Chapter 15 MOST NIGHTS
She looked at Jake again.
"I should probably go home," she said.
"It is past midnight," I said. "And I am not driving you home at midnight."
"I can call..."
"Lily." I sat down in the armchair across from her. "Stay. It is one night."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she uncurled slightly from the sofa.
"Did you have a good birthday though?" she asked.
That question surprised me.
Not because it was strange but because no one had asked it. Not once tonight. People had come to my house and drunk my drinks and eaten my food and wished me happy birthday the way you said words you had been taught to say.
Nobody had actually asked me how exactly it was for me.
"It was fine," I said.
She looked at me sternly.
"Alexander."
"It was a good party," I said.
"That is not what I asked," she said.
I looked at her sitting there in the green dress with her heels off and her hair slightly loose from whatever she had done with it earlier and Jake asleep beside her and the quiet house around us.
"It got better," I said. "Toward the end."
She held my gaze for a moment. Then she looked at Jake.
"He called me pretty," she said softly. "Before he fell asleep."
"You are," I said.
It came out before I decided to say it. She looked at me.
I looked back steadily like I had meant to say it exactly like that with no particular weight behind it.
"The dress helps," I said.
She looked down at it.
"Why did you buy it?" she said. "Really."
"I told you. The photographers...."
"Alexander. Some of them even got drunk."
I was quiet. She waited.
"It's cas' you would have stood at the bottom of those stairs feeling like you did not belong," I said finally. "And you do belong. And I did not want you to spend the whole night feeling like you did not."
The room became very quiet. Jake breathed slowly beside her. She looked at me for a long time.
"Thank you," she soon whispered quietly.
"It is just a dress," I said.
"It is not just a dress," she said.
I said nothing. She reached down and picked up the remote from the coffee table.
"Uhm.... uh.... Is there anything good on?" she asked.
I looked at her. She looked at the television.
"We could watch something," she said. "While he sleeps. Since we are both just.... here."
I should have said no. I knew I should have said no.
I stood up from the armchair and sat down on the sectional. On the other side of her.
Jake on her left, me on her right with the television flickering to life in front of us.
"What do you want to watch?" I said.
"Something that does not require thinking too much," she said.
"Done," I said.
I put something on. It did not matter what it was. Neither of us were really watching it.
Lily's POV:
I do not know when I moved closer.
It happened the way things happened with Alexander, without decision and without either of us acknowledging it was happening until it already had.
The film had too many explosions and not enough plot and at some point I had shifted sideways and my shoulder was against his arm and neither of us said anything about it.
His warmth was the one that made a large empty room feel smaller in a way that was not claustrophobic but something else entirely.
I stared at the screen.
On my left Jake breathed slowly. On my right Alexander sat very still.
"You are not watching," he said quietly.
"Neither are you," I said.
"No," he agreed.
Silence.
On the screen, something exploded.
"I really wanted tonight to work," I said.
He did not say anything.
"With Jake," I clarified.... unnecessarily.
"I know," he said.
"He was so good earlier," I said. "Before the drinking. He was.... he kept kissing my cheek and making me laugh and feel good and I thought tonight was going to be the night where something really shifted. Where he looked at me and I could feel it properly."
"And?"
"And then he fell asleep. I really wish we could cuddle but no," I said.
Alexander cackled beside me. It was not exactly a laugh.
"It is not funny," I said.
"No," he agreed. But his shoulder was definitely shaking slightly.
"Alexander."
"I am not laughing," he said.
"You are absolutely laughing. At me," I said.
"I am sympathising," he said. "Silently. In a way that looks like laughing."
I looked at him and looked back at me. And then I was laughing too. Quietly, so as not to wake Jake, but genuinely.
It was the kind of laugh that was tired,mhonest and strange at once.
"It is a little funny," I admitted.
"It is very funny," he said.
"He called me pretty first," I said. "That counts for something."
"It counts for something," he agreed softly.
We looked at each other for a moment longer than the joke required.
Then I looked back at the screen.
His arm shifted.And somehow without decision, it ended up around my shoulders.
I stared at the television and tried to ignore it, breathing steadily with the last of my might. He stared at the television.
Neither of us said a word about it.
So the film continued and Jake slept on.
The television went off and I looked up.
Alexander had the remote in his hand. He set it on the coffee table quietly and stood and walked to the corner of the room where a small speaker sat on a shelf between two books.
He pressed something and music came on.
Not party music like what had been playing earlier. This was something soft, slow and low. The kind of music that existed specifically for rooms that had gone quiet at the end of long nights. Piano and some other instruments underneath it that I could not name. It was so warm.
It filled the room like water filling a glass. I sat very still on the sofa. Jake breathed on my left.
Alexander came back and stood in the middle of the room for a moment, looking at nothing in particular.
Then he looked at me.
"You should sleep," he said quietly.
"I am not tired," I said.
He looked at me and I looked at him back.
We both knew that was not entirely true. There were tiredness and there was a state that was beyond tired, where the body was exhausted but the mind refused to close because the room felt too specific, too quiet, too weighted with things that had not been said yet.
He sat back down beside me again.
The music moved through the room slowly. I did not recognise the song but I felt it. The way certain music passed the brain entirely and went straight somewhere else.
"Who is this?" I asked quietly.
"I do not know the name," he said. "My mother used to play it."
I looked at him. He was looking at the middle distance the way he did when he said something more honest than he intended.
"She has good taste," I said.
"She does," he said. "When she is here."
The last three words landed softly. I did not push them.
Jake shifted in his sleep beside me. He made a small sound and his head tipped further to the side and then he was still again.
I watched him for a moment.
This boy I had loved from a distance for two years. This easy beautiful careless boy who had kissed my cheek tonight and called me pretty and then fallen asleep before anything real could happen.
I felt am emotion move through me.
It was not anger and not even disappointment anymore.
Something quieter than both. Something that felt uncomfortably like realisation.
"Alexander," I said.
"Mm."
"Do you ever feel lonely in this house?"
There was a long pause. Long enough that I thought he was not going to answer.
"Yes," he said soon.
Just that. Just yes.
I looked at him. He was looking at his hands and my heart melted.
"Every night?" I asked.
"Most nights," he said. "You get used to the sound of it." He paused. "You learn to fill it with other things."
"Like what?”