Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Livia
Then . . .
The flight home is seven hours and twenty-eight minutes long, and I spend most of it deciding whether the silhouettes on my left ankle will speak for themselves.
I have given them fifteen days to settle.
The skin around them is still faintly pink.
Not angry anymore, just new. The hawk with the hockey stick is the easy one.
Creed will understand the hawk before I even explain it.
He’ll probably look at it for too long, then pretend he isn’t affected, then touch it later when he thinks I’m asleep.
The key is the confession.
Hal gave us a key before any of us knew how to say home.
A key to his door. To his life. To the rooms he had locked against everyone before us.
I put it on my skin because some gifts are too big to carry in a pocket, and some men don't know they saved you until you show them the place where you decided to stay.
Which I have been.
Which I am.
The plane hums around me with that strange first-class hush people pay extra for, as if money can make air less recycled or time less cruel.
Halston insisted on the seat. Of course he did.
He used phrases like, ‘more comfortable,’ and ‘long flight,’ and ‘you need to sleep.’ Which were all technically valid and emotionally manipulative, because Halston has always been able to make care sound like logistics.
The flight attendant brings me sparkling water in an actual glass. I drink half of it and forget the rest exists.
My legs are tucked under a blanket. My shoes are off.
My left ankle keeps finding the cool air outside the fabric, as if the tattoo wants to announce itself before I do.
A woman across the aisle sleeps with a silk mask over her eyes.
A man two rows ahead types for five hours without blinking.
Somewhere behind me, a baby cries for seven minutes, then gives up with the dignity of a person who has realized no one here can fix existence.
I sleep for one hour total.
Maybe less.
I read the same forty pages of a book Halston mailed me for my birthday three times and absorb none of it.
The sentences look familiar. They don't enter my brain. Every time I try to focus, I see Creed’s hands.
Halston’s mouth. The Chelsea apartment. A wine glass on a coffee table.
Halston in Creed’s shirt after the night he finally told him about Annaline.
Nine days.
It’s been nine long days since that call, and it has felt both too long and not long enough.
Too long because I should have been there.
Not long enough because some part of me is terrified they learned, in my absence, how to be together without needing me in the room.
It is not a pretty fear.
It is not generous.
It sits in me anyway.
I am excited. I am nervous. I am so tired I can feel my personality losing structural integrity.
I have spent a semester abroad trying to become the version of myself who can leave and return without assuming love will punish her for going.
I have failed several times. I have succeeded twice.
I have cried in museum bathrooms, learned to order coffee without apologizing, and bought a scarf that Creed will say makes me look like I’m about to accuse someone of bad lighting.
Still, beneath all of that, one question keeps pressing its hand to my ribs.
What if I come home and the space I left behind has already closed?
The plane lands at JFK just after dusk.
The cabin lights brighten too fast. Everyone begins the same tired ritual of standing before the doors open, as if proximity to the aisle will make customs forgive them.
I stay seated because I am in first class, and apparently first class comes with the privilege of watching other people panic from a wider chair.
By the time I walk into arrivals, my body feels made of airport air and bad decisions.
Then I see him.
Halston.
I see him before he sees me.
His hands are in his pockets. He’s wearing a black coat, charcoal scarf, dark hair slightly longer than when I left, swept back in that unfair way that looks accidental only if you have never seen Halston Saint Claire near a mirror.
He is doing the guard-dog thing he does in public spaces. Scanning the room. Registering exits. Listening to announcements. Taking in luggage carts, security, strangers, distance. All of it. He does it at airports, restaurants, theaters, anywhere the world can move too fast around someone he loves.
He is unaware he is doing it.
I have watched him do it for years.
He turns his head.
He sees me.
The scanning stops.
Everything about him focuses—on me.
The relief hits so fast I almost hate him for it.
He begins to walk toward me, and I walk to him faster than I planned. Faster than a woman with dignity and a carry-on should move through arrivals. My suitcase tips once behind me. I don't care.
He opens his arms.
I walk into them.
He lifts me.
Not high. Not dramatic. Just enough that my feet leave the floor and my face presses into the warm side of his neck. His coat smells like winter, expensive wool, and Halston underneath it. Clean skin. Cedar. I close my eyes and hold on too hard.
His arms tighten around me.
One second.
Two.
Long enough for him to tell me without words that the space didn't close.
Long enough for me to believe him.
“Hi, baby,” he says into my hair.
My breath leaves me in something that is almost a laugh and almost not.
“Hi.”
He sets me down, but he doesn't step away. His eyes do the careful pass over my face that he does after travel, after long days, after foundation meetings, after any stretch of time when he has had to trust the world to return me to him intact.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Tired. Glad I’m back, but don’t ask me anything else until I am clean.”
His mouth curves. “Define clean.”
“Bathed. Out of these clothes. Plane smells gone. On our comfortable couch.”
“Done.”
He takes the suitcase handle from me.
“Halston.”
“Liv.”
“I can carry my own suitcase.”
“I know.”
He keeps walking with it anyway.
I let him because I am tired, and because he needs to carry something, and because there are forms of care I have learned not to slap out of his hand just because I am afraid I might start needing them.
Aren, the driver, is waiting at the curb.
He opens the door without comment, and I slide into the back of the car.
Halston follows, hands Arden the bag, then gets in beside me.
The partition is already up. The radio is off.
The city outside is a blur of headlights, wet pavement, and people who have no idea I am currently one emotion away from becoming a public incident.
For three seconds, neither of us speaks.
Then Halston reaches for my seat belt.
“I can—”
“I know,” he says again, and clips it into place.
His knuckles brush my hip.
That is all.
That is enough.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
The car pulls away from the curb.
The pressure of the last nine days fills the back seat.
Annaline. The call. His red eyes through a screen.
Creed saying, ‘He told me.’ Me, lying awake early in the morning with my phone against my chest, trying not to book an earlier flight because Halston said maybe and then stayed.
Because I said I would respect it, because love can’t always mean arriving immediately with a suitcase and no plan.
“Come here,” he says.
Soft.
I move before I think better of it.
His hand comes to my jaw. Mine finds the front of his coat. Our mouths meet in the center of the back seat, and the first kiss is too gentle for the way I have missed him.
I make a sound of protest against his mouth.
He understands.
Of course he does.
The second kiss is not gentle.
His hand slides into my hair, careful of the pins, then not carefully at all when I pull him closer.
My mouth opens under his, and his control slips by one breath, one angle, one warm, devastating press of his tongue against mine.
The car turns, and my shoulder bumps the leather seat.
He follows me there, one hand braced beside my head, the other at my waist, holding me without trapping me.
I kiss him like I’m angry at the ocean that was between us.
I kiss him like I’m sorry I wasn’t there.
I kiss him like I need his body to answer the question my mind has been too tired to stop asking.
Are we still us?
His mouth says yes.
His hands say yes.
The way he stops, forehead near mine, breathing hard and trying to keep himself decent in the back of a car with a driver on the other side of a partition says yes too.
“I missed you,” he says.
The words are simple.
They wreck me anyway.
“I missed you too.”
His thumb moves along my cheek. “I’m sorry.”
That makes me pull back.
“For what?”
“For telling Creed without you.”
I shake my head before he finishes. “No.”
“Liv.”
“No.” I touch his face with both hands because sometimes Halston needs to be held in place before he can hear love. “I wish I had been there. That’s true. I hate that I wasn’t. That’s also true. But I am glad you told him. I am glad one of us could hold you when you finally said it.”
His eyes close for half a second.
When they open, they are bright.
“You always do that,” he says.
“What?”
“Make grief less humiliating.”
I swallow.
The car moves through Queens toward the bridge. Outside, the city starts becoming itself in pieces. Signs. Brake lights. The low dark stretch of road leading back to Manhattan. Inside the car, Halston’s hand is still at my waist.
“It is not humiliating,” I say.
“It feels that way.”
“I know.” I lean in and kiss the corner of his mouth. “That doesn't make it true.”
His breath catches.
There. A small break in the armor. A place where I can press my mouth and remind him he is alive.
I kiss him again.
This one is slower.
Deeper.
Less frantic, which somehow makes it more intimate.
His fingers spread against my waist. Mine slide under his coat, over the expensive sweater beneath it, feeling him through layers I suddenly resent.
He makes a low sound into my mouth, and every part of me remembers the bed in Chelsea, the couch, the way Creed’s hand looks against Halston’s neck, the way our life has been waiting in rooms we keep entering one at a time.
I pull back because if I don’t, I will climb into his lap before the Midtown Tunnel, and Aren deserves better than that.
Maybe.
Halston’s eyes drop to my mouth.
“Clean,” he says, voice rough.
“What?”
“You said clean. Bathed. Couch.”
I nod slowly. “Yes.”
“We can manage that.”
“Can we?”
His mouth curves, small and dangerous. “I am extremely competent.”
“I have missed your arrogance.”
“It has missed you too.”
I laugh, and the sound comes out shaky.
He hears that.
He always hears that.
His face softens, and the heat turns tender so quickly it almost hurts.
“Creed is waiting at home,” he says. “He just finished training and I told him it wasn’t practical to try to arrive on time.”
Home.
My eyes burn.
I hate that word. I love that word. I have spent months pretending Paris was home because my suitcase lived there and my toothbrush stood in a cup by the sink.
But home is a couch in Chelsea, Creed’s socks in places socks should never be, Halston’s legal pads on the kitchen island, and the two men I love arguing over whether I have eaten enough to qualify as an adult.
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“He misses you.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No,” Halston says. “He’s not okay. Not entirely. You were gone for too fucking long.”
I nod.
That hurts, but it also helps. Truth usually does both.
“Neither are you?” I arch an eyebrow.
“No.”
“Neither am I,” I confess.
His hand tightens at my waist.
The car moves over the wet road, and Manhattan rises ahead of us, lit and waiting and entirely too much. I look at Halston, at his tired eyes and controlled mouth, at the man who came to get me himself because he needed to be the first one I touched after landing.
I think of the tattoos on my ankle.
The hawk.
The key.
He hasn’t seen them yet.
Soon.
Not in the car.
Not while I still smell like a plane and fear.
Soon, I will show him what I planned. I will let him see that I didn't spend the semester leaving them behind. I spent it learning how to come back with proof.
Halston’s thumb brushes my cheek once.
“Tell me what you need,” he says.
The question is too gentle for the way he is looking at me. His eyes are on my mouth, then my face, then lower for half a second before he brings them back up like restraint is a muscle he has trained too well.
I look at him.
The car is dark around us. Private enough to be dangerous, not private enough for what I want. His hand is still on my face, his body angled toward mine, and every inch between us feels negotiated by people who are trying very hard not to become reckless.
“Don’t make me explain tonight.”
His jaw shifts.
Not frustration.
Want.
He nods. “Okay.”
I catch his wrist before he can pull his hand away. I press my mouth to his palm, then hold it there long enough to feel his breath change.
“Just take me home,” I whisper, “and make me feel loved.”
His eyes darken.
The whole car seems to go quieter.
Then he leans in, slow enough that I can stop him, close enough that I forget why I ever would.
“Baby,” he says against my mouth, “that I can do.”
His eyes hold mine.
Then he kisses my forehead, my cheek, the corner of my mouth.
The car keeps moving toward home.
For the first time in months, I let myself stop bracing for the part where love disappears when I'm not looking.
It is in the car with me.
It is taking me back home.