4. Liliana #5
Dark hair falling into dark eyes. That jaw. The kind of mouth that looked as if it was always half a second from a smile it wasn’t going to explain. My pulse did an undignified thing.
“You’re a singer,” I said, and it came out almost accusing, because in all my imagining of him over the past months, this had somehow never occurred to me.
“Yeah, well.” He lifted a shoulder, mouth twitching. “I try.”
“Is that your song?” I asked, to divert, still off-balance, flustered under the weight of him. “The one you just played. I’ve never heard it before.”
“No. Nobody has.” He held my eyes. “It’s not finished.”
“It sounded finished.”
“It’s not.” His voice dropped, quieter, meant only for the small space between us. “I’ve had the first half of it written for months. Just couldn’t figure out how it ended.”
He let that sit, let me feel exactly where it landed. “Turns out I was waiting to see her again before I could write the rest.”
The room tilted. I understood him perfectly. He wanted me to.
Neither of us said anything for a moment, and the space between us went taut and warm, charged with a current I had no name for and no defense against.
Tristan was looking at me intensely. Patient and certain, just a little dangerous, a glint behind his eyes that should have sent me running back to my safe, boring table.
It didn’t. God help me, I leaned into it.
My phone buzzed in my clutch and shattered the moment clean in half.
I glanced down on reflex. A text, from the date I’d abandoned.
And I must have made a face, because Tristan’s eyes dropped to the phone in my hand, read the change in me, then lifted back to my face, and every trace of teasing went out of him.
“That the guy you came in with?” he asked.
“My mother’s idea of my future.”
He studied me for a long moment. The music and the laughter and the whole gilded machine of my mother’s world grinding on somewhere behind us, and then he asked the question that split my life cleanly into a before and an after.
“Want me to get you out of here?”
It should have been an easy no.
He was a stranger, more or less. A rich boy playing at rebellion, exactly the kind of reckless, careless, guitar-slinging disaster my mother had spent twenty-four years training me to avoid.
And I was Aurelia Astor’s perfect, careful, hand-folded daughter, who did what she was told and married who she was told and never, ever caused a scene.
But I was suffocating.
I had been suffocating my whole life and he was holding out his hand now, palm up. An offer and a dare, an escape route all at once.
Standing there in that ballroom I understood with perfect, terrifying clarity that he was the only thing in the room that felt close to breathing again.
I put my hand in his.
My body just did it. His fingers closed warm around mine, sure, and that smile broke across his face as if he’s the sun coming up.
Then he was pulling me through the crowd, headfirst and heart-first, out a side door and into the spring night, away from the table and the future my mother had drawn up for me before I was old enough to object.
That was the start of it all.
The car slows, and I blink, and the memory lets go of me all at once.
We’re not moving anymore. Through the glass the glowing lobby of the building slides into focus, the doorman, the awning. Home, or the address that’s supposed to be home. We’ve arrived, and I didn’t feel a single mile of the drive.
“Thank you,” I tell the driver, my voice not quite steady as I gather my things and step out into the night.
The memory follows me the whole way up.
Through the lobby, into the elevator, watching the floor numbers climb, that boy on the rooftop and the hand held out in the ballroom trailing after me as if it’s a scent I can’t shake. I reached for him to breathe. I built my whole life around that one reckless, hopeful choice.
I can’t remember the last time I did.
The elevator opens onto our floor and I let myself in, and the penthouse is dark the way I left it, the way it always is now. I toe off my heels in the entryway, bracing for the enormous familiar quiet.
But it isn’t quiet.
There’s a lamp on low in the living room, a single pool of light in all that dark, and standing in the middle of it, waiting, is my husband.
“Tristan?”
He’s a mess. That’s the first thing I see.
Still in the clothes he left in this morning, sleeves shoved up, hair wrecked as if he’s been dragging his hands through it for hours, the exhaustion carved deep under his eyes.
And cradled against his chest, a little crushed as if he’s been holding them too long and too tight, is a bunch of white lilies.
My flowers. The ones that were scattered across this floor in broken glass a night ago. The ones he always says look like me.
“Hey.” His voice is rough, careful, hopeful and braced all at once. He lifts the flowers a fraction, self-conscious. “You weren’t here. I didn’t know when you’d be back, so I just… I waited.”
I don’t move. I can’t. I’m still half in the car, half on that rooftop, and now here he is in the flesh, the boy from the trellis grown tired and rumpled in the middle of our dark living room, and my chest does a slow, painful thing I’ve been trying not to let it do all day.
That’s when I notice the rest of it.
Behind him, on the table where a magazine-perfect dinner sat cold and untouched, there’s a different dinner now.
Smaller. Humbler. Two candles, already burned halfway down from waiting. Two plates of something simple and a little overcooked. Pasta, it seems, the kind of thing a man who can barely work a toaster attempts when he’s desperate and out of grander ideas.
There’s a dish towel still thrown over his shoulder. He cooked. He actually cooked, badly, for me, in the same spot where I cooked for him and he never came.
The sight of it undoes what I’ve spent all day holding together.
“I know I said the day was yours.” He follows my eyes to the table, and his jaw works.
He doesn’t reach for an excuse. He doesn’t tell me how hard he tried or how long he stood here.
“And then it wasn’t. Again. I’m not going to stand here and list reasons, because you’ve heard them all and they don’t fix anything.
” He sets the lilies down on the console, gentle, and takes a step toward me, stopping short of touching.
“I just needed you to come home to more than an empty apartment for once. That’s all this is. ”
My eyes are burning. I look at the sad, overcooked pasta and the half-dead candles and the flowers he crushed against his chest waiting for me, and I understand that this is him trying with his hands instead of his mouth for once, and it lands somewhere the words never could.
“The label’s handling the leak,” he goes on, quieter. “They assured me. And I know we’re not okay right now. I know that. But I need you to trust me, just a little longer.” He swallows. “I’m sorry… I’m going to do better.”
And there it is. The catch I’ve learned to listen for.
“Just until after the concert.” He says it as if it’s a lifeline. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. “Get me through one final time, and then it’s you and me. All of it. I swear.”
Another finish line. Another just until. I’ve been chasing his finish lines for months and every time I reach one there’s a new one drawn a little further out, and standing here I can see it perfectly clearly, the shape of the gamble, the exact odds of it.
I know what it’s cost me every other time I’ve believed him.
So I don’t run to him. I don’t melt. I hold my ground and I make myself say the true thing, evenly, while I still can.
“I can’t keep doing this, Tristan.” My voice comes out steady, firm, no tears in it. “I mean that. And I’m not going to pretend tonight fixes it, because it doesn’t.”
He goes still, bracing.
“But I’m too tired to fight it out with you right now.”
My eyes drop back to the table, to the burned-down candles and the lilies he held too tight while he waited. Once, he was the person I ran toward to get out of rooms like the ones I’ve been trapped in all day.
Some worn, stubborn part of me still wants him to be.
He sees it, whatever crosses my face. He takes a slow step closer, then another, watching me the whole time for the sign to stop, and when I don’t give it, he lifts his arms, careful, uncertain, the way you’d approach something you’re half sure will bolt.
Tristan doesn’t pull me in. He just holds them open, an offer, and waits.
I could step back. He’s giving me the room to.
But I don’t. After a day that took and took from me, I let myself lean in, into the arms that used to be my safe place, because I want to remember why I chose them, even for five minutes.
That’s allowed. I’m allowed that much.
The second I do, he exhales as if he’s been holding his breath the whole time, and his arms come around me hard, crushing me in, holding on as if he still can’t quite believe I let him. He presses his mouth to the top of my head.
“Thank you,” he whispers. “Just until after the concert and this will all be over. I swear.”
I don’t agree. I don’t say it back. I just let him hold me, because I needed to be held and I’m done apologizing for needing things.
But behind his shoulder, in the dark, my eyes stay open.
The concert. That’s the line, drawn silent against his chest.
He gets me that far, and one real chance to show me the boy from the rooftop is still in there somewhere. If I stand in that arena and still feel like a stranger in my own marriage, then I stop gambling.
Then I let it go, and I let him go with it.
One shot left.
He doesn’t know it’s the last one.