13. Tristan
— ? —
Tristan
The last chord fades into the rain, and I let it go.
Standing here on this soaked street with my guitar going quiet against my chest, I didn’t come here to win anything.
I came here because she was supposed to hear that song weeks ago, on the best night of our lives, and instead she heard the worst possible version of me, and the least I owe her is the real one. This is not to clear my name or to argue my case.
But just to put the truth in front of her the only way I’ve ever been any good at, which is four minutes of melody and everything I don’t know how to say out loud.
Liliana heard it now.
That’s enough. It has to be enough, because it’s all I’ve got.
The rain comes down harder, cold through the hoodie, and up in the window her silhouette goes still, and then she steps back and the curtain falls closed and she’s gone.
It lands about how you’d expect. Like a stone in the gut. But I made myself a promise the night I let her walk out that door, that I would want her without demanding anything back, that I would give and give and expect nothing.
Part of keeping that promise is knowing how to stand in the rain and watch a window go dark and not fall apart about it. So I sling the guitar onto my back and I zip the hoodie to my chin and I turn to go, already bracing for the long wet walk to the car and the longer night after it.
Then I hear the gate.
The metal latch scrapes, hinges creak, and I turn around, and she’s standing in the gap with an umbrella held over her head and an expression I can’t read at all.
“You can wait the rain out inside.” She says it fast, as if she wants it over with, her eyes fixed somewhere over my left shoulder. “It’s coming down too hard to walk in.”
I don’t move, because I’m genuinely not sure I heard her right.
Lily scowls at my hesitation and looks away entirely, and even in the dark I catch the color rising in her face. “Can’t have the country’s favorite singer catching a cold on my cousin’s sidewalk,” she mutters. “That’s a headline I don’t need.”
And despite everything, despite the cold and the ache and the low roar of the storm, my mouth pulls into a smile I couldn’t stop if I tried.
“No,” I agree. “We wouldn’t want that.”
I follow her in.
Honestly, I’ve never actually been inside Danica’s place before.
It’s bigger than it looks from the street.
Warm and lived-in, soft lamps and full bookshelves and the kind of comfortable clutter that means a person actually lives their life here.
I stand just inside the door dripping onto the mat, suddenly hyperaware of how much water I’m bringing into someone’s home, while Lily shakes out the umbrella and props it in the corner with her back to me.
I watch that back for a second. The line of her shoulders, the loose fall of her hair, and I fumble around for a way to fill the silence that isn’t the enormous impossible thing sitting in my chest.
“So…” Smooth, Everett. Very smooth. “Is it just you here? Where’s your cousin?”
“She had a work thing.” She doesn’t turn around. She just says it to the wall and moves further into the room, and the conversation dies right there on the floor between us.
Meanwhile, I have no idea what to do with my body.
I’m standing in the home of a woman who spent weeks screening my calls, dripping on her cousin’s rug, and there is no script for this, no charming line, nothing my whole polished public self ever prepared me for, because none of that was ever real and this is.
This is the realest thing I’ve done in years and I’m terrified of getting it wrong.
Lily glances back, catches me hovering like a lost thing, and the look on her face softens by a fraction.
“Sit.” She nods at the couch. “Before you flood the entryway.”
And so I sit.
She disappears down a hallway, and outside the storm cracks open properly, a white flash at the windows and a roll of thunder close behind it that rattles the glass. Full storm now. The kind that settles in for the night.
Still, I sit on the edge of the couch and try very hard to behave.
It sounds ridiculous, a grown man giving himself instructions like a nervous kid, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Don’t push, don’t reach or say too much. Don’t ruin it.
Because she opened a door tonight, an actual literal door, and let me stand inside her life for the length of a rainstorm, and I know with total certainty that this is the closest I’ve been to her since she pressed her ring into my palm.
A crack of light. That’s all it is. I have spent every day since she left learning the difference between a man who forces a door and a man who waits for it to open, and I will not be the first kind ever again.
As I wait, my heart does a painful, hopeful thing in my chest.
Liliana comes back with a towel.
I expect her to toss it at me, brisk and businesslike, keep-your-distance.
She doesn’t. She crosses the room and stops right in front of me, close enough that I have to tip my head back to look up at her, and without a single word she drapes the towel over my wet hair and starts to dry it.
I go completely still.
Her hands move over my head through the towel.
Gentle and unhurried, working the water out of my hair, and I don’t dare breathe wrong.
I just sit there and let her, my heart slamming so hard I’m half convinced she can hear it, and I look up at her face in the lamplight while she frowns in concentration at the top of my head.
Lily is in soft clothes. An old sweater and sleep shorts, her hair down, her face bare, and God, it takes me apart, because this is her. Not the woman in the red dress who leveled a ballroom.
This one. The one I used to come home to and was too much of a fool to treasure.
The one nobody else gets to see.
I missed her so much I can barely hold it.
She finishes and starts to step back, folding the towel, murmuring that she’ll find me a dry shirt, already turning to go.
But my body moves before my brain can stop it.
I catch her wrist. Gentle, barely any pressure at all, easy to break if she wanted to. And I pull her back toward me. I stand as I do it, and I wrap my arms around her from behind and pull her against my chest, and I feel her go rigid with surprise.
“Tristan, what…”
“Five minutes.” The words come out rough, cut across whatever she was about to say. I close my eyes and drop my face into her hair, breathing her in. The familiar warm scent of her, and my heart clenches so hard it aches. “Just give me five minutes. Please.”
My arms tighten, careful, not trapping her, just holding.
“I missed you, baby,” I whisper into her hair. “You have no idea how much I missed you.”
For a long moment she’s stiff in my arms. Rigid and unyielding, and I brace myself to let her go, to apologize, to have pushed too far.
But then, slowly, by degrees, I feel it, the tension bleeding out of her shoulders, her spine easing, her weight settling back against me by the smallest fraction.
“Just five,” she mumbles.
And she lets me hold her.
We stand there in the dark, the storm throwing light across the walls, thunder rolling somewhere overhead while I’m still soaked to the skin.
I should be shivering but I’m not.
Because this, her back against my chest, her breath slowing, the warmth of her seeping into me… this is the warmest I have been in weeks.
In months, maybe. I press my face into her hair and I hold my wife in a borrowed living room in the middle of a storm and I cannot believe I ever had this every single day and let myself forget what it was worth.
I almost don’t survive how badly I don’t want to let go.
Until her phone goes off.
The bright electronic chirp of it cuts through the moment, and I feel her stiffen again, this time with a different kind of tension, and reality comes rushing back in.
What I’m doing. Where we are. How little I’ve actually earned.
I make myself let her go. Slowly, one arm at a time, releasing her and stepping back and clearing my throat like that might clear the rasp out of my voice.
“Sorry,” I manage.
Lily doesn’t look at me. She reaches for the phone on the side table, and even in the low light I can see the flush high on her cheeks, the way she keeps her eyes fixed hard on the screen and away from me, and I have no idea what to say, so I say nothing.
The storm fills the silence for both of us.
She reads whatever’s on the screen, and her shoulders drop half an inch.
“It’s Danica.” She sets the phone back down. “She’s stranded at the office. Some server thing, I don’t know… She’s not going to make it home tonight.”
Which means it’s just us.
In this quiet house. In this storm. Neither of us says that part out loud, but it sits there in the room all the same, and I watch her realize it the same second I do.
I clear my throat and rub the back of my neck, suddenly aware of every inch of space between us and how much of it just disappeared.
“I’ll head out once the rain lets up a little,” I offer, because it’s the decent thing to say, because I will not be the guy who overstays a mercy. “I won’t be in your hair. Promise.”
She eyes me for a moment, unreadable, then just nods.
“I’ll go see if I can find you a dry shirt. You’re still dripping on the couch.” And she turns and disappears down the hall again before I can answer.
I sit back down beside my guitar and wait. Listening to the rain hammer the windows and the low mutter of thunder rolling through, trying not to think too hard about the fact that I’m alone in a house with my wife and a storm that shows no sign of stopping.
She comes back with a bundle of soft gray fabric in her hands, and the careful way she’s holding it, a little too gingerly, tells me it’s not just any shirt before she even says a word.
“Here…” She tosses it to me, and I catch it, and I recognize it instantly.
It’s my sweater. The old worn one I thought I’d lost ages ago.
“It’s one of your things I ended up with,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear, not quite meeting my eyes. “Been in my drawer. I don’t think I have any pants that’ll fit you, though.”