18. Tristan
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Tristan
The world, it turns out, has opinions about a man who tells the truth on live television.
The fallout hit within hours and it hasn’t stopped rolling since.
Ford got dropped by the label before the press conference even finished trending, and the whispers started immediately, blacklisted, radioactive, done. No reputable act will touch him now. Word is he can’t get a manager job scheduling a high school talent show.
Hallie went down faster and uglier, her follower count bleeding out in real time, the brand deals evaporating, the comment sections turning into a bloodbath, until she deactivated every account she had and vanished off the face of the internet entirely.
And me, I’m apparently the biggest story in the country, the superstar who blew up his own career and exposed a conspiracy in the same four minutes, everyone breathless to know what I’ll do next.
I know exactly what I’m doing next. I’m sitting on a stool in my own living room getting a pottery lesson, and I’ve never been happier in my life.
I couldn’t care less about any of it.
That would’ve been unthinkable a year ago, the old me lived and died by the story, refreshed the numbers, chased the noise.
This me can’t look away from the woman sitting across from me with her hands covered in wet clay and a smudge of it on her cheek, telling me I’m doing it wrong.
“Tristan…” She taps the backs of my hands where they’re mangling a lump of clay on the wheel. “Focus. You’re not even looking at it. Gentle pressure, keep it centered, you’re squishing it into a pancake.”
“I am looking at it,” I lie, dragging my eyes down to the wheel. My bowl, if you can call it that, has collapsed into a sad lopsided crater listing hard to one side. “Huh. Okay. That got away from me.”
“That is the worst bowl I have ever seen in my life.” She’s biting back a grin. “And I once taught a class of six-year-olds.” She shakes her head, delighted. “Thank God you can sing, Everett, because you have absolutely no future in ceramics. None. This is a tragedy in bowl form.”
“Bold words from a woman with clay on her face.”
“Where?” She swipes at the wrong cheek, smearing it worse, and I lose it, and she narrows her eyes at me. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
I lean across the wheel and kiss her, quick, tasting the laugh on her mouth, and for a second she leans into it, and then she pulls back and points a muddy finger at me with mock severity.
“No. No kissing during instruction. You’re supposed to be learning a life skill and instead you keep, doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Distracting me.” She flicks her fingers at me, and a small spray of wet clay flecks across my shirt. “On purpose.”
I look down at the clay on my shirt. Then I look up at her, slow.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh, you should not have done that.”
Her eyes go wide, and she’s already scrambling back off her stool, hands up, backing toward the kitchen. “Tristan. Tristan, no.”
“You don’t know what you just started.” I stand, unhurried, scooping a generous handful of wet clay off the wheel, and her face wavers between delight and genuine alarm.
“It was one flick! One tiny flick! That does not warrant whatever you’re thinking!”
“Should’ve thought of that before you insulted my bowl and assaulted my shirt.”
She bolts, shrieking, and I go after her.
What follows is undignified in a way I hope nobody ever gets footage of.
We tear through the penthouse, clay flying, both of us slipping on the hardwood, her laughing so hard she can barely run, me catching her around the waist and smearing a muddy handprint across her shoulder while she twists free and gets me back across the jaw.
Lily’s fast. She’s always been fast. She ducks behind the kitchen island and pelts me with a wad of clay that catches me square in the chest, and I chase her back out into the living room, both of us breathless and filthy and grinning like idiots.
Then I finally get an arm around her, hauling her back against me, both of us stumbling.
“Truce,” she gasps, laughing, “truce, truce, we’re getting it everywhere, my mother will have a stroke if she sees this place…”
But that’s when her hip catches the low console by the couch, and the top drawer slides open with the jolt, and a folder inside tips over, and a dense sheaf of papers slides out and fans across the floor.
We both stop.
I know what it is before I can read a word of it. I feel my stomach drop.
The divorce papers.
I’d forgotten they were even there. I stuffed them in that drawer weeks ago, back when they were the only thing left of us, back before any of this, and I never looked at them again, and I sure as hell never wanted her to find them like this, in the middle of the best afternoon of my life, clay drying on both our faces.
She bends down and picks them up. Smooths them out. Reads the top line, and I watch her go still, and everything in me clenches tight.
“I almost forgot about these,” she says quietly.
“Lily…”
My voice comes out careful, too careful. I don’t want to touch this.
I don’t want to say the wrong thing and remind her that this was ever real, that there’s a version of us where these papers got signed.
I didn’t bring them up on purpose, I’ve been avoiding them for weeks, terrified that mentioning the word divorce out loud would break whatever spell we’ve been living in.
“You don’t have to look at those right now. We can just…”
She looks up at me. And she reads my face, the way she always could, sees the fear sitting right there on it, and the tightness in her own expression softens and settles.
Then, holding my eyes the whole time, she takes the papers in both hands, and slowly, deliberately, she tears them straight down the middle.
The sound of it goes through me.
She doesn’t stop there.
She folds the halves together and tears again, and again, methodical and calm, letting the pieces flutter down to the clay-streaked floor between us, until the thing that nearly ended us is just confetti scattered across the hardwood, and then she looks back up at me with the smallest, surest smile I have ever seen.
“We don’t have any use for that anymore,” she says.
A joy breaks open in my chest, huge and bright and almost too much to hold.
I cross the space between us in one step, and I catch her face in my clay-streaked hands, and I kiss her like the whole world just started over.
Because it did.
The kiss goes from soft to starving in the space of a breath.
Whatever careful thing I’ve been holding onto for weeks, all that restraint, all that patience, the constant vigilance of not pushing, of waiting, of being good, it just detonates the second her mouth opens under mine.
Because the papers are gone.
The last barrier between us is confetti on the floor, and there’s nothing left to be careful about, nothing left to lose, and I feel her feel it too, feel the exact moment the wanting flips over into a hunger that can’t wait another second.
She fists her hands in my shirt and hauls me closer, up onto her toes, kissing me back like she’s trying to climb inside me, and I groan against her mouth and get my hands under her thighs and lift.
Her legs come around my waist, and I’m walking us backward without breaking the kiss, both of us clumsy and desperate and covered in drying clay and laughing into each other’s mouths between kisses that keep turning serious.
Lily’s back hits the glass.
The whole wall of windows, the city spread out gold and glittering forty floors below, and I press her up against it, her spine to the cool glass and the whole world at her back, and she gasps into my mouth at the temperature of it, and I swallow the sound, and everything in me goes molten.
“Here,” she breathes against my lips, her fingers already dragging my shirt up. “Right here. I don’t want to wait, Tristan, I don’t want to move, I just want you, right now…”
“You’ve got me, baby.” I get the shirt off over my head and her hands are on my chest instantly, hot and greedy, and I press her harder into the glass and kiss down the line of her throat until she’s arching against me. “You’ve had me the whole time. You were always going to get me.”
I strip her out of her clay-streaked clothes right there against the window, slow enough to savor it and fast enough that we’re both shaking, and she helps, impatient, yanking at buttons, and then there’s nothing between her skin and the glass and my hands and my mouth, and the city lights are painting her gold and I have to stop for one second just to look at her.
“Fuck…” It comes out wrecked. “Look at you. I will never, for the rest of my life, get over the sight of you.”
“Then don’t stop looking.” She pulls my mouth back to hers, and there’s no more talking that matters.
I lift her again, her back braced to the window, her legs locked around me, and when we come together this time it’s nothing like the desperate grief of the cabin, it’s a different thing entirely, it’s joy, it’s homecoming, it’s every held breath finally releasing at once.
She cries out against my shoulder and her nails drag down my back and I set a rhythm that has her gasping my name into my skin, the glass cool at her spine and my body hot against her front, the whole city glittering witness below us and neither of us caring who might look up.
“I’ve got you,” I say against her temple, over and over, moving with her, into her, “I’ve got you, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, never again, never…”
“Tristan.” My name breaks apart in her mouth. “Bed. Take me to bed. I want, I want all of you, I want to feel all of it…”
I don’t need to be told twice.
I carry her up the stairs still tangled around me, both of us laughing and gasping and unwilling to stop kissing long enough to make it easy, and I lay her down across our bed, our bed, the one that sat cold and empty for weeks, and I follow her down into the sheets.
And here it slows.
Here, with her spread out beneath me in the last of the evening light, her dark hair fanned across the pillow and her eyes soft and blown and fixed on mine, the hunger banks down into a deeper thing, a want that aches.
I take my time. I map every inch of her I neglected for a year, every place I stopped paying attention to, with my hands and my mouth and all the reverence I have in me, until she’s trembling and pleading and pulling me up to her, and when I finally sink back into her it’s slow and deep and complete.
Her breath catches, and her hands find mine on the pillow and lace our fingers tight.
“I love you,” I tell her, my forehead against hers, moving with her, watching her come apart beneath me. “I love you, I love you… I’m never going to stop saying it.”
“Tristan…” She’s close, I can feel it, her whole body tightening, her eyes glassing over.
“I’ve got you.” I press it into her skin. “Let go, baby. I’ve got you. I’ll always have you.”
And she shatters, gasping my name, her fingers crushed in mine, and I follow her right over the edge a heartbeat later, groaning into the curve of her neck.
Both of us wrecked and clinging and finally, completely home.
We lie in the sheets in the blue dark, her head on my bare chest, her leg thrown over mine, my heart slowly finding its way back to normal under her cheek.
Neither of us has said anything in a while. We don’t need to. I trace lazy patterns up and down her spine and feel more whole than I have in longer than I can remember.
And then I reach over to the nightstand.
I’ve kept it in that drawer for weeks.
Since the night she pressed it into my palm and walked out into the dark, I have carried this thing around like a stone in my chest, unable to look at it, unable to put it anywhere but close.
I open the drawer and my fingers find it in the dark, small and cool and impossibly weighted with everything it means, and I bring it out and hold it up in the dim light.
Her wedding ring.
Lily goes still against my chest.
I take her left hand in mine, gently, and I lift it, and I slide the ring back onto her finger where it belongs, slow, careful, watching it catch the last of the light as it settles into place.
It fits as if it never left. Because it never should have.
“You kept it,” she says softly. She lifts her head, and her eyes are wet, and she’s looking at the ring on her hand like she can’t quite believe it’s real.
“Of course I kept it.” I bring her hand to my mouth and press a kiss to the ring, and then to the finger beneath it, my lips lingering against her skin.
“I was never going to let it go. Not really. I told you I was going to win you back, Lily, and a man doesn’t give away the thing he’s fighting for. ”
I meet her eyes. “I kept it because I swore to win you back. And I meant it.”
Her face crumples and blooms all at once, and then she’s laughing, this wet, joyful, disbelieving laugh, and she surges up and kisses me, deep and lingering and full of every promise we’ve been rebuilding for weeks, her ringed hand cradling my jaw.
I lie there in the dark with my wife in my arms and her ring back on her finger.
The whole ruined year is finally behind us as I feel every last piece of my life click quietly, perfectly, back into place.