11. Liliana #2
Tristan is across the room near the bar, mid-conversation, a glass of red halfway to his mouth, and the second he sees me he stops.
Just stops. The glass hangs there an inch from his lips, forgotten, and his whole face does a thing I have not seen it do in years, it opens, wide and helpless, every ounce of that famous composure falling straight off it.
He looks at me as if the floor has dropped out from under him. As if he’s forgotten there’s anyone else in the room. As if I’m the only thing in it.
A hot, vindictive, deeply satisfying feeling uncurls in my chest.
Good, I think, holding his stunned gaze for exactly one second before I turn away as if it costs me nothing. Look all you want. Remember exactly what you had.
I don’t go to him.
Every cell in my body is aware of him across that room, tracking him the way you track a storm on the horizon, but I turn my back and I go find my people instead, the co-chairs and the donors and the foundation board, the ones who knew me before I was a headline.
And God, it’s good.
They fold me right back in, delighted, a little surprised.
“Liliana, you look incredible!” “We’ve missed you here. Glad to have you back.” “The spring program numbers came in, you’ll die when you see them.”
Not one of them mentions the concert, not one of them looks at me with pity.
They talk to me about the work, my work, the thing I built with my own hands and my own name, and for a whole shining stretch of the evening I’m not Tristan Everett’s tragic wife or the woman from the video.
I’m just Liliana. And she, it turns out, is doing just fine.
For a while, I almost make it through the whole night.
The dancing has started, couples drifting out onto the floor under the chandeliers, and I’m near the edge of it with a glass of champagne I’m mostly holding to have a use for my hands, when a voice comes from just behind my shoulder, low and warm and unmistakable.
“Liliana.”
My whole name, the way he only says it when he means it, and it goes down my spine.
I turn, chin up, expression smooth.
Honestly, I’ve had all night to prepare for this but turns out, I’m still not prepared, because he’s cleaned up since the gate.
The disheveled, shivering boy from my cousin’s curb is gone, and in his place is the other Tristan.
The one from the magazine covers, dark suit and easy shoulders and that slow, dangerous confidence that used to make entire arenas lose their minds.
His hair is a careful kind of messy. His eyes haven’t left my face since I turned around.
Focus, I order myself. He is a beautiful man in a nice suit and you are immune. You are a wall. You are the Hoover Dam.
“Tristan.” I keep my voice cool, pleasant, the voice I’d use on any acquaintance. “You clean up all right.”
The corner of his mouth tips. “You look…” He stops, and a helpless look crosses his face, and whatever polished line he was going to say, he abandons it. “There aren’t words. I’ve been standing over there for twenty minutes trying to find one and there just isn’t one.”
“Then don’t strain yourself.”
He huffs a quiet laugh, and then he does the thing I’ve been dreading and anticipating in equal measure all night. He holds out his hand, palm up, open, an invitation and a question both.
“Dance with me.”
Every sensible part of me says no.
Says walk away, says you’re doing so well, says do not put yourself in his arms in front of every camera in the room.
But we’re being watched, all of us, the whole room half-turned toward this exact moment, and a refusal would be a scene, and a scene would be a story, and the story cannot be that the Everetts can’t stand to touch each other.
Fake it till you make it. Give them nothing to print.
That’s the excuse I use, anyway. It’s cleaner than the truth, which is that I want to.
“One dance,” I say, and I put my hand in his.
The moment his fingers close around mine, it’s a mistake.
I know it instantly.
Because his hand is warm and familiar and exactly the right size, and it swallows mine the way it has a thousand times, and my body responds before my brain can stop it, some deep muscle memory lighting up all at once.
He leads me out to the center of the floor, and I feel the cameras find us, hear the soft frantic clicking start up around the edges of the room, and then his other hand settles at the small of my back, light, careful, barely there, and I have to bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep my face from doing anything at all.
Tristan doesn’t pull me close. He holds me at a perfectly respectable distance, his hand loose enough at my back that I could step out of it any second I wanted, and somehow that restraint is worse than if he’d crushed me against him.
He’s giving me the room to leave. He’s making it my choice, every second of it, and I can’t make myself take it.
We move together as if no time has passed at all. As if my feet remember his. His touch is so familiar it aches, warm through the thin fabric at my back, and every place we’re connected hums with a low current I would give anything not to feel.
Electricity down my spine, heat pooling low in my stomach, my pulse loud in my own ears. I stare fixedly at his collar and breathe through my mouth and remind myself of every single reason this is a terrible idea.
And the whole time, he watches me.
I can feel it, that steady, unwavering attention, his eyes on my face like there’s nothing else in the room worth looking at.
It’s too much. It’s exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t let happen.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I mutter, still staring at his collar.
“Like what?”
I make the mistake of glancing up. His eyes are right there, dark and soft and fixed on me, and the words come out before I can stop them.
“Like you still love me.”
A quiet certainty moves through his face.
And then, in the middle of a turn, he does it, he draws me in, one smooth pull that closes the careful distance between us, and I lose my footing for half a second and fall forward against his chest with a gasp, my free hand flying up to catch myself against him.
Suddenly there’s no space left at all. Suddenly I’m close enough to feel the warmth of him through his shirt, close enough to catch the cedar and mint of him that I have not let myself think about in weeks, and I tip my face up to his, startled, and his eyes are waiting for me.
“That’s because I do,” he says.
Low. Simple, not a line. Not a performance for the watching room.
Just the truth, laid down quiet and sure between us, his gaze holding mine as if he’s got nothing left to hide and no interest in hiding it.
And I forget, for one catastrophic second, every single reason I walked into this room determined to be strong.
Then a camera clicks somewhere close. Too close, and the sound snaps me back into my body like cold water.
I go rigid in his arms.
For one endless second I’d forgotten, forgotten the room, the crowd, the phones angled toward us, forgotten that this exact tenderness on my face is precisely the image half of them came here hoping to catch.
I look up and there’s a woman not ten feet away with her phone raised, and I can see us in the little glowing rectangle of her screen, close and swaying and lit up like a reconciliation, and panic goes through me cold and total.
So I step back. My hand slides off his chest and my face closes like a door.
“I need some air,” I manage, which is absurd, because we’re already inside a ballroom the size of an airport, but I can’t do this, I can’t stand here and let them photograph whatever is happening to my face right now.
“Lily…” His voice, low, following me. “Lily, wait…”
But I don’t wait.