had been deep inside a stunning brunette, and both of them had been breathing hard, getting closer and closer to a big finish. Lily had felt almost clinical for a moment, looking at them, because she’d known exactly what it felt like when Rafael did precisely what he’d been doing to that woman, and yet she’d been seeing it from a completely different angle...
The clinical thing hadn’t lasted. It had fallen away, hard, and when it had gone Lily had felt sick.
“No,” she said now. “I don’t think that helps.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” he asked, his voice rough. “Then. As you stood there.”
She eyed him. “Like what?”
He didn’t answer that. Because what could she have said? What was there to say in such situations? Lily turned her attention back to her hands. She forced them to open, then clenched them again.
“It was one thing to know that you had other women. I always knew that. You didn’t exactly make a secret of it. You even brought them home with you. But it was different to see.”
She stopped to take a breath, and thought he almost said something—but he didn’t. She hadn’t asked him for forgiveness, Lily reminded herself. Maybe he wouldn’t ask for any, either. Maybe there was no point bothering to apologize when wounds ran this deep. What was an apology between them, after all of this, but a pat little Band-Aid slapped over an amputated leg? What good would one do either one of them now?
What good does any of this do? some voice inside her demanded, but she couldn’t stop now. She knew she couldn’t.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I turned around and I left,” she told him. “As quietly as I’d come in. I walked out and stood there in front of your house. It was like an out-of-body experience. I kept thinking that at any moment, I’d start sobbing. That I would cry so hard and so long that it would rip me in half.” She looked at him then. “But I didn’t. I stood there a long time, but it never happened. So I got in the car again and I drove.”
“Where were you going?” Rafael hardly sounded like himself, but Lily couldn’t let herself worry about that. Not now. “To find your friends?”
“My friends hated you,” she said and watched him blink as he took that in. “Oh, they didn’t actually know it was you, but the secret man who always hurt me? They’d hated him for years. Openly. Any mention of you and it was all tough love and yelling. I didn’t bother calling any of them. I knew what they’d say.”
She shifted position, pulling her knees up beneath her chin. Rafael didn’t move, standing there so still and so cold that Lily almost thought he’d turned himself into a statue.
“I just drove,” she said. “Out of San Francisco and then out to the coast. I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t sobbing or screaming or anything. I felt numb, really. But I knew what I was doing.” She found his gaze in the dimly lit room, and imagined hers was no less tortured than his was. “I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. You should know that.”
“Then how did it happen?”
Lily shrugged. “I was going too fast in a too-powerful car. I took a turn and there was a rock in the middle of the road. I swerved, and then I couldn’t correct it. I was skidding and there was nothing I could do about it.”
She heard the brakes again, could hear her own swift curse so loud in the car’s interior, and she remembered that stunned moment when she’d realized she really wasn’t going to make it, she really wasn’t going to save herself—
Lily shook it off and blew out a breath. “Then the car crashed. I don’t remember that part. Only that I knew I was going to die.” She swallowed, determined not to surrender to the emotion she could feel knocking around inside her. “But then I didn’t. I was lying on the ground, not dead. I still don’t know how.”
“They think you went through the windshield,” Rafael said, clipped and low. “That was the theory. From what was left of the car.”
“Oh.” She tried to picture it, but it made her feel dizzy again. Dizzy and fragile and entirely too breakable. “I guess that makes sense. I kind of came to on the shoulder, facedown in the dirt.”
“You weren’t hurt?”
He sounded so tense, she almost asked him if he was all right, but caught herself.
“I was shaken up,” she told him. “I had some scrapes and was bleeding a little bit. The wind was knocked out of me. The bruises took a few days to really fully form and then a long time to fade.” She hugged her knees closer to her. “But I was fine. Alarmingly fine, I thought, when the car blew up.”
“Alarmingly?”
“I thought I was dead,” she said simply. He went still again. “It didn’t make sense that I was...fine. The car was...”
“I know,” he said harshly, his face in stark lines. “I saw it. It was mangled beyond recognition.”
“How could anyone survive that?” Lily asked. “But then, when I tried to stand up, I got sick. And I figured dead people didn’t throw up. I was pretty shaky.” She braced herself for this next part and couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She plucked at the blanket over her lap instead. “And then all I could think about was that I wanted you. I needed you.”
She heard the sharp sound he made, but couldn’t let herself analyze it or slow down. “I’d passed that town not far back, so I decided to walk back there and find a phone. I thought if I heard your voice, it would all be okay.” Lily could still feel the heavy air that night, salt and wet, as the fog rolled in. She’d had dirt and blood in her mouth, and it had hurt a little bit to walk. But she’d kept going. “By the time I made it into town, the fire trucks were heading out. I don’t know why I didn’t flag them down. I think I was worried about the fact it was your father’s car? And I didn’t have permission to drive it. The whole walk to town, I kept thinking about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars I’d owe him and how I’d ever pay him back with a stupid degree in Anglo-Saxon elegies. It was on a loop in my head. I don’t think I was thinking straight.”
Rafael muttered something in Italian then, ragged and something like savage. But Lily kept going.
“I made it to a gas station and found a pay phone. Maybe the last working pay phone in California. And I picked it up to call you.” She mimed picking up the phone, and she didn’t know where that lump in her throat came from. That great pressure in her chest. She looked at him. She dropped her hand. “But what would have been the point?”
“Lily,” he said, as if her name hurt him. He rubbed a hand over his jaw. But he didn’t argue.
“Nothing was going to change,” she said, almost as if he’d argued after all. He sat down hard on the end of the bed, then. His too-dark eyes were a torment, his mouth twisted, but she didn’t look away. “It was this moment of awful clarity. You were in bed with that woman, but she could have been any woman and it could have been any given night. It didn’t matter. It had been years and it was still the same. It wasn’t going to change. We weren’t going to change. And it was killing me, Rafael. It was killing me.”
They sat there, separated by the length of the mattress and all of their history,
