Blinking blearily, Lili glances at her phone, charging on the nightstand.
2:03 a.m.
She slips out of his bed.
The loft is quiet. Just the soft pad of her feet down the hall, late-night Tribeca traffic low outside the tall windows. The muted close of the kitchen cupboard, after she stands on tiptoe to get a glass; the run of the sink faucet, as she fills it. The slow pattern of her own breath, sleepy.
She runs her hand along the wall, walking back down the hall. His study door is half ajar.
In a haze between asleep and awake, she settles back into bed, leaning against the headboard. She drinks her water slowly. Beside her, Aleksandr sleeps. His breath is distant and steady. Sometime during the night, he’d turned away from her, towards the window.
Exhausted from his early morning flight back from the West Coast, he’d fallen asleep fast. He’d tried to hide how tired he was, stifling a yawn while he checked his email one last time; as they’d gotten into bed, she half-heartedly teased him that the time difference was supposed to be in his favor. He’d grinned, soft with fatigue, and drew her closer under the sheets; his hair was still wet from the shower together, where she had shut her eyes under the hot water, his arms around her, and let herself stand where she was for a moment.
Are you alright?he murmured at the dining table, afterwards. The soothing run of his palms against her arms slowly brought her back into herself.
Yes,she’d whispered, resting her tear-streaked face against his shoulder. Still shaking, a little.I just—I just missed you.
His lips pressed warm against her hair, a hand on her back.
Me too, Lili.
Left hand, bare ring finger—
God, to be scared of quiet things: the sound of his breath, the weight of his gaze. Patient, quiet, strong things. Things she wants to last, things she wants to call her own.
Looking at him now, it aches in her chest: the heart stretch of wanting, the risk of hope.
It’s insidious, the unease—of this becoming something that can be taken away from her. Once fully thought, she can’t unthink it. It’s there, heavy with consequences.
Some noxious twist, once seeded, unable to burn away.
Toxic, and she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe,she can’t breathe—
Lili’s inhale catches, shallow. Like even the air isn’t safe anymore. Like any movement she makes will make it clearer, and clearer.
I didn’t see myself marrying her.
Growing up, it was foundational to her: the understanding—uncomplicated, but irrefutable—that any momentary interest in her wouldn’t last. That anything good would end, that the people she loves will leave; that profit is only a measure of future loss. That the sooner she could accelerate the interest, expedite it, burn it out, the faster she could grit her teeth—shut her eyes, hold her breath—and move past the agonizing experience of it, the inevitable loss, the crack that could collapse her chest, the fear that never drains from her stomach, the easier it might become: to accept that there is nothing valuable enough about her. That there is no one who would want to hear her voice for the rest of their life.
Conceptually, she knows her friends love her, care for her.
That even Jane and Robert had affection for her.
But she doesn’t feel it in her body. It has never felt like weight she can lean against permanently, but rather something she accommodates temporarily: a gift in her life, yes, beautiful, but a joy that could dim—will dim—with the passing of years, wane of interest. Friends grow apart. It’s happened before, it will happen still. She was fostered for over a decade; look how easily she was let go.
Sometimes, she wonders—and it’s a familiar thought, one she’d tested in the dark in bed as a teenager, hush of Marin forests and fog outside; revisited in her most vulnerable moments as an adult, subspace and moments of being broken open—if she died, would it hit anyone?
Would the loss of her be a cataclysm for anyone?
There’d be sadness, sure. Tears, grief, but she wonders if it would just be associative grief, in the end: the sadness of death in proximity, not the agony—the obliterating, bone-collapsing pain that never really eases—of real absence, after someone necessary to you leaves, is lost.
She used to wonder if she’d ever be truly necessary to someone.
Sometimes, she’d want to test that, too: disappear, and watch as her absence turned out to be just space. Easily rearranged, reabsorbed. The people she loves, her friends she’s held close, missing her, but moving past her. Maybe not immediately but eventually; steadily. It’s not that she hadwanted to die, but rather that the thought didn’t seem violent; the loss of her did not feel significant.
And it hurts, it hurts so fucking much. The thought—the belief, basic conviction harder than her own bones—that she doesn’t, and won’t, mean that much to anyone. Not now, not ever. That there’s no way she could sustain or feed that amount of love; that her own insufficiency—fostered, never adopted; trip to Marin denied—would cause it to falter.
But if she lets him—if she lets herself hope that she could ever mean that much to him—
