Lily of the Valley (26 page)

“I’ll never get over your eyes,” I say as she rolls over and kisses me on my forehead.

She flushes. “You make me feel like the only girl in the world.”

I sit up and bring her to my chest, stroking her hair and breathing in her familiar and still overpowering strawberry scent. “You are, Lily.”

There’s something frightening about loving someone this much and I move away from her after a moment. It’s still only been a short time and I can’t deny that I’m scared of what could happen. I smile, though, and reach into my nightstand for the first part of her gift. Turning around, I see her playing with the tissue paper in the bag for her and I playfully swat her hand.

“Not yet.”

She grins. “Stop teasing me.”

“If I recall correctly, you love to be teased.”

I can’t resist her and I push the bag off the bed, moving over her body and kissing her everywhere. She moans and arches her back, calling my name, and I don’t care about gifts or holidays or anything but hearing the noises she’s making. She undresses me, but I just look at her, still wearing a few layers of fleece. She reaches between my legs and strokes my cock. I tilt my head back and give in to the way she fists her hand around me and makes me feel so fucking good. How on Earth did I find her? It’s impossible to stop her, but I don’t want just her hand. I want every part of Lily, my girlfriend, my princess. I reach down and take her hand away, focusing on removing her clothes.

When she’s naked on my bed, I kiss up along her body, starting at her feet. There is nothing about Lily that I don’t worship. Reaching her stomach, I kiss her and she digs her fingers into the back of my head.

“Oh, please, Jack.”

There’s no way I could say no to her and I make the rest of the trek up her body quickly, until I’m positioned to enter her. Before I do, I touch her lips with my fingers. “You’re beautiful. You are so fucking beautiful.”

“Merry Christmas,” she says and I slide into her. She brings her legs up to wrap them around my waist and this is better than a million presents under a tree. I might not have chocolate calendars or stockings or a normal family, but I have Lily.

Chapter 27

We fall asleep together after. When I wake, I realize it’ll never get old to roll over and find her tucked beside me, her slow breathing tickling my side, and her hair draped across a pillow. I kiss her softly until she wakes up and she smiles at me as she opens her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was so tired.”

“It’s okay. It’s only noon.”

She moves closer and runs her hand along my chest. I have to fight all the urges in my body to touch her everywhere again. There are several things we need to face today. I grab my boxers and slip them on, reaching into my nightstand and taking out part of her present again. Sitting down, I toss the box next to her.

“Open it,” I say.

She isn’t one of those girls who takes her time with gifts. She tears off the paper instantly, and I kind of understand why my grandmother wraps my stuff in baby shower paper. I spent twenty dollars on a roll of paper, a small bag, and tissue paper. I don’t even think I used the tissue paper right. I just shoved the mass of it on top of the present in the bag. It looks kind of stupid, but apparently Lily doesn’t focus much on what’s on the outside anyway.

“Seriously?”

She laughs and holds up the dildo Alana helped me pick out. It’s really ridiculous looking. It’s supposed to be flesh-colored, but it’s some kind of weird orangey pink, and I don’t even know what shape it is. Lily puts the box down between us and reaches over, pulling the elastic of my boxers back. She goes back to the box and holds it up. “Shaped like a real penis,” she reads aloud. “Jack, I hate to break it to you, but you don’t have a real penis.”

“You want to test that theory, princess,” I ask her and push her back onto my bed. She’s still naked and God, do I want to test that theory. I want her and I know she’s feeling the same way.

“We’re never going to get out of bed,” she says.

“And?”

She moves away from me and grabs her shirt, throwing it over herself, and then she steps into her panties. “I hate doing this. God, I really hate doing this, but I want to go with you today. I want to be a part of that, too. I want you to trust me with everything you are. Not just this.” She must see the mood shift in me, because she finishes her thought. “Not that
this
is not a wonderful way to spend my Christmas.”

“I don’t want you to feel bad,” I tell her. The moment is gone and the mood has changed. I sit up and find my clothes, dressing, because I can’t just spend all day with her in bed, pretending everything else doesn’t exist. “And once we go…”

“Jack, I don’t love you because you’re fucking amazing in bed. I love you because when I finish classes at the end of the day and leave the building, I can count on you to be standing by that same oak tree, looking lost and confused that there’s someone counting on you. I love you because when you think I’m sleeping, you whisper your fears to me, and I love that you have fears. I love you because you bought me a dildo for Christmas, which is both so wrong and yet so ridiculously
you
. And I love you because when you look at me, I
love
me
. Not in an arrogant and selfish way, but in a way that makes me feel like I deserve to be looked at like that.”

“You deserve everything, Lily. But I have so little to give you.”

“I told you,” she says, as she brushes my cheek with the back of her hand, “I only want you. That’s more than everything else combined.”

It’s quiet for a minute and I don’t know what to say to her. I feel like I need to preface going to see my mom with some explanation, some story. I need Lily to know everything.

“There are so many things I still haven’t told you,” I remind her.

She takes my hand. “So tell me. And then we’ll go see your mom.”

I take a deep breath and then I tell her everything. I tell her about the snowmen. I tell her about the fighting and what my mom was like outside of that one instance at the craft fair. I tell her what I heard from that teacher. I even tell her what it was like, what happened daily and how I felt. Lily doesn’t move; she just keeps holding my hand. When it starts to hurt too much to keep talking, she holds me, and then the words finish spilling out. I describe watching my father kill my mom, how scared I was, but how I didn’t understand. How I
still
don’t understand.

“And there’s this unspoken obligation,” I explain. “That I owe him forgiveness. That sooner or later, I have to let go and move on. As if he owes me nothing in return. As if he didn’t owe me a fucking mother.”

Talking about it brings too much back and I don’t want Lily to see me this way. On the night when I called Alana because the darkness was enveloping me, I realized how much I love Lily, but I also realized that there are parts of me I don’t want her to see. I don’t want her to know that I’m this person.

“I don’t know what to say,” she says, her voice shy and sad.

“Can we just forget it? Maybe I’m not ready.” I pull my hand away from her and turn around, bringing my knees up to the bed and trying to quell the shaking in my body.

I feel her behind me, reaching her arms around me, under my arms, and across my chest. She doesn’t talk, just lays her head against my back and holds me.

“I want to be real with you,” I tell her. “But I’m afraid you’ll hate me.”

She speaks into my back. “I’ll never hate you. Please trust me. I might not know what to do or what to say, but I’m not going anywhere, Jack.”

I don’t turn around, but I continue speaking. “I can’t move on. I can’t be someone else. My grandmother has been pushing me to help my dad, to encourage this rehabilitation program the state wants to try with him. And I go, because she wants me to go. But if he died in there? If I never saw him again? It’d be okay. I don’t think I can forgive him. I don’t think it will ever be understandable. My mom wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t a good person; I know that. I’m not stupid and I know so many things now that I didn’t know as a kid. But she was a person, Lily. And she was my mom. I didn’t get to pick her.”

“I know,” she whispers. She doesn’t know and she knows she doesn’t know, but the words are comforting nonetheless. They tell me that she’s listening, that she’s trying to understand.

“I wish he’d left. Just walked out. But he killed her. He choked her to death in our fucking living room while I watched. I just can’t forgive that. I’ll never forgive that.”

“You don’t need to forgive anyone. Except yourself.”

I move so that she’s on my side instead of behind me. Her eyes are wet with tears, but she’s not scared of me. All that’s present in her face is sadness.

“What do you mean?” I ask her.

“You act like his actions define you. I’m not you and I’m not going to speak about your family. I won’t offer my opinions on what kind of people your parents were or are. And I won’t tell you whether you should or shouldn’t forgive him. What I will tell you is that you’re more than them, Jack. You’re not your past.”

“But people-” I start.

She shrugs. “People can fuck themselves.”

I can’t help but laugh.

“I’m serious,” she says. “Any person who judges you because of your father is not only an asshole, but they’re stupid, too. Because anyone would be lucky to know you.”

“I just don’t know how to let it go,” I admit.

“Sometimes the things we hold onto are the things that hold us back.”

“That’s pretty fucking wise.”

She smiles, still sad. “
You
taught me that. I might not know what you’re feeling, but I know that I want to know. I know that I want you to be a part of my life, to be my future. But you’re always looking behind you. Turn around. Look forward.”

“The future is terrifying,” I whisper.

“It is. But it’s easier together.”

I think about her words. I’ve never seen the future. All I’ve ever seen is darkness and misery and suffering and the countdown of my life. But she’s right. Whenever there was hope, whenever something seemed good, I ran away. I convinced myself that it was going to end and I lost myself. I let the darkness win, because it was easier than hoping for the light. Because what if the light didn’t come? Or worse, what if it did? The absence of it was easier to face than its loss.

“There’s more,” I tell her. This part is going to be the hardest and I’m worried about bringing her into this. Because it’s not the kind of thing you can unknow – and it could change us completely.

“Go ahead,” she says. “I’m right here.”

I try to find the words, try to explain what it felt like, how helpless I was and yet how sure. I describe the mirror and the distortions that stared back at me. I tell her about the way that there was nothing ahead of me but black emptiness. I even tell her about how aware I truly was in the moments leading up to it, how I could feel the chair against my feet as if all of my nerves were pressed against the smooth wood of it. Even as I speak, I can feel the rope in my hands. I can hear the sound of the chair falling over and I remember how it was. There was no white light. There was no sudden regret, no moment when I would have given it all for more time to appreciate the little things. There was just more misery, more sadness, and more darkness that stretched on endlessly. Until the darkness was all.

“And then I woke up in a hospital bed, with a bunch of assholes standing around me, trying to label what was in my head. They had their go-to list of chemicals that would make me normal, their scientific names of disorders to explain why, when I pictured life, I saw nothing. I was there for months. When I left, I wasn’t any different. They just titled me chronic and told me to keep telling someone my problems and popping my pills.”

Lily’s silent when I’m done speaking. She won’t even look at me. It was too much; I knew it was too much.

So this is how it ends… Christmas Day. I still haven’t even given her the real gift. I should have known this would happen. A fucking holiday? Like I would ever have the right to a holiday. And of all holidays, Christmas. Isn’t it the “most wonderful time of the year” or some bullshit?

She has her back to me. I don’t know when she turned away. At some point while I was talking, I guess. I keep my fists at my sides. I want to punch the wall. I want to hurt. I want to get so drunk that today never happened. But most of all, I want her to say something. I want to kiss her one last time. I want to tell her that I still love her, no matter what she thinks of me. I want to have a normal fucking life.

“I can’t,” she says and her voice is choked with sorrow.

“I know.” I’ve already resigned myself to it.

She turns to look at me. Her cheeks are spotted white and red and her eyes are swimming in tears. She tries to talk, but it’s just sounds of pain as the words refuse to come.

“No. I can’t,” she repeats, but she doesn’t continue or move. She just stares at me. I don’t know what to say or do.

“It’s okay. I figured.”

She leans into me and hits me hard in the chest, her little soft hands making the weakest fists and it’s an out of body experience. She’s punching me and crying and saying the word no, but all I can think about is how she’s gorgeous even when she cries. How her punches don’t hurt, but she’s putting so much into them and it’s kind of perfect. Finally, she stops and pulls my face down to hers, kissing my forehead, cheeks, and lips. She repeats my name over and over.

“I love you so much,” she says. “You can’t fucking leave me like that, Jack.”

“It’s in the past,” I tell her.

She pauses. “Entirely?”

I can’t lie to her. “No. Not entirely. But I want it to be.”

“I was there as you said it. I felt what you were feeling.
You
felt what you felt back then, because it’s not gone. You still feel like that, don’t you?”

“Sometimes,” I admit.

“How often?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. It comes and goes. I can have good months. Sometimes even a few in a row. I also have bad months. And sometimes those are in a row, too.”