15. Liliana #2
My fingers find the hem of his henley and shove it up, and he breaks the kiss just long enough to yank it off over his head, and then it’s just him, firelit and beautiful and mine, and I press my palms flat against the warm bare planes of his chest and feel his heart slamming as hard as my own.
“Fuck, look at you, baby…” he breathes against my throat, his mouth moving hot down the side of my neck, and his hands are working the buttons of the flannel.
His flannel, off of me one at a time, slow even now, reverent even now, as if he’s unwrapping a gift he can’t believe he’s allowed to touch again.
“I forgot. I actually let myself forget how you… how this feels.” He pushes the flannel off my shoulders and it falls behind me and his hands smooth up the bare skin of my back and I shiver hard against him. “I’m never forgetting again. You hear me? Never.”
He lays me back on the blankets in front of the fire, and the firelight paints him gold as he comes down over me, bracing on his forearms, his weight settling between my hips, and I arch up into him helplessly.
His mouth maps a slow burning path down my throat, my collarbone, lower, and I fist my hands in his hair and I stop thinking entirely, stop bracing, stop holding any part of myself back and just let myself feel it, feel him, the drag of his mouth and the press of his hands and the low rough sounds he makes against my skin as if I’m undoing him just as fast as he’s undoing me.
The rest of our clothes go, tangled and shoved aside in the firelight, and then there’s nothing left between us at all, just skin and heat and the crackle of the fire and the wanting that’s been building for weeks finally, finally breaking.
Tristan pauses at the last, poised over me, his eyes finding mine, checking, always checking, even now.
“Liliana,” he says, rough and reverent and undone. “Look at me, baby. I want to see you.”
I hold his gaze. I wrap my legs around him and pull him in.
When he moves, when we finally come together after all these months of distance and hurt and want, the sound we both make is half relief and half ruin, and my eyes go hot and my whole chest cracks wide open.
We move together as if our bodies never forgot each other, because they didn’t.
It’s slow and then it’s not, deep and desperate, his forehead pressed to mine and my name falling out of his mouth over and over like a prayer he can’t stop saying.
The firelight plays over both of us. His hand finds mine on the blanket and laces our fingers tight and pins it beside my head, and I hold on like he’s the only solid thing in a spinning world, and the pleasure of it builds and builds until it’s almost unbearable, until it’s tangled up with everything else, the love and the grief and the loss and the impossible, terrifying hope.
And somewhere in the middle of it, I start to cry.
I don’t even know why. It just breaks out of me, tears sliding hot down into my hair, a sob catching in my throat between one gasp and the next, and it isn’t sadness, exactly, and it isn’t pain, it’s just, everything, all of it, everything I’ve held clenched shut for a year cracking open at once with him buried deep inside me and his heart pounding against mine.
Tristan feels it instantly. He goes still, lifting his head, his eyes searching my wet face in the firelight, and I brace for him to ask, to stop, to make me explain.
He doesn’t.
He just lowers his mouth to my face and kisses the tears away.
One and then the next, soft and slow, my cheekbones, my temple, the corner of my eye, gathering the salt of them with his lips without a single word, without asking why, as if he understands that some crying doesn’t need a reason.
That some things just have to come out of a body, and then he presses his forehead to mine again and breathes with me, and moves with me, and holds me through all of it until the crying and the wanting become the same unbearable thing and break apart together.
I shatter with his name in my mouth and his hand crushed in mine, and he follows me over a breath later, groaning my name into the curve of my neck, both of us wrecked and shaking and finally, finally undefended.
Afterwards, we end up lying tangled together in the heap of blankets, the fire burned down to embers, my head on his chest and his heart slowing under my ear and his hand tracing lazy shapes up and down my bare back.
Neither of us says anything for a long time. I listen to him breathe. I feel more peaceful than I have in longer than I can remember, hollowed out and refilled all at once.
“Lily…” His voice rumbles low under my ear, careful, as if he’s afraid to break the quiet.
“Give me a second chance. Please. Not just tonight. A real one. I know I have no right to ask, and I know it won’t be easy, and I know I have years of proving myself ahead of me.
I’ll do all of it. Please. Give me a real chance. ”
I go quiet against his chest, and I let myself really feel the question, the whole enormous weight of it, and I don’t rush the answer, because he deserves a true one and so do I.
“I’m not going to promise you it’s all fixed,” I say finally, lifting my head to look at him, my chin on his chest. “Because it isn’t.
I’m not going to fall back into your arms and pretend the last year didn’t happen and let everything go straight back to how it was.
It can’t be how it was. How it was is what nearly killed me. ”
“I know.” His hand stills on my back. “I don’t want how it was either.”
“But…” I take a breath, and I feel the gamble tip forward under me, the leap I’ve been circling for weeks, and I make it. “But I’ll let you try. One chance, Tristan. One real, last chance.”
I hold his eyes so he knows I mean every word. “Don’t screw it up. Because I don’t have another one in me. This is the last one I’ve got.”
A wave breaks open across his face, relief and disbelief and a joy so raw it’s almost hard to look at, and he cradles the back of my head in his hand and pulls me up to kiss him, slow and deep and full of promise.
“I won’t,” he says against my mouth, fierce, certain. “I swear to you, Lily. I won’t.”
Next thing I know, I wake in the gray light of morning and my heart lurches, because I’m alone.
The blankets are tucked carefully around me, the fire long dead, and the space beside me on the floor is empty and cold, and for one terrible plunging second the old fear grabs me by the throat.
He’s gone, of course he’s gone, you let him back in and he’s already gone, and I sit up clutching the blanket to my chest with panic roaring in my ears.
Then I hear it.
Singing. Drifting in from the next room, some silly old tune half-hummed and half-mumbled, and underneath it the clatter of a pan and the pop of food cooking, the homely ordinary sounds of a kitchen in use.
I go still. My heart climbs back down out of my throat.
So I get up, wrapped in a blanket, and pad to the doorway, and I stop there.
Tristan is at the stove in his jeans and nothing else, hair a wreck, flipping a crepe in a pan and quietly singing a song under his breath, entirely at home, entirely unaware I’m watching.
There’s coffee going. There’s a plate already set out.
Morning light is coming through the window and landing gold across his bare shoulders, and he looks up then, and catches me in the doorway, and his whole face breaks into that grin, the crooked boyish one, the one that has never once been fair, and he lifts the plate toward me like an offering.
“Morning,” he says, warm and easy and happy, so happy. “Sit down. I made you breakfast. It might even be edible.”
And I stand there in the doorway wrapped in a blanket, looking at my husband making me breakfast in the golden morning light as if no time has passed at all.
As if we’re just us again and nothing was ever broken.
Right there, one clear, terrifying thought rises up through the warmth flooding my chest.
I don’t know how to lose him again.
I don’t think I’d survive it.