- Sebastian -
hen Lily opened the blinds, there was a streak of mascara smeared under her red-rimmed eyes. She looked down as soon as she saw me, perhaps sensing that I’d had it with being out of the loop.
Seriously, what the fuck? Were all women crazy? Was it me? Was I a crazy magnet?
I clenched my jaw, my eyes following her as she moved to let my family back in the room.
Even if she was crazy, that didn’t mean she was unlovable. It just made her flawed. Like Tiffany. And everyone else I’d ever met, for that matter.
Perhaps there was such a thing as normal, but I had more evidence to believe in Santa Claus at this point. Besides, deep down I knew I’d never trade knowing Lily for knowing normal. The mere suggestion sounded dull. Sounded like death.
Still, I was going to go crazy if I didn’t get some answers.
“We need to talk,” I said when she stepped in the doorway.
My mom and brother shoved the last of their trash in the closest garbage can and re-entered the room with big smiles on their faces, the kind of smiles only a greasy feast can provoke.
Lily nodded, and I reached for the top of her cheek, wiping the smear of makeup off with my thumb.
She lifted her hand and pressed it against mine, closing her eyes as she took a deep breath.
It felt wrong to comfort her when I was so angry, but as it happened, I felt my chest loosen and my face relax.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked after I dropped my hand.
“I don’t know. We’ll find somewhere.” I started down the nearest hall, keeping to the left so hurried nurses wouldn’t bump into me when they consulted their clipboards and dug for pens in the pockets of their scrubs.
“Here,” Lily said.
I stopped in my tracks and turned around.
“There’s no one in here.”
I followed her inside the small doctor’s office and closed the door, relieved to be away from the buzzing and beeping equipment outside. In fact, it was so suddenly silent I worried Lily might hear how hard my heart was pounding, might hear the pleading in my head. For the truth. For an explanation. For answers that wouldn’t lead to more questions.
“So?” she said, sitting in the chair beside the doctor’s desk, which was pushed in the corner and empty apart from a photo of a shiny black Lab with wise eyes.
I crossed my arms and leaned against the high bed, crinkling the paper lining that lay poised for a patient I hoped wasn’t about to arrive. “So.”
“I’m sorry I showed up here when I knew you didn’t want to see me,” she said, leaning back. “Javi didn’t make me feel like I had much choice.”
“You always have a choice,” I said. “That’s why I’m still so confused about what happened at the Fourth of July party.”
“Will you sit down?”
I rolled the doctor’s chair away from the desk and took a seat, keeping some distance between us.
She opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Look…” I lifted my eyes to hers. “I don’t know how you got yourself into a situation like that, but I’m not naïve, Lily. And it breaks my heart that you would—”
“I know,” she said. “But what could I do in that moment? Accept a bribe from you? That’s not how I want things to be between us. I hated the look on your face when you thought that might work.”
“I wasn’t trying to pay you for your company. I’m not one of those guys.”
“I know.”
“I was asking you to choose me, Lil. I was asking you to pick me instead of whatever you’re mixed up in.”
She stared down at her hands for a moment before looking back at me. “Is it too late?”
I sighed and leaned back.
She raised her eyebrows.
“I don’t know.”
“Because you think I’m damaged goods or because—?”
“Christ, Lily.” I shook my head. “I would never think that. Could never.”
“So…?”
“I just question your judgment.”
“You and me both.”
I rubbed the back of my neck.
“I’m out,” she said. “For what it’s worth, that was my last job.”
“Well, thank fuck for that.”
She flinched.
“But I still don’t get why you ever took your first. What the hell were you thinking?!”
She shrugged. “I was struggling to make ends meet,” she said, her voice softening as if she was remembering her mental state at the time. “I couldn’t afford my tuition, I was spending my student loans on rent, and I hated the place Paige was in. The food was bad, the nurses were negligent, and there was this strip of wallpaper in her room that was peeling away. And every time I went there all I could think about was how she was stuck in that room all the time and how the least she deserved was to be somewhere that wasn’t unraveling. ’Cause that would be new for her every day. She wouldn’t remember that it was there before, ya know? I worried she’d wake up and see it in the mornings and think her world was coming apart around her. It was unbearable.”
The urgent desperation in her voice was suffocating.
“Anyway, I was determined to get her out of there, so I dropped out of school to get a second job.”
I swallowed the knot in my throat.
“So I was working in a call center all night and a diner all day to save up the money to move her, not even worried about my needs or the fact that my kitchen faucet didn’t work so I was doing my dishes in the bathtub—”
I couldn’t look away from her even though I wanted to, even though I needed to over the shame I felt at thinking of her dealing with all that on her own.
“And then one day a girl came into the diner, and she looked rested and glamorous and none of her clothes were pilling…and she offered me a way out.”