14. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
I wake up warm.
That’s the first thing I register before my eyes are even open. There is this deep, unfamiliar warmth spreading through me. A solid heat pressed all along my front, rising and falling slow and steady under my cheek.
It smells of cedar, mint, and faintly of rain. It smells of a memory I’ve been trying not to have. And my body knows it before my brain does, sinking into it, molding itself closer to it. Some ancient contented part of me sighing finally, there you are.
I open my eyes.
Tristan.
His face is right there on the pillow, inches from mine, slack and unguarded in sleep. The pillow that was supposed to be between us is on the floor.
At some point in the night we both crossed the border we so carefully drew, and now I’m tucked against his chest with his arm slung warm across my back and my hand fisted in the front of his sweater… My sweater, which is originally his sweater, and he’s breathing slowly and evenly.
God help me, he is looking absolutely beautiful. The gray morning light softens every hard line of him. His lashes are stupid and long against his cheek. My heart is beating so loud I’m half afraid it’ll wake him.
I could look at him like this for an hour. That’s the horrifying truth of it. I could lie here in this warm quiet and just look at my husband’s sleeping face until the sun comes all the way up.
But someone clears their throat.
My eyes snap up and away from him so fast I nearly give myself whiplash.
Danica is standing at the foot of the bed.
Arms crossed. One heeled foot tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm against the floorboards. Eyebrows somewhere up near her hairline. She has the exact expression of a mother who has come home early and found a scene she was not supposed to find.
Which, I realize with a lurch of pure mortification, is more or less precisely the situation.
“Well,” she says, drawing the word out with enormous satisfaction. “Good morning, young lady.”
The panic hits before my brain can catch up to it. One second I’m cocooned against Tristan’s chest, and the next my hands have shoved out on pure reflex, a full-body flinch of oh no, oh no, she’s seeing this, and the result is instantaneous.
There’s a yelp, a scramble, and then a loud thud as my husband disappears clean off the side of the bed.
“What the fu…” His voice comes up muffled and disoriented from the floor, followed by a groan.
Tristan struggles upright, hair sticking straight up on one side, blinking around in confusion, taking in first me, frozen and horrified in the tangled sheets, and then Danica, looming at the foot of the bed like judgment itself.
“Oh,” he says. “Uh… Morning?”
“I didn’t know you had a visitor, Lily.” Danica turns the full weight of her stare on me, and I feel roughly nine years old. “A whole overnight visitor. In the bed. How nice.”
“It’s not… we didn’t… there was a storm!” I manage, and it comes out about as convincing as it sounds.
Tristan hauls himself to his feet, dragging a hand through his wrecked hair in a doomed attempt to look presentable, and gives Danica the sheepish, boyish smile that has gotten him out of trouble on every continent.
“Hi, Danica,” he tries.
However, my cousin is immune. She narrows her eyes at him until he actually shrinks a little.
“You,” she informs him, “are not off the hook. Not even slightly.”
Then she turns back to me and jerks her chin toward the door. “You. Handle him before breakfast, Missy. I need coffee and I need to not be looking at this.”
And she sweeps out, leaving the two of us alone in the wreckage of my dignity.
For a moment neither of us says anything. Tristan stands there in yesterday’s rain-stiff jeans and the old sweater, hair in ten directions, and I sit tangled in my sheets with my face on fire as the silence gets more excruciating by the second.
“So,” he says finally, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m thinking I should probably go. Before your cousin finds a reason to bury me in the garden.”
“Yeah.” I exhale, half relief and half a feeling I don’t want to name. “Yeah, that’s… that’s a good idea.”
***
I walk him out to the gate.
His car is parked half a block down, and the morning is cool, rinsed clean by the storm, everything dripping and bright.
He’s got his guitar slung over his shoulder and one hand still absently rubbing at the crown of his head where he cracked it on the nightstand last night, and he looks rumpled and tired but still entirely too good in the early light, and I keep my arms crossed with a careful arm’s length between us telling myself I’m being very strong about all of it.
“Well,” he says, turning at the gate. “Thank you… For the couch. And the sweater. And, you know. Not letting me freeze on the sidewalk like a stray.”
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He smiles, soft, and turns to go.
I swear I don’t decide to do it. That’s the only excuse I have.
Tristan turns to leave and before I’ve thought it through, I’m up on my toes with my hand curled around his jaw, pulling his head down toward me, my fingers already searching through his hair for the spot.
“Hold still. Let me see. You hit your head twice since last night, that can’t be good.” My fingertips find the little raised bump near his crown and he winces. “Sorry… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shove you that hard earlier, I panicked. You’ve got an actual lump.”
But he’s gone completely still under my hands.
When I glance down from his hair to his face, he’s looking up at me from under his lashes. Close, so close, and there’s that slow grin spreading across his mouth, the crooked boyish one, the one that has never once been fair.
“I’ll survive,” he says quietly.
And that’s when I realize how close I’ve pulled him.
My hand is still cradling his face, our mouths a breath apart, his eyes doing that warm dark thing that used to be the beginning of everything. My stomach swoops. I drop my hand and step back so fast I nearly trip over the gate.
“Right.” I clear my throat. “Good. You’ll live. You should, um… You should probably get going. You already wasted a whole day here.”
“Well.” He shrugs, that grin still playing at his mouth, entirely too pleased with himself. “I’ve got the time. Kind of unemployed at the moment.”
And there it is. The reminder that he walked away from all of it, the label, the tour, the career he spent his whole life building. My treacherous chest does a slow, warm thing that I hate with my entire being. I press my lips together and refuse to let it show on my face.
“Right,” I say again, because apparently it’s the only word I have left.
He watches me for a second, and the grin softens into a look quieter and steadier that reaches all the way into his eyes.
“I’ll see you, Lily,” he says.
I only nod because I don’t trust my voice to do anything more than that. And I stand at the gate with my arms wrapped around myself, watching him walk down the wet street to his car, guitar on his back.
All the while, I do not let myself smile until he’s pulled away and there’s no possible chance he could see it.
However, I make it exactly as far as the front door.
I get inside and shut it behind me, and Danica’s voice sails out from the kitchen, bright and merciless.
“Next time,” she calls, “give me a little heads up if you’re planning a sleepover with your supposed ex-husband! So I can buy the good coffee! And prepare emotionally!”
I don’t answer her. I speed-walk straight to my room, shut the door, and collapse back against it, pressing both hands over my burning face and sliding halfway down the wood.
“Damn you,” I whisper into my palms. To the empty room, to the closed door, to the man who is currently driving away with my composure in the passenger seat. “Damn you, Tristan Everett.”
Then I peel myself off the door and go take the coldest shower of my entire life, and it does absolutely nothing at all.
***
The lilies keep coming.
A day passes, then another, and every morning there’s a fresh white stem waiting on the step exactly like before, as if nothing between us has shifted at all, as if he didn’t spend a whole storm in my bed with a pillow between us telling me the truth about every song he ever wrote.
He’s still not pushing. He never pushes. He just keeps quietly, faithfully showing up in the one small way he’s allowed himself, and I keep quietly, faithfully failing to throw a single one away.
But this morning’s delivery is different.
Tucked beside the lily, in a little paper bag with my name on it in his slanted scrawl, is a box of band-aids. Just a plain box of band-aids, the good fabric kind, and a note.
[ For the next time you fight a bowl and lose. - Yours, T. ]
I stand in the doorway holding a box of band-aids and I feel my throat go tight and my eyes sting. It’s absurd, it’s such a small, stupid, ordinary thing, and it undoes me completely.
Because he remembered.
Some man who used to forget our dinners while it was cooking on the stove, remembered a tiny cut on my palm from a broken bowl in the dark, and he went out and bought band-aids, sending it with a flower.
Every promise he’s made lately, he keeps.
Every small way he could show up, he does.
It’s the exact opposite of the entire last year of our marriage, and I keep waiting for it to slip, for the old Tristan to come back, the one who meant well and vanished anyway, and he just… doesn’t.
In the end, I carry the band-aids to my room and I sit on the edge of my bed, staring at nothing for a long time.
“You’re having doubts.”
Danica says it from the doorway, not a question, and I look up to find her watching me with her arms folded and her head tilted, reading me the way she’s read me since we were kids.
“I’m not having doubts.” I set the band-aid box down on the nightstand, next to a drawer full of lilies I refuse to acknowledge. “I’m having… I don’t know. Feelings. Which is worse.”
She comes in and sits down across from me on the desk chair, spinning it around to face me. “Talk to me.”
“He’s been too good.”