Epilogue #2
And underneath it, thousands of comments, and a whole trend spun off it, and I start to laugh despite everything, because the top one is a meme.
Can Tristan Everett fight?
Stamped over a photo of him looking soft and smug with his arm around me, and the replies are a war zone of people declaring their intentions to steal me away from him and him, personally, in his own replies, threatening every last one of them.
“‘Come and try,’” I read aloud off the screen, incredulous. “My God, Tristan, you replied to one hundred people. You are sick.”
“One hundred and twelve. I’m very thorough.” He takes the phone back, thoroughly pleased with his own ridiculousness. “They keep saying they’ll take you from me. Somebody has to defend the marriage.”
And it lands on me all at once, standing there, the whole enormous distance between this moment and another one, a lifetime ago.
Once, the entire internet laughed at him over me and now here he is, a year later, publicly, gleefully, absurdly claiming me, and the whole world is charmed to death by it, and the joke isn’t on him anymore.
The joke is that he’s the most devoted man alive and he doesn’t care who knows it.
We flipped the whole thing on its head.
Together. We turned the humiliation inside out until it came back around as love.
“Seriously…” I shake my head, fond and exasperated. “You should really find a better use of your time.”
“I kinda enjoy it,” he says, grinning up at me, unrepentant to his bones.
“I think you’re going to be pretty busy soon, though.” I say it soft.
He tilts his head, that little crease coming back.
“Busy? Nah. I told you, I run my own schedule now. No tours, no albums, nothing on the calendar. I’m a man of leisure. My entire job is loving you and annoying strangers on the internet.” He pats the bed beside him. “Speaking of, come back, you’ve been gone forever, I…”
“It’s not that.” My heart is going so fast I can feel it in my fingertips. I bite my lip against the smile trying to break my whole face open. “That’s not the kind of busy I mean, Tristan.”
He goes still. The grin slips into confusion, his head tilting further, and I watch him try and fail to read whatever’s happening on my face.
“Lily?” he says slowly. “What are you…”
I bring my hand out from behind my back.
Then I hold it up between us, the little plastic stick, the two pink lines, my hand trembling just slightly, and I watch his eyes drop to it, and I watch the exact half-second it takes for him to understand what he’s looking at.
“I’m pregnant,” I say, and my voice breaks right down the middle of it, wet and laughing and terrified and joyful all at once. “You’re going to be a dad, Tristan.”
For a moment he doesn’t move at all.
He just stares at the little stick in my hand, and then up at my face, and then back down, his mouth slightly open, every thought visibly draining out of his head, and I watch it move through him in waves.
The shock, the disbelief, the dawning, the thing underneath all of it cracking his whole face wide open.
“You’re…” His voice fails. He tries again. “We’re… Lily, you’re…”
“Yeah,” I whisper, nodding, crying now, grinning like a fool. “Yeah. We are.”
And then he moves.
He comes up off that bed like it caught fire, and he grabs my face and kisses me, hard and sloppy and laughing, and then he’s got his arms around my waist and he’s lifting me clean off the floor, spinning me in a full circle while I shriek and clutch his shoulders.
Both of us laughing so hard we can barely breathe, and he’s babbling a stream of it into my neck, ‘a baby, we’re having a baby.’
Apparently, that is not enough for him.
Tristan sets me down, and before I can stop him he’s striding across the room, throwing open the doors to the balcony, stepping out into the amber evening air, and he leans over the railing and he yells it, at the top of his lungs, out over the entire city.
“I’M GOING TO BE A DAD!”
“Tristan!” I scramble after him, mortified and delighted in equal measure. “Tristan, oh my God, the neighbors…”
“I’M GOING TO BE A…”
I reach him and go up on my toes and clap both hands over his mouth, and he’s laughing behind my palms, his eyes crinkled up and shining.
“You’re insane,” I inform him, fighting my own laughter. “Be normal. Be a normal person for one single second. Stop embarrassing us.”
The bastard doesn’t even try.
He just grins against my hands, unrepentant and radiant, and then he takes my wrist gently and moves my palm from his mouth to his lips and presses a kiss to it.
Then he lowers our joined hands down between us, and turns mine over, and kisses the back of it, right over my ring, his eyes coming up to hold mine, gone suddenly, completely soft.
“We’re going to be a family,” he says quietly, all the wild joy in him gathering into a steady, sure thing. “A real one. I’m going to be there for every second of it, Lily, every single one, I swear to you. I’m never going to miss a thing.”
The beautiful part is that I believe him.
Completely. Without a single shred of doubt.
I curl my fingers around his and hold on tight, and I nod.
“I know,” I say. “I know you will.”
Later, after he’s finally calmed down enough to just hold me, the two of us wrapped up together on the balcony watching the last of the light go down over the city, his hand splayed wide as I let myself think back over all of it.
I gambled everything on him.
Twice. Once on a rooftop, and once again in the wreckage, when the smart thing, the safe thing, the thing everyone would have understood, was to let him go.
I risked it all on the belief that people can change.
That love, real love, the kind that shows up, is worth the terror of trusting it.
Here, now, with his ring on my finger, his child under my heart and his head bent to press a kiss to my stomach in the golden dark, I finally know, all the way down, the truest thing I’ve ever known.
My risk and my gamble paid off.
Every last bit of it.
THE END