“Please stop saying sorry,” she whispers. “Please.” She remembers earlier words in bed:Missed that, the way you fucking come for me, nobody else—nobody else comes fucking close to that.“Did... did you sleep with many people?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. “I slept with other people, yes.”
She listens, waiting for more past his half-answer. Aleksandr lets out a heavy breath. “I just... I kept imagining you, with someone else. I didn’t know why you’d left. If you’d wanted to be with someone else, if you only didn’t—didn’t want this, with me. I was—furious. I was furious.”
Lili closes her eyes, against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know when that’ll ever mean enough, but I am sorry.”
“I want to forgive you,” he replies, quiet. “It’ll just—it’ll take time.”
You have time, she thinks.You have all of my time.
Somewhere on the floor, his phone goes off.
Aleksandr reaches for it, keeping her in his arms. He glances at the number, not visible to her. He frowns.
“Sorry,” he says, as he pulls away, getting out of bed. “I have to deal with this.”
“It’s alright.”
The sheets quickly lose his warmth. As Aleksandr pulls on his trousers, Lili sits up. She winces with the soreness in her hips.
“Do you want a bath?” Aleksandr asks, watching her.
She’s about to decline—not wanting to be a burden—but then stops.
“That’d be really nice,” she nods. “Please.”
He goes into the en suite, tapping through messages on his phone. As she hears the water turn on, Lili draws her knees into her chest. There isn’t resolution in the air; things are not yet resolved. She gnaws on her nail, thinking about the calls he has to answer—work, yes, but also maybe, Sanaë. Lili is helpless in the face of that. She can’t begrudge it, little right to be angry or hurt.
Lili glances out the window, looking down Walker.
She still has so many questions.
From the window, fresh air drifts in. Summer is cooling, heat laced with the dryness of leaves, close to falling.
In the midst of those changing seasons, the city feels like possibility, again.
A place becoming a home. Concrete, stone, glass—these sidewalks, those bridges. She remembers arriving in New York, first weeks of undergrad, during this same turn of seasons, wondering what all of this would eventually mean to her, this city that people dream of. Over the years, the accumulation of memories and habits: the places she’s been happy, and the places she’s been far too drunk, the places she’s watched her life change, and the street corners that hold her mistakes.
Years past, years ahead: the uncertainty of all this city could hold for her, in what’s to come.
“Alright?”
Lili glances away from the window. Aleksandr stands in the bathroom door frame, watching her with a faint smile.
Her hair feels loose and messy; the sheets are warm and white. Familiar street noises outside, the tall windows open. A man in a door frame, the rush of bathwater, and sunlight.
This man she wants a life with.
“Yeah,” she says, with a smile of her own. “I’m alright.”
She doesn’t make it to the bath.
The water goes cold, after she’d caught Aleksandr’s gaze on her in the mirror, when she’d walked into the bathroom, sheets clasped loose around her as she reached a hand into the bath to test its temperature.
The stare of a man who looks and looks, and finds himself wanting still.
