13. Tristan #2
She kept my sweater. In her drawer. After everything.
I turn it over in my hands and I don’t say any of the enormous things I’m thinking, because I know better now, so I just say, “It’s fine. This is more than enough.”
Then I reach back, grab the collar of my soaked hoodie, and pull the whole wet mess off over my head in one motion.
Suddenly, I hear her breath catch.
I glance up, and Lily is staring.
Frozen mid-turn, her eyes gone wide and fixed on me before she can school them. A slow warmth crawls up the back of my own neck even as a satisfied, entirely unhelpful part of me stirs in my chest.
I tug the dry sweater on over my head, and when my face comes through the collar I catch her still looking, and I can’t quite keep the edge of a grin off my mouth.
“This works great,” I say, pulling it down, all innocence. “The pants will dry. Thank you, Lily.”
Her eyes drop, involuntary, to the soaked denim clinging to my legs, and then she goes crimson. Absolutely crimson, and whips around so fast she nearly loses her balance.
“You have no manners,” she sputters, facing the wall now, one hand flung up as a shield. “Who just… who does that! You can’t just take your shirt off in the middle of someone’s living room like a… like a… ugh!”
I press my lips together and lose the fight against the smile completely.
“Sorry,” I mumble, not sorry in the slightest as I hear her make an outraged little noise in her throat.
“I’m going to the kitchen,” she announces to the wall, with enormous dignity, chin high. “To find food. Like a normal person. Who has manners.”
“Okay,” I say, and my chest feels lighter than it has in weeks as I watch her march off.
I settle back against the couch cushions and let myself have this, just for a second.
The warmth of the dry sweater that smells faintly of her drawer. The sound of her banging around in the kitchen, muttering to herself, alive and close and here. The storm sealing us both inside this little pocket of a night.
Outside, the rain keeps coming down in sheets, and I catch myself hoping, selfishly, stupidly, that it never stops.
That the roads flood. That the storm parks itself over this city and refuses to move and gives me this, one more hour of her banging pots in the next room while I sit here in her cousin’s living room being quietly, carefully happy.
I know it’s selfish but I hope for it anyway.
Then, as if hearing my prayers, the sky splits open.
A crack of thunder so loud it rattles the windows in their frames, a white blaze of lightning right on top of it, and every light in the house dies at once, plunging the whole place into black.
And from the kitchen, a scream followed by a crash. Ceramic shattering against tile.
“Lily!”
I’m up and moving before I’ve finished her name, banging my shin on the coffee table, feeling my way toward the kitchen through the dark. “Lily, where are you, are you okay, talk to me…”
Fortunately, I find her by the counter.
She’s crouched down against the lower cabinets, knees drawn up, both hands pressed flat over her ears, and even in the near-total dark I can see how tightly she’s curled into herself. My whole chest seizes.
“Hey. Hey, I’m here.” I drop to a crouch in front of her, close but not touching, keeping my voice low and even. “I’ve got you. Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Her voice is thin, embarrassed, muffled behind her hands. “I just… the thunder was so loud, and I dropped the bowl.”
“Forget the bowl.” There’s broken ceramic scattered across the floor between us, pale shards catching what little light there is. “Don’t move, okay? There’s glass everywhere and you’re barefoot. Don’t move, I’m going to find us some light.”
I feel my way back along the counter, yanking open drawers, patting through their contents blind, until my hand closes on the unmistakable shape of a lighter and, in the next drawer, a fat emergency candle shoved to the back.
I get it lit on the second try, and a small warm circle of light pushes back the dark as I carry it over and set it on the counter above her.
That’s when I see her hand.
There’s blood, dark and slick, welling from a cut across her palm where she must have grabbed at the counter or caught a shard on the way down. I curse under my breath.
“Shit, you’re bleeding… hang on.” I crouch back down. “Wait right there, don’t put your hand on anything.”
I move fast. I sweep the worst of the shards aside with the edge of a dish towel, clearing a path, and then I get my hands under her arms and lift her. Easy, up and away from the mess and onto the clear stretch of counter, setting her down on the edge of it.
She lets me move her, lets me handle it, and I try not to read anything into it and fail completely.
I find a clean towel and the first-aid kit under the sink by candlelight, and I step in close, between her knees where she’s perched on the counter while I take her hurt hand carefully in both of mine and turn it toward the light.
“It’s not deep,” I tell her, pressing the towel gently to her palm. “It looks worse than it is. You won’t need stitches or anything. Just a cut.”
Lily doesn’t say anything. She’s watching me work, her hand small and warm in mine, the candlelight throwing everything gold and close.
As I clean the cut, I try to focus on the task and not on how near she is, how her knees are on either side of me, how I could count her eyelashes at this distance.
I finish taping the little bandage into place, and then I make the mistake of looking up.
Her face is right there. Inches away, lit soft and warm, her eyes already on mine, and for a second neither of us moves, and the storm rolls on outside and the candle flame leans and the whole night narrows down to the six inches of air between us.
“I don’t think this storm is stopping anytime soon,” I say quietly.
The words hang there. I feel her go still.
“Do you want me to stay?” I keep my voice low, careful, my hands still cradling hers. “Just… until it passes. I know you’re scared of the thunder.”
I watch her not answer. Watch the hesitation move across her face, and I start to back off before I’ve pushed too far, easing back a step, letting go of her hand, reaching to pack up the kit.
“I’m only offering. I can still go, if you’d rather. It’s fine either way, I just…”
Then the sky worsens.
Another crack of thunder, another white flash. Before I can finish the sentence, her hand shoots out and fists in the front of my sweater, gripping tight, holding me right where I am.
I freeze.
Lily is staring up at me, her cheeks pink, her knuckles white in my sweater, and her voice when it comes is small but certain.
“You can stay.”
My heart lifts so hard and so fast it nearly takes me off my feet.
***
The power doesn’t come back.
We wait it out for a while. The two of us and a candle during the storm until eventually it becomes clear the electricity isn’t returning tonight, and it’s late.
There’s an awkward, careful negotiation that ends with me on the floor of her room and her in the bed, because the couch is somehow too far and neither of us says why.
So that’s where we end up.
Me stretched out on a folded blanket on her bedroom floor, her tucked into the bed above me, both of us flat on our backs staring up at a ceiling we can’t really see, the candle guttering low on the nightstand, the rain still going steady against the window.
Neither of us sleeping. Neither of us talking.
Just the sound of the storm and the space between us, close and enormous all at once.
I’m about to give up and try to sleep when her voice comes down soft through the dark.
“The song.” A pause. “It’s good, Tristan. It’s really good.”
My heart takes off at her words.
“I’m glad you liked it,” I manage, and it comes out steadier than I feel. “I wrote it for you. Every note of it.”
She doesn’t answer that, and the quiet settles back in. I lie there in the dark listening to her breathe and turning a thing over in my chest, a truth I’ve carried so long it’s worn smooth, and I decide, all at once, that I’m tired of carrying it alone.
“You’re my muse,” I say into the dark. “You have been since the start. Since the very first one.”
I hear the sheets shift above me, as if she’s turned her head toward the sound of my voice.
“My first big hit… The song that put me on the map, the one everybody knows, the one I opened the concert with.” I stare up at the ceiling I can’t see and just let it out.
“The one you know as Bloom. And I never told you this… I don’t think I ever told anyone the real version, but I wrote it after the night we met.
The rooftop. The stupid cat, the trellis, you in that black dress telling me I was an idiot. ”
I feel myself smile in the dark. “I went home that night and I couldn’t sleep so I picked up my guitar and the bones of Bloom just fell out of me. I couldn’t finish it, though, not until I saw you again at that gala months later. It’s about you. It was always about you.”
The rain fills the silence. She doesn’t move.
“And every love song I’ve written since.”
My throat tightens.
“Every single one, Lily. There’s never been another subject.
People spend years guessing who my songs are about, writing think pieces, and the answer is you.
It’s only ever been you, from the very first one to the last. You were my first love, my only one.
No matter what anyone out there says, that’s the truth of it. ”
I hear her breath catch somewhere above me in the dark.
“That’s what the concert was supposed to be.”
The hardest part, the part I’ve never said out loud to her.
“The whole album… Twelve songs, all about you. About us, start to finish. I was going to drop it that night, after the show. That’s what all the late nights were, all the times I wasn’t home…
all the ways I let you down while I was building the stupid thing.
It was my anniversary present to you. At least, I meant for it to be. ”
My voice goes rough.