54. You Stay
you stay
alyssa
He drove me home in silence. I’d understood on the sidewalk outside the police station, with gauze taped around my hand and my calf, and a copy of my statement folded in my other fist, that when Julian said I’m taking you home, Lyss, he didn’t mean my condo, and he didn’t mean his.
The streetlights came on while we were on the highway, and I watched his profile in the dark.
He hadn’t said three sentences since the hospital.
His jaw stayed tight, and every minute or so his eyes would cut to me and back to the road.
He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other around mine.
In the many hours since he’d picked me up off the kitchen floor and held me in his arms, there hadn’t been more than a couple of minutes he wasn’t touching me.
I watched him as much as he touched me, because under all that composure, he was coming apart.
He’d held it together to get me out of his kitchen, into a hospital room, through a police station, and into his car.
He had Tre drop his car off at the hospital, since he’d ridden with me in the ambulance.
Julian was, no surprise, unshakable in a crisis.
Four steps ahead, everything already in motion.
But I knew he was holding it. I was afraid for him.
I’d been alive nine hours longer than I might have been, and the whole time, the main thing in my head was him. Whether he was okay. Whether he’d come out of this the same man. The cuts on my hand and leg weren’t what I was thinking about. He was.
He pulled into the long driveway at Belmead and killed the engine.
Then he came around, opened my door, held out his hand, and helped me up the steps with the careful patience of a man who’d been told my body had been through something and would let me know about it in the next forty-eight hours.
Unlocked the door. Took me inside. Ran me a bath.
I sat on the edge of his bed and watched him through the open bathroom door, testing the water with the inside of his wrist the way he always did, the way he’d been doing since he was a kid running baths for kids who weren’t his. He came back out.
“It’s ready, baby.”
“Come sit with me a minute.”
“The bath—”
“It can wait.”
He sat. Kept hold of my hand and looked at our hands instead of my face, and I let him, and after a while he said it without looking up.
“I’m sorry, Lyss.”
“I know you are.”
“I should’ve changed the locks. Changed the code. I run a company, I know how a passcode works, I knew better than to keep the same base. I didn’t even know she knew it. Why didn’t I see it?” He stopped. “I should’ve been there.”
“You were on a run.”
“I had a feeling all week. Couldn’t put my finger on it. I should’ve stayed home this morning, should’ve taken the drive to Belmead last night, should’ve done any one of a hundred things, and I didn’t do a single one of them. You paid the price for that.”
I turned his face to mine. “Listen to me. I’m going to talk to you like a client, because right now you need lawyer logic.
You did everything a reasonable person could do.
You ended it. You documented her. You cut off access.
You didn’t give her your passcode… she stole it.
That’s not on you. The fact that she’s sick is not on you.
” I held his eyes. “I’m telling you as somebody who knows the law. You did your job.”
“Alyssa…”
“Not done.” He closed his mouth. “You almost lost me today. And I almost lost me today, and I’m going to have a hard time with that, and so are you. I’m not carrying it by myself and I’m not letting you carry it by yourself. We carry it together. You hear me?”
He shut his eyes. “I hear you.”
“Good. Now ask me what you’ve been too scared to ask me since the kitchen.”
He looked at me a long moment. I watched him make himself do it.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” His whole body let something go. “My hand’s going to be fine, the cuts are clean, stitches out in two weeks. I’m not okay-okay. I might be jumpy, I may dream about it for a minute. But I’m alive. I’m here.” I squeezed his hand. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head, one small hard shake. “No. I’m not.”
“I know you’re not.”
“Haven’t been since I walked in and saw you on the floor… “I don’t know what to do with what I felt. Haven’t felt that since…”
He stopped, and I knew the end of that sentence the same way I’d known it when she came at me. I wasn’t going to make him say his mother’s name to finish it. I put my forehead against his and my hand at the back of his neck. “I know.”
He kissed my head and sat back. “Come on. The bath.”
He didn’t get in. He sat on the tile with his back to the wall and his knees up and held my hand over the lip of the tub, and he didn’t look away from me once.
The water was warm and soothing. He’d put the eucalyptus salts in, and the whole room smelled green and clean.
I sank to my collarbone and closed my eyes, while his thumb moved across my wrist, and about ten minutes in, the shaking started.
It came up out of nowhere. Maybe it was the warmth, the quiet, his hand, that told my body deciding it was finally safe enough to dump nine hours of adrenaline all at once.
My teeth chattered and the water went choppy around me.
It wasn’t crying. It was just my body doing what it had been holding off since seven that morning.
Julian didn’t move. Didn’t tell me it was okay, or try to lift me out. He sat on the floor with his hand around mine and let me shake. Maybe because he’d been near enough grief in his life to know a body that needs to shake should be allowed to.
It passed after a few minutes. Then he pulled the plug, held a towel open, and when I stood he wrapped me in it and picked me up like I weighed nothing. He put me in his bed, dressed me in his tshirt, pulled the covers up, and got in behind me. His arm came over me and settled flat across mine.
We didn’t say anything. I felt his breath in my hair and the weight of his arm and let myself start to drift… and right as I was going under, I felt it. A wet drop on the top of my head. Then another.
I didn’t move, or make a sound, because I knew if I turned to check his face he’d fix it, and I didn’t want him to fix it. He’d held it all day, and now, in his own bed, in the dark, with me breathing against him, he was finally setting it down. I wasn’t going to stop him.
So I let him cry into my hair. Slow and silent, no shaking, no sound, his arms never once going loose, for a long time. And then it eased, and his breath went even, and his hand at the back of my head got heavy, and he slept.
I stayed awake a few minutes more. I needed his chest rising under my cheek a little longer. I needed to know we were both alive in the same bed at the same time, and that we hadn’t lost each other today.
We hadn’t lost each other today.
The man I loved had cried into my hair and fallen asleep with both arms around me, and I was alive and he was alive, in his bed, in our town, and tomorrow we’d figure out the rest. For the first time in my life, every inch of me was covered.
I closed my eyes and let myself fall.
julian
Sabrina had survived emergency surgery, spent days in the hospital recovering under police watch, and been transferred to a psychiatric unit for evaluation while the charges moved forward.
Breaking and entering. Stalking. Aggravated assault. Attempted murder.
I stared at that list longer than I should have the first time my lawyer said it out loud.
All of that life. All of that ambition. All of those years she’d spent building herself into somebody people watched, followed, listened to — and for what?
To throw it away over a man who had never belonged to her.
Over a life she had made up in her head and then punished Alyssa for living.
It was a waste.
A stupid, senseless waste.
And then I stopped myself, because even that was more energy than I owed her.
There were headlines, of course there were.
Sabrina had built half her life online, and the internet loved a woman unraveling almost as much as it loved dragging Alyssa’s name back through a story she had already survived once.
I tried to apologize for that. Alyssa stopped me before I got the words all the way out.
“She did this,” she said. “Not you.”
I knew she was right.
I knew it in the part of me that could line up facts and assign blame where it belonged.
But the part of me that had picked her up off my kitchen floor, covered in blood because she loved me, would never hear it clean.
Sabrina came for Alyssa because of me. I could live with the truth that it wasn’t my fault.
I wasn’t sure I would ever live free of the fact that it happened because Alyssa was mine.
So I stopped apologizing out loud, and decided I would spend the rest of my life making sure being loved by me gave her more than it ever cost her.
Alyssa and Micah had been at my place eleven nights running. Half her closet was in mine. Micah’s shoes lived by my front door, and I liked it that way.
Sunday night, we were getting ready for bed, Alyssa washing her face and brushing her teeth at my sink. I’d just finished brushing mine. Micah was already knocked out down the hall, asleep.
“I want to ask you something.” I leaned on the counter next to her.
She shut off the water. “Okay.”
“I want you and Micah to move in here. Permanently. I could hand you a lot of reasons right now. Good ones. Your lease, the drive across town, Micah’s school is closer from here.
What happened to you in that building, and why you never need to step foot there again.
I could lean on that one all day, tell you this is about keeping you safe, and you might even say yes to it.
None of those are the reason. I want you here because this is your home.
Yours and Micah’s. His shoes by the door, and random Legos on the floor.
Your hair products taking over my bathroom. ”
That almost got a smile out of her. I wasn’t finished.
“You two make this my home. You’re my family. That’s the reason.”
She was quiet, for a moment. “Say it again,” she said. “The last part.”
“You’re my family. I need you here.”
She turned to me, damp hand over mine and held them there. “Then we stay,” she said.
“You stay.”