, she’s going to be exhausted before I even warm up. I catch her glance over at me, her eyes doing a quick scan from my hair to the mat and then back as she continues punching like the bag personally offends her.
“I’m pretending these are filled with chocolates, and if I hit them hard enough, they’ll fly out like they’re shooting from a confetti cannon,” she replies in all seriousness. “And I started taking lessons a couple of years ago.”
Interesting. The timeline checks out for when she left my life.
“Well, I’ve heard that exercise can increase endorphins,” I say. The sound of her gloves hitting the bag is the only response. “Help the immune system.” Punch. “Lessen one’s anxiety.” Punch. Punch.
Truthfully, that’s why I started an intentional fitness plan after we broke up. But she doesn’t need to know that tidbit. “So, did you ever go exploring around the world like we . . .” I stop with an awkward pause. “Correction, you planned?”
Where did that come from? I punch the bag in front of me just to do something with my hands. The force of the bag connecting with my glove brings me a measure of relief. My last comment made me wince. Now, I think I may need to install one of these in my apartment or get a membership here if this is as therapeutic as I feel like it could be.
“No. I had other things come up. But I explore in other ways too,” Lily replies to my question forcefully, the reverberation of each punch accentuating different parts of her words.
“So do I,” I pant, trying to keep up with her. My muscles are warm, loosening with each passing minute. I feel the sweat across my forehead, my arms straining at the exertion.
Being in the same space as Lily sends my mind reeling. I wasn’t kidding when I said I wanted to get her in the ring, but her determination to excel is my undoing. She sets her sights on something and goes for it, no questions asked. It hurts to realize that, in the end, she failed to do that for me.
“And now, you keep Rafe out of trouble.” She pauses, wiping the sides of her eyes with the back of her arm. The gloves look oversized on her, as if she got her hand stuck in something far too big but doesn’t mind that she got caught.
I reply with an easy smile and walk to where she stands. “He’s my best friend. I like protecting him.” I give the bag between us a quick jab, facing her, my own side of the gym abandoned. “Besides, he makes it easy. Especially because he is in love.”
Lily pauses a bit too long at the word. It hovers between us, and I freeze, staring into her deep eyes. She uses the break in my defenses to land a punch on the bag that knocks me back an inch. I know it’s only because I was distracted, but I let her take the win just the same.
We seem to have moved beyond the warm-up into full workout territory. She picks up the pace so much that I look over at Edgar for an indication of what to do. Is this even safe?
Her jabs at the bag end abruptly. Without a word, she hops into the ring in the center of the space—the boxing elephant in the room—and gives a jerk of her head to motion for me to follow. The slight give from the padding of the floor canvas takes some adjustment as it absorbs more than the shock of our movements. Lily taps my gloves before lifting her own up to chin height. She starts to throw punches just as my brain catches up with her intention to strike my hands through my gloves.
As the sound of her jabs reverberates throughout the space, Edgar glances up. He shrugs and goes back to typing on his computer. The fact that he knows her enough to know this isn’t abnormal makes me swing back in time to receive a punch from Lily so hard that I almost stumble backward from the force. Meanwhile, Lily’s arms are moving like tiny machines.
“How are you doing this?” I yell over the noise, not even trying to hide both my concern and appreciation of her tenacity.
Hesitantly, I step toward her again, hoping it’s not my face she has pictured each time she’s practiced this little exercise. Ensuring that all my best bits, besides my face, are hidden, I look around my gloves cautiously.
“That’s not.” Grunt. “The point.” Punch .
My heart is racing so quickly I think it might punch out of my chest. She gives an additional grunt, hitting my right glove again, this time with enough force that it stings and almost knocks her out on the rebound. The strength she has is otherworldly.
Lily motions with her gloved hands. “Can you help? Stay steady for me, please?”
“How often are you here, beating the crap out of something?” I reply. I’m panting, my sweat dripping to the floor.
“I told you. If I’m not loving you . . .” she begins then pauses abruptly.
“You took up boxing,” I state, no emotion in my voice. This is why I’ve been bothered by the whole situation. Once, she jokingly remarked that if she weren’t loving me, she’d be boxing. And here she is. “Boxing or loving me, right?”
I really don’t think I want an answer, but sometimes I think I romanticize what we had. She doesn’t spare me a glance but pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, the light sheen of sweat on her causing the shorter tendrils of her hair to stick to the sides of her face and the curve of her neck. I swallow. Lily goes back to punching, but I’ve had enough. It’s time to lay the truth bare.
“Why did you walk away, Lily?” The question is spoken in a low tone, but she hears it anyway. She freezes, gloves pressed together.
“Because I’m a mess,” she replies tensely.
“Not true. And not enough.” I shake my head. By some stroke of good fortune, the gym is empty, except for Edgar, and he’s now talking quietly on the phone across the room. “I need a reason. Please give me a reason.”
I’m practically begging, but my analytical brain has repeated the day she left me so many times that I need some relief before I go mad. I need someone to give me another angle, another way to see why our relationship failed. I think she’s the only person who can.
“You did nothing wrong,” Lily insists.
I shake my head again.
“Is that still not enough?” she counters with fire in her eyes. They’re turning a darker shade of grey as my words hit a nerve. I won’t let her get off quite so easy. Not after all this time. I’m not seeking these answers to hurt her. I’m seeking them to give us both a chance to move on.
I pin her with my gaze. “You can’t apologize for the wreckage without telling me the cause.” I’m breathing heavily, and I hate it. “Were we . . . too much?” She shakes her head. “Too fast?”
Again, a head shake.
“Too slow?” My brain struggles as it tries to compute what’s happening.
Tears brim in Lily’s eyes, but there’s no hostility. If I had to guess, I’d think the expression on her face looks like fear. But that’s impossible. How could my seemingly fearless, brave, spitfire of a woman be afraid of me? I release a sigh.
“Too . . . afraid?”
Her eyes flash upward. I know I’ve found the thread of truth. My mind races as my stomach fills with dread.
“Of me?” Instantly, I deflate, my hands dropping to my sides. “Did I do something?”
I feel as if I could vomit just thinking of a woman being afraid of me. I’ve witnessed that dynamic in my mother’s relationships with men. I vowed never to allow fear to be something a woman associates with me.
“No,” Lily hastens to assure me. “No.”
She brushes tears from her eyes, and I want to take her in my arms. But it’s not the moment. Not until we get to the bottom of it all.
“Not of you.” Her shoulders tremble as she shifts her frame from side to side.
I sense there’s so much more going on that she isn’t saying, but I can’t do anything without the truth. We’re stuck in a holding pattern. While I had called the time of death on our relationship a couple of years ago, being thrown together with her these past couple of months almost makes me believe in us again. When I held her the night of the Regency Ball—when I nearly kissed her—it made me feel as if I were coming out of hibernation.
Her answer now causes pain to shoot throughout my heart and my limbs. I know what it’s like when Lily confides in me, the look in her eyes when she’s fully with me, and the feeling of her body melting into mine when she’s in my arms. She ran in fear once, and then I repeated the mistake at the ball. I’m terrified to admit, even to myself, that I wish I hadn’t chucked the engagement ring I once purchased to offer her.
Now, I see what I didn’t see before. Lily is wearing herself out. Framed by her furrowed brow, dark circles hover under her eyes. Seeing her in pain, knowing she’s been afraid of . . . something that I triggered, gives me the courage to make this the last time. Our friends are getting married, and this battle between tension and hope has gone on long enough.
“Lily, I’m gonna call it. You win.”
“What? No.” Without realizing it, she reaches for me like she did that day at the moving truck. While all I’ve ever wanted since I turned down her explanation was for her to need me in her life again like she did long ago, this isn’t how I want it to occur.
I nod my head in affirmation. “I used to pride myself on my winning streak in the courtroom, but I think this may be a case I’ll never resolve. If you’re not ready to tell me why you felt it best to walk away from what we had, I’m finally—really—okay with it.”
To be clear, I’m not okay with it, but Lily’s well-being will always be more important than my own. It must be.
“What about our challenges?”
I feel myself sink a bit. I’ve fallen for this tiny town. I can see myself living here long term. But I’ve never not fallen for the woman before me even more. I know things can’t continue this way. Something has to change for us both.
“I’ll look for a new place soon. Maybe Liam or someone in town will want my current space. It’s a nice apartment.”
She wraps her arms around herself and stares out the back window. It has a glimpse of the river rushing by us, upset and high from a recent spring storm.
“It’s okay, Lily,” I continue. “Let’s just leave it here. Because I’m . . . tired.” I turn away from her to hide the emotion I feel creeping across my face. I duck to slink through the ropes and down from the platform when her voice cuts through the sharp air.
“No!”
I freeze in my tracks.
“Don’t you dare , George!” Her jump from the ring and the sound of her footsteps hurry to follow. She pops up in front of me, cheeks red from emotion. “We shook on it!”
“It wasn’t a binding contract.”
“It was to me.” Her eyes flare.
“Lily, we can’t keep doing this. Do you understand that? Can you respect that?” I see when the thrill of the fight hits her system.
She lifts her chin in defiance. “We almost kissed.”
A figurative punch hits my stomach. “We . . . yes, okay?”
“And then you ran away.”
“I didn’t—okay yes, but I only walked out quickly . . .” There’s something else she isn’t adding. With everything that has already been exposed, I let it slide.
“You’re not quitting, George. We still have the wedding to get through . . . so this isn’t over.” She says the last part of the sentence with extra force, her voice a hoarse whisper as Edgar strides over to the main part of the gym, carrying his laptop in one hand.
I stuff down the hope that sparks in my heart, releasing an unamused laugh instead. She’s got me again. “Fine, but Lily? This is the last time.”
She glances over at Edgar and then to my chest, never making eye contact and no doubt trying to assess just how much he can hear of our conversation. “Look, you wanna say I messed up? Say it. I know I did.”
A drop of sweat falls from the side of her forehead and blends in with a tear that slips out. She goes to brush it with the back of her hand but can’t quite catch it from the awkwardness of the gloves. “And I’m paying for it. But you messed up too.”
Before I can overthink it, I rip off my gloves and throw them to the floor. My hand lifts to cup the side of her jaw. I use my thumb to wipe away the rogue tear. She doesn’t fight me, the grey in her eyes overtaking any lavender edges.
“Lily, what are you talking about?” My eyes scan hers, and I watch as she squeezes them shut, another tear slipping out at the edges. She hates to cry, which is how I know this goes soul deep.
“I’m just so . . . mad.”
The world keeps spinning, but I’m reeling in my own universe. The force of her words pushes me back as if I just went from zero to eighty on a roller coaster. Not that I’ve been on many of those. But the one time, yeah, that’s similar to this feeling. Rather than follow up on what she just said, she goes back to punching the bag with more force than before .
“Sweetheart, you’re going to hurt yourself if you keep doing that.”
“Edgar!” Lily yells, pulling us out of the moment. He pokes his head around his computer screen precariously hovering on the edge of a fallen punching bag that I’m pretty sure he uses as a makeshift desk. “I need five.”
Somehow, Edgar knows what this means and is fine enough with it to walk toward the rear changing room and disappear. I turn back to her, refusing to let this moment pass if I finally have a trail of the truth to follow.
“Why are you mad?” I reach for her.
She evades my touch, turning her face away so that all I can see is the rise and fall of her shoulders.
“Lily, why are you mad?”
“Because . . . you . . . you know I lied!” She spins to face me, the force of her fiery and yet heartbroken attention enough to drop like a rock in my stomach. “You let me tell you all that crap, and you didn’t even call me on it. You just let me say it, and you walked away. You didn’t even fight for me.”
The tension in my shoulders intensifies at an unnerving rate. While I’d never yell at Lily, I’m instantly furious. I didn’t go after her? I let her go?
“Are you hearing yourself?” I ask quietly. “I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. And you walked away. You did that, Lily. And call me irrational, but you wanted me to fight for you? Would you fight for someone who told you they didn’t want you?”
Tears are streaming down her face now. I know there’s nothing I can do to wipe them away, not as emotion chokes me up too .
“I still wanted you, even though I clearly see it’s too late.” She moves toward her things piled against the wall. “Oh, and kissing you? Yeah, I never stopped wanting to do that either.”
Rather than stay here and talk it out, rather than verbally sparring with me or proving her theory incorrect by grabbing and kissing me, she grabs her bag, hands still in those oversized gloves. Without even putting on a jacket, she leaves, the thud of the door reiterating her choice.
The excuse for a door opens. Edgar sticks his head out, looking from me to the empty gym. “Is she gone?”
I move toward my bag, my limbs numb as I pick up my hoodie and pull it over my head, trying to piece together how her words have reframed my past in a matter of minutes.
“Yeah, Edgar. She’s gone.”
I use the cloth and spray to wipe down the punching bags. Edgar politely watches my every move. Maybe he isn’t such a bad guy after all. As my jealousy dissipates and the toll of what went down here sinks in, I have an overwhelming desire to go home. Picking up my gloves from the floor, I pause at the sight of a folded piece of paper discarded on the mat where Lily stood.
Reaching for it, I open it to find what looks to be a list of sorts.
1. Finish Rory’s gift.
2. Learn a French phrase for D’Artagnan.
3. Tell G the truth. (Or forgive G.)
Out of all the things that happened today, she’s already checked one off the list. And if my dreams have been any indication, we’ll need to do the same for each other more than once.