1. Liliana #2
“It sounds exhausting is what it sounds like.” He sighs, but I catch the spark of excitement he’s trying to hide.
He lives for this, the spectacle, the roar of a crowd singing his words back to him.
It’s half of why I fell in love with him.
“But this one matters to me. More than the numbers, more than any of it. I need it to be right.”
He goes quiet and lifts his eyes to mine, holding them, and there’s so much in the way he’s looking at me that my chest goes tight.
No performance in it, no charm, just Tristan, laid bare, letting me see exactly how much this thing weighs on him and exactly how much of it is tied to me.
“I can’t wait for you to hear it,” he says softly.
“Okay.” I lean in with a soft smile and press a quick peck to his lips, then pull back to hold his gaze. “I’m sure it’ll be great, Tristan. It always is.”
An emotion in him settles at that. He turns his head and kisses my palm where it rests against his cheek.
I go back to my crepes, tilting my head to give him room without even deciding to, and he takes it, dragging his lips down the side of my neck in that barely-there way that makes me lose my train of thought. My free hand finds his hair again.
Funny, how the world knows Tristan Everett as the cocky one, the charmer, the golden boy who struts across a stage as if he owns every soul in the building.
They don’t know he turns into this the second the doors close, soft, clingy, and greedy, tucking himself against my skin as if he’s a man half his size.
“My wife,” he mumbles into my skin. It comes out low and honest. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Crash and burn, probably.” I keep eating, biting back a smile. “Spectacularly. It’d be all over the news.”
“Absolutely I would.” He huffs a laugh against my throat, then wraps both arms around me from the side and pulls me half into his lap, breakfast be damned, burying his face in the crook of my neck as if he’s planning to live there.
I chuckle and press my fork-hand flat against his chest. “Don’t start again.”
“I’m not starting anything.”
“Oh please, I know your tactics.” I take another bite of crepe. “Before you get any ideas, we’ve got the thing tonight. The children’s music foundation benefit. The one you promised.”
He groans into my shoulder, long and pitiful. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Cancel it. I want the whole day. Just us. I’ve barely seen you in weeks and now you want to hand me over to a room full of donors in bad ties.”
“You committed to this months ago, Tristan. Publicly. There are place cards.”
“There are always place cards. That’s how they get you.” He tightens his hold, rocking me gently, still refusing to lift his head. “We’ve got hours. Come back to bed. Just for a little while.”
“We already spent the entire morning in bed.”
“And it was the best decision either of us has ever made.”
I laugh and tug his hair until he finally looks up at me with a pout.
A grown man, a stadium headliner, sulking over a black-tie event.
“You are genuinely insatiable, you know that? We have a commitment. We’re going.
And you’re going to smile and shake hands and mean it, because it’s for kids and a good cause and because I said so. ”
That cracks him wide open. He laughs, delighted, the sound rolling out of him warm and unguarded, and kisses me full on the mouth before I can dodge it. “God, I love it when you boss me around.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Fine. The benefit.” He sighs as if I’ve asked him to donate a kidney.
“But I’m counting every minute until I get you home.
” He finally releases me enough to let me sit up properly, though his hand stays on my thigh under the table, thumb tracing idle shapes.
“Eat. You’ll need your strength. These things are brutal. ”
We finish the late breakfast, trading bites and stealing sips, letting the last of the morning burn off around us.
The afternoon stretches out ahead of us, unhurried and ours, before we’ll have to trade his old t-shirt and my bare feet for the polished versions of ourselves the world expects.
By the time I’ve done my hair and slipped into the dress, a deep green thing that falls off one shoulder and pools at my feet, he’s already waiting by the door in his tux, collar open, tie still undone in his hand.
Tristan goes still when he sees me. His eyes drag down the length of me and back up, slow, and he lets out a low whistle.
“Okay. Maybe this benefit isn’t such a bad idea after all.” He crosses the room and catches my hips, pressing a kiss to my bare shoulder.
“We’re already running late because of you.” I roll my eyes, though the heat crawling up my neck gives me away.
“Worth it.” He finally knots his tie, then offers me his arm and bends into a ridiculous, sweeping little bow. “Shall we, milady?”
A laugh slips out of me before I can stop it, and I slide my hand into the crook of his elbow. “You’re such an idiot.”
He leads me out to the car, his hand warm over mine the whole way down.
It’s the best day we’ve had in months, and I let myself sink all the way into it.
I don’t want it to end.
***
The charity event is exactly as boring as I expected.
It’s for one of those vague, well-meaning causes that rich people throw money at to feel better about themselves, a cause centered on underprivileged youth and music education, which is the only reason Tristan agreed to come.
He cares about this stuff, genuinely, not just for the optics. It’s one of the things I love about him, the way he never forgets where he came from, even now that he’s headlining stadiums and selling out arenas.
I watch him work the room, and my heart does a complicated twist in my chest.
He’s magnetic, there’s no other word for it.
Everyone wants a piece of him, the society matrons, the music executives, and the trust fund kids trying to seem cool.
He shakes hands and tells jokes, posing for photos with a practiced ease that makes it look effortless, even though I know it exhausts him.
Tristan is Hollywood’s golden boy, country music’s crown prince, and he wears the crown naturally, born for it.
But he keeps finding me across the crowd.
Every few minutes, his eyes seek me out wherever I’ve drifted, and a look passes between us. A wink, a grin, a face so ridiculous I have to hide my laugh behind my champagne glass.
While a silver-haired donor’s wife is telling me about her granddaughter’s cotillion, I catch him over her shoulder, trapped beside some record executive, and he clutches his own chest and lets his head loll as if he’s dying on his feet, mouthing ‘help me’ across the room.
I press my lips together and mouth back a very firm ‘behave’. He grins, unrepentant, and does it again worse, going fully limp for a second before snapping upright the instant the executive turns to him.
A snort escapes me before I can stop it, graceless and loud, right in the middle of the poor woman’s story about tea sandwiches. She stops. Her eyebrows climb toward her hairline.
“Sorry,” I manage, pressing a hand to my mouth. “Went down the wrong way. The champagne. Please, go on.”
She goes on and I do not hear a word of it. Across the room, Tristan looks unbearably pleased with himself.
The evening drifts on the way these things do, champagne and small talk and the slow shuffle from one polite conversation to the next. My feet are starting to complain about the heels by the time a familiar voice cuts in.
“Okay, the two of you need to stop,” says a voice at my elbow. Danica, my cousin, the only family member who actually likes Tristan, holding two glasses of champagne and wearing a look of pure amused disgust. “I can see it from across the room. Whatever this is.”
“Whatever what is?”
“This. The eye-thing. You’ve been eye-fucking each other over the canapés for twenty minutes and it’s frankly indecent at a children’s charity.” She presses one of the glasses into my hand. “Get a room. There’s clearly one free upstairs, we both know nothing stops you two.”
“We’ve been married for two years. We’re allowed to look at each other.”
“You’re not allowed to be this obnoxious about it. Some of us are single and bitter, Lily. Have some compassion.” She takes a long sip and surveys the room. “Seems like things are getting better between you two though.”
I let out a breath. She would know since she’s the only one I ever talked to weeks ago.
“They are.” I watch him too, and the warmth of it settles in my chest. “I hope it lasts, honestly. He got a break in the studio schedule, so I’ve got him to myself for a little while.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah. I’m just savoring it.” I shrug, going for casual and not quite landing it. “You know how it goes. The album drops, the tour starts, and I lose him to it all over again. So I’m taking the good days while I have them.”
Danica bumps her shoulder against mine, gentler now. “Take all of them. You look happy.”
“I am.”
My eyes have already found him again without my permission, drifting across the room to where he stands trapped in another conversation, nodding along, not really listening. He’s loosened his tie a fraction. His jacket pulls across his shoulders when he shifts his weight.
I let myself look, greedy about it, tracing the line of him from across a room full of people who have no idea what he sounds like humming half-finished songs at the foot of our bed at dawn.
As if he feels the weight of my stare, he turns his head, and his eyes lock onto mine through the crowd.
Tristan doesn’t look away. He lifts his champagne, takes a sip over the rim of the glass without breaking the stare, and that mouth curves into a private smirk meant for exactly one person in this ballroom. Heat rolls through me as my fingers tighten around the stem of my own glass.
There’s an ache in my chest that has nothing to do with the room. It’s a possessive, selfish thing I’m not proud of. The desire to gather up this version of him and keep him hidden away where the world can’t reach.