11. Liliana #3
I turn on my heel and I move, fast, weaving through the couples and the clusters of gowns, past the bar and the string quartet and the long glittering windows, until I find a set of glass doors standing open to a balcony, blessedly dim and empty, and I slip through them into the cool night air and press my hands flat against the stone railing and try to remember how to breathe.
I hear his footsteps behind me before he says a word.
Of course he followed.
He always follows now. That’s the whole cruel new shape of him.
Stupid. This is so stupid.
Without thinking, I round on him.
“You broke me.”
It comes out of me raw, before I’ve decided to say it, and it stops him cold two steps onto the balcony. The words hang in the cold space between us, ugly and true, and I don’t take them back.
“You don’t get to do this.” My voice shakes and I let it.
“You don’t get to stand in a beautiful suit under beautiful lights and pull me into your arms and look at me like that, like nothing happened, like you didn’t take my whole life apart.
You broke me, Tristan. You can’t just dance it back together. ”
He doesn’t flinch from it. That’s new too. The old Tristan would have reached for a soft word, a deflection, a way to make the hurt smaller.
This one just stands there in the spill of light from the doors and takes it, his face open and grave.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I’m not trying to act like nothing happened, Lily. I know exactly what happened. I know exactly what I did, and I know I’m the one who did it, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend otherwise.”
He swallows. “I danced with you because you let me, and because I’ve wanted to be near you for weeks, and I’m sorry if it felt like I was trying to erase anything. I’m not. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to.”
The sincerity of it lands somewhere under my ribs, and I hate how much I feel it. I turn my face away, toward the dark garden below, because it’s easier than looking at him.
“You’re wasting your time,” I tell the night.
“All of it. The flowers, the notes, the standing on my cousin’s curb till dawn.
All of this.” My throat tightens. “I don’t know if I can forgive you.
I don’t think you understand that. It’s not a maybe I’m playing hard to get about. I genuinely don’t know if it’s in me.”
“I know that too.”
He says it so gently that I finally turn back to look at him, and he’s closer now, he’s crossed the balcony while I wasn’t watching, and he stops an arm’s length away, careful, always careful, waiting to see if I’ll bolt.
I don’t.
He lifts his hand slowly, giving me every second in the world to step back, and when I don’t, he cups the side of my face, his palm warm against my cold cheek, his thumb barely moving against my skin.
And I let him.
Goddammit, I let him.
I stand there in the dark in my red dress and let my husband hold my face as if it’s made of glass, and I look up into the eyes I fell in love with on a rooftop a lifetime ago, and I can’t make myself pull away.
“I know you don’t know if you can forgive me,” he says, low and steady, his forehead dipping toward mine until we’re almost touching, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath.
“I’m not asking you to. That’s the part I finally understand, Lily.
I’m not owed it. You don’t have to forgive me, and you don’t have to want me back, and you don’t have to feel a single thing you don’t feel. ”
His thumb strokes once across my cheekbone. “You don’t have to do anything at all. Just let me show you that I love you. That’s all I’m asking. Let me show you, and then you decide whatever you decide.”
My breath stutters in my chest.
Behind him, out over the dark garden, the first firework of the night goes up and bursts into gold.
The light of it washes across his face, across the hope written so plainly there it makes my chest ache, and the crowd inside makes a soft delighted sound at the windows, and none of it is real to me.
None of it.
There is only his hand on my face and his forehead nearly against mine and the terrible, wonderful, familiar pull of him, the one I have spent weeks convincing myself I was strong enough to resist.
But I was wrong.
I know it right there under the fireworks, with his palm warm against my cheek and my whole traitor heart pounding to get closer to him. I have made a serious miscalculation.
And I thought the danger was that he’d charm me, or pressure me, or wear me down with grand gestures and pretty words so I built all my walls against that man.
What I never built is a single wall against this one.
This Tristan, my old Tristan.
The one who holds my face and asks for nothing and just tells me the truth.
As I stand there, unable to step back, unable to look away, unable to do anything but feel the whole broken, hopeful, impossible weight of what’s still between us… one clear thought rises up through all the noise and lands with the force of a verdict.
Tristan Everett is still very dangerous for my heart.