Chapter Eleven #2
Instead, she lay awake, glaring at the ceiling of this old house, growing more and more furious by the minute. And the more she tried to keep herself from tossing and turning, the worse it got.
It was after midnight when she finally gave up. She climbed out of the bed, taking care to tuck Arlo back in. She shoved her feet into her warm slippers and she wrapped a long sweater around her like a robe, and she found herself out in the dark, cold hallway before she could think better of it.
She made her way down the main stairs, where the Christmas decorations looked stately and quiet in the dimness.
She stood there for a moment, at the foot of the stairs, but then whatever demon had spurred her out of bed kept her going.
She found herself at the doors to the main library before she could talk herself out of it.
The room was a showpiece. The jewel of the house, she’d heard Rafael’s father say once.
It was a huge library filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves accessed with the kind of rolling stairs and ladders that made Lily giddy with a book lover’s joy, though this was the kind of library that featured books that were better looked at than read.
This time of year, that hardly mattered, as the huge Christmas tree dominated the far end of the room, where there was normally a larger sitting area done up in pompous leather chairs and blocky masculine accessories.
And tonight, Rafael stood at the fireplace, one arm braced on the mantel above it, his face toward the flames.
Lily stood there in the doorway for a moment, letting that great, yawning thing that was all her many and complicated feelings for this man take her over. It washed through her, buffeting her like a riptide, turning her over and over and over until she could hardly see straight.
Until she focused on Rafael, that was, and he was all she could see.
Maybe, she thought, it had always been that way for a reason. Maybe she wasn’t sick or twisted. Maybe they’d simply been too young to handle what had been there between them from the very start.
Maybe.
She was so damned tired of all these maybes.
“You did it again,” she said, and her voice sounded reedy and strange in the vastness of this formal, stuffy room.
By the fire, Rafael didn’t move. It made her think he’d known she was there, and something curled up deep inside her at the thought.
“You ran away. Right there in plain sight. You used to do it with other women. Tonight you did it with your supposed self-loathing and your noble gestures no one asked you to make. But it was still running away, wasn’t it? ”
“I suppose we could have a competition to see who gets farther,” he replied after a moment, but at least his voice was dark and low again.
Not that strained, polite voice he’d been using earlier tonight.
At least here and now he sounded like Rafael again.
He looked at her then, without straightening.
“Have you packed, then? Or are you planning to walk back to Virginia as you are?”
The unfairness of that felt like another great wave crashing over her head, and the smart move would have been to turn around and leave—but she didn’t. Instead, Lily took another step into the room.
“What would it matter if I did or didn’t?” she demanded. “You don’t care either way.”
“I care.” His voice was a lash across the firelit room. “Believe whatever you must, but know that. I care.”
He straightened then, and it took her a moment to truly appreciate how disreputable he looked at the moment.
Gone were the tailored suits, the casually elegant daywear.
This version of Rafael seemed a good deal more.
..raw. His shirt was open, potentially misbuttoned.
She didn’t think he’d shaved recently. And that look in his dark gaze. ..burned.
Lily still didn’t leave. She studied him for a moment while too many emotions battled it out inside her. Too many to count. Too many to name.
“You’ve convinced yourself that this is all some great love story, haven’t you?” she demanded. “It wasn’t.”
“No?” he asked, and he roamed toward her then, that stark, dangerous expression on her face thrilling her in a way she told herself she didn’t understand. But her body did, the way it always did. It flushed hot, then melted. Everywhere. “It should have been.”
“Things are only epic to you when you’ve lost them, Rafael, have you noticed that?
” She didn’t know what made her more furious—him, or her body’s response to him, which had only intensified.
If anything, that night in Venice had made it worse.
“This can only be a love story if I leave you. That’s what you want. ”
“I love you.” It was harsh and flat, and they both stared at each other as it hung there between them, dancing like an errant spark from the fire on the old rug, then disappearing.
She thought he would take it back, but instead, he breathed deep and held her gaze.
“I should have told you then. I should have told you every day since I found you again. I should have told you tonight. I love you, Lily.”
Lily stared back at him, stunned. Scraped through and emptied out.
But then another wave hit, this one harder than the ones before, and she laughed.
It was an ugly sound. She heard the harshness of it echo back to her, but she couldn’t stop.
She couldn’t make it stop, not even when Rafael drew closer and stood there above her.
“Stop,” he said, and he made it worse with that look on his face, something like gentle, and the way his hard mouth softened. It nearly did her in. She jabbed at her eyes with hands that had turned into fists without her noticing. “You don’t need to do this.”
“Love doesn’t do anything, Rafael,” she threw at him then. “It doesn’t save anyone. It can’t change anything. It’s an excuse. A catchall. In the end, it’s meaningless. And, at its worst, destructive.”
He reached over and slid his hand around the side of her neck, holding his palm there. Over her pulse, she realized. As if he was checking in with her heart—and that, too, made everything inside her seem to lurch and then slide. She was finding it hard to stay on her feet.
But she couldn’t look away from him, either.
“You’re talking about what people do with love, or in its name,” he said. “But that’s people. Love is bigger and better than all those things.”
Lily shook her head. “How would you know? My mother’s shining example? Or maybe your father’s?”
She wanted to jerk her head away from him, knock his hand off her. But she didn’t, and she couldn’t have said why. Only that it was connected to that trembling knot inside her that seemed to get harder and bigger the more it shook.
“They’re people,” Rafael said. “Flawed and limited, like anyone.”
“My mother spent her life chasing the next high. Men. Drugs. Whatever. Your father gets married for sport. You call those flaws? I’d call it something more like pathological.”
“Are you and I any better?” Rafael asked, and he couldn’t know, she thought, how much the heat of his hand warmed her. How much she wanted to simply topple into it and let him hold her there forever... He couldn’t possibly know that, could he?
“That’s my point.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “I told you the truth and you wanted nothing to do with me. I told you I’d take your child away from you again and you’d let me do it. You and I are worse than our parents, Rafael. We’re much, much worse.”
He shifted then, bringing his other hand up to hold her on the other side and tipping her face toward his.
“No,” he said, in his uncompromising way. So certain. So ruthlessly sure. “We are not.”
But she was warming to her theme, to that knotted thing inside her, as if it might choke her if she didn’t get all of this out.
“And what I don’t understand is what it’s all for,” she threw at him. “What’s the point? The things you did or I did, then or now. The things anyone does. What is there to show for any of it?”
“You,” Rafael said. “Me. Arlo.” He shrugged in that way of his, Italian and uncompromisingly male, his dark eyes fixed to hers.
“This is what love is. This is what life is. Complicated. Brutal. Glorious.” His hands tightened and he drew her closer, until they stood in what was nearly a kiss. Nearly. “Ours, Lily. This is ours.”
“Rafael...”
“I will put you on that plane myself,” he gritted out. “If that’s what you want. If you really want to put this—me—behind you.”
And she opened her mouth to tell him that was exactly what she wanted, but didn’t.
She couldn’t, somehow. It all whirled around inside her.
All the fear, the pain. The running and the hiding across all these years.
The lies, then and now. Had she cut herself off from her life because of Rafael?
Or had Rafael been the last strike in a life spent coming a distant second to whatever her mother was losing herself in that month?
Maybe, just maybe, it was all the same running away.
And maybe it was finally time she stopped.
She’d never stopped loving this man. She’d simply never learned how to do it without losing everything in the process. Her life. Herself.
“And if I don’t?” she dared to ask, if softly. “If I don’t want that?”
Rafael studied her face for a long, long time.
So long that Lily forgot everything except the stark male beauty of his face.
So long that she forgot herself, too, all those dark things that crowded their past, and smiled up at him with every last bit of that shaking, knotted thing inside her that she was very much afraid was hope.
And it was worth everything, she thought, to see that answering curve take over his face, transforming him before her eyes from that grim, hard man to the Rafael she’d loved before she’d known she shouldn’t.
The Rafael who had been so beautiful to a sixteen-year-old girl that she hadn’t dared to look at him directly.
As if she’d known even then that once she did, she’d never look away.
“I want to make you smile, Lily. I want to make you happy.” His mouth brushed hers, a smile to a smile, and made her shiver deep inside. “But I don’t have the slightest idea how to do that.”
So she wrapped her arms around his neck and she pulled him close, resting her forehead against his.
“Love me,” she said, all of that emotion making her voice thick and her knees feel weak in turn. “I think that’s a good start.”
“I always have,” he told her, his words resonating like a vow. “I always will.”
She breathed in deep, then breathed out all the dark and the pain, the hurt and the fury. She let it go, like snow into the water of those dark Venice canals.
“Rafael,” she whispered, “I’ve been in love with you all my life. I wouldn’t know how to go about stopping. I never have. I don’t think I ever will.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” he promised her.
And Lily didn’t know if he kissed her or she kissed him, only that they came together and this time, she felt that knotted thing open up, hope like light inside her and inside him, flooding them both.
Love. Life. Complicated and wonderful—and for the first time in her life, she truly believed she could have all of those things. With him. Finally, with him.
Rafael lifted her up into his arms and carried her across the room. Then he laid her down beneath the sparkling lights of the first Christmas tree that was truly theirs, on the very first day of the rest of their lives, and started working on forever.
Kiss by perfect kiss.