28. Anthony
— ? —
Anthony
Now - Our Anniversary
I stand at the railing with my back to the ballroom and the whole city lit up in front of me.
Manhattan stretches to the horizon in every direction, a sea of lights and shadows and all the lives being lived behind those glowing windows. The wind is cold up here, cutting through my tuxedo jacket, and I grip the railing hard enough to feel the metal bite into my palms.
Behind me, through the glass, everyone is pretending they didn’t watch me walk out here. I can feel their eyes on my back, can imagine the whispers spreading through the crowd like wildfire. That’s him. The one who turned in his father-in-law. The one whose wife left him. The one who-
I don’t turn around when the doors open and the noise of the party swells and falls away again.
I know the sound of her heels.
They click against the stone, slow and deliberate, and then they stop. Behind me. Close enough that I can smell her perfume - still not jasmine, still that lighter scent she switched to years ago, but underneath it something that’s just her. Something I’d know anywhere.
“Are you hiding?” she asks.
The balcony tilts under my feet.
It’s the same place and the same words. The first lines she ever said to me as a woman, before I lied to her. Before I held her while she cried about letters I had in a box. Before I built a life on a foundation of secrets and called it love.
“I was looking for air,” I manage.
“There’s air inside.”
“It’s better out here.”
“Is it?”
I turn around.
She’s in green silk, something that flows around her body like water and catches the light from the ballroom behind her. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and her makeup is smudged at the corners like she’s been crying, and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
She steps closer. Into the wind. Her hair blows across her face, and she doesn’t move to push it back.
“The view is better,” I tell her, and my voice gives out halfway through.
“You can’t say things like that to me.”
“I can’t help it.”
“You don’t get to.” She stops an arm’s length away, exactly where she stopped the first time, all those years ago. “You said those exact words to me, and everything that came after was a lie.”
“Not everything.”
“How am I supposed to know which parts?”
I don’t have an answer. I’ve had months to find one, lying awake in hotel rooms and staring at ceilings, running through every moment of our relationship and trying to sort the true from the false.
But the truth is that I can’t. The truth is that the lies and the love were so tangled together that I don’t know where one ended and the other began.
“You’re not,” I say finally. “I can’t give you that. I can only give you the rest of it. The true parts. Every day, for as long as you let me.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Her face is unreadable, and I can see her weighing something - my words, my face, everything I’ve done and everything I’ve said since this all fell apart.
The last time she did this, she put me into a stack of chairs a minute later. So, when she takes the last step and kisses me, I keep my hands still and wait for the shove.
It doesn’t come. Her lips brush against mine like a question, like she’s testing whether this still feels the same. And God help me, it does. It feels exactly the same, her mouth warm and familiar, her breath catching against my skin.
Then her hands slide inside my jacket and fist in my shirt, and she makes a small, broken sound against my mouth, and I stop being careful.
I pull her flush against me with one hand spread across the bare skin of her back.
The green silk is cut low, and my fingers find the ridge of her spine, the warmth of her body, the way she shivers when I touch her.
The glass doors are right behind us. I can feel the crowd watching through them, and I don’t care.
Neither does she.
When she pulls back, she’s breathing hard. Her lipstick is ruined, smeared across her mouth and probably across mine too.
“This still doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she says.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t mean we’re okay.” She presses her forehead to my chest, and I can feel her trembling. “It means I’m tired of pretending I don’t still love you.”
I hold her like she might disappear. Like she’s made of smoke and shadows, and if I let go, she’ll drift away on the wind and I’ll never get her back.
“I’ll earn it,” I tell her. “Every day. For the rest of my life.”
“It’s going to take a long time.”
“I have a long time.”
She lifts her head. Her eyes are wet and fierce, and she wraps her fingers around my wrist hard enough to bruise.
“Take me somewhere else,” she says.
“Alessia, there’s nowhere. I didn’t get a room. I didn’t think-”
She opens her clutch with her free hand and holds up a hotel key card between two fingers.
“I did,” she says.