Fic - And We Could Be Fine (Lily, Lily/Rufus) PG-13, 1/1
Title: And We Could Be Fine
Summary: They always did have a thing for horrible timing.
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: 3,280 words. Set directly after Roman Holiday. Title take from the lyrics of This Song which makes me think of Rufus/Lily every time I hear it and very well could be written by Rufus for Lily post break - up in my warped little fandom obsessed mind. Big thanks tostealmy-kiss the lovely for the beta. This is mostly for you, because I know no one else wanted more Rufus/Lily fic than us.
[1]
There is a box, shoved way back in the corner of her closet - buried under Prada and Gucci and Louis Vuitton- and a week after she says yes to Bart, who, despite what people say, she does love (but only just enough), when Serena’s with Dan and Eric is asleep she grabs a bottle of wine and pulls it out. It’s not big, really, which is surprising to her because she hasn’t looked at in ages, and she wonders as she sips her red wine and pulls anxiously at the hem of t-shirt, looking at it like it’s the devil incarnate, how something so small could contain such a monumental part of her past.
Lily has never been one for sentiment, though (which was always a double edged sword of sorts for most men and is why, she assumes, that sort of happiness that never fades has always been just out of reach for her), and she realizes the irony in the moment the same exact second she remembers kisses and touches long past and downs the rest of her glass in single gulp. She refills it a second later and takes a sip, her free hand running over the beaten cardboard, the fraying edges, tracing the outlines of her hasty scrawl in a lone corner, marking a date she knows without even looking.
Inside there are CDs and newspaper clippings, graying photos, concert stubs. Perfectly manicured fingers glide nimbly over the smooth surfaces, remembering. The taste of regret is on the tip of her tongue, lingering like it always is, irritating and alluring at once. She sips her wine to wash it away (she does this often, kind of like a ritual cleansing that never gets her all the way clean) and after she swallows she waits a beat, always hopeful, but the bitter taste still remains.
The sound of a key sliding into a lock and laughter that could only belong to her daughter drags her out of the moment. She picks up a lone picture, with crinkled edges and fading colors and faces that are all too familiar and shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans as she kicks the box back in its rightful place. Hidden but never forgotten.
[2]
Rufus was always good at declarations. He wrote songs and serenaded her to sleep and never not told her he loved her. It was just the way he worked and Lily always loved it and hated it in the same breath because it was just not the way she worked. The I never should have let you let me go stays with her for weeks, months really, long after the engagement, long after Allison left (for good this time, or so she heard)and keeps her warm throughout the cold New York winter.
There’s some sort of soiree, a benefit of sorts for Constance Billiard and she goes because she has to. She’s without the Fiancée due to business, without her kids because Serena’s too busy with Dan and this is just not Eric’s type of thing. She perches herself at the bar because she is a Van der Woodsen after all, and she sips her champagne and twists the rock on her finger and tries to ignore the fact that she feels his presence before she even catches a glimpse of him.
Fingers against her back, soft and fleeting, and she inches forward, away. It’s too much.
“Fancy meeting you here,” is his greeting, carefree and smiling, like they’re old friends, like they’ve talked to each other every day since his Christmas day phone call that she never returned.
“Indeed.” She sips her champagne for lack of better things to do.
“How’s Bart?” he asks, and she notices him eyeing the ring on her left hand at the same time she notices the lack of one on his.
They always did have a thing for horrible timing.
Lily rolls her eyes and goes to slide off her seat the same exact time he moves in. The smile is gone, and he’s so close she can name the brand of his cheap shampoo from memory (Rufus always did like consistency, even if he always denied it), smell the heady scent of must and aftershave that she always, without a doubt, associates with him, even now. He looks like he’s leaning for a second, his eyes tracing her face, and she braces herself, grips her champagne glass. Turns her head away.
“I would have made you happy,” is all he says, simple and to the point, his voice a whisper and rough with emotion and something pools deep inside her belly. She sips her champagne and believes him.
The “happiness isn’t everything,” slips out of her lips before she can stop it, and she slides past him before she can think twice, ignoring the feel of his eyes on her, steady and certain, until she disappears out the door.
She doesn’t look back.
[interlude]
Some nights when she has trouble sleeping and has had a little too much to drink, when the weight of her mistakes (old and new) weigh down on her like a rock, Lily will turn on her side and draw her knees up to her chest. Close her eyes and let herself remember. It’s a private moment, a weak moment, and a lone finger will trace the inside of her wrist like he used to, tiny shapes caressed into her skin soft and sweet, barely there. It’s almost the same, but not quite.
[3]
Serena asks her about it once. The wedding is fast approaching, and they are knee deep in flower and seating arrangements, arguing over which catering company is best. Which champagne to serve at the reception. Serena thinks her mother should wear white; Lily laughs at the idea.
“Was Rufus a lot like Dan?” Serena asks during a lull in conversation as she runs her hands through her hair, like she’s asking for a weather report or how her day was.
Lily pauses, pen to paper right in the middle of making a list of things to do for the following day. Besides that afternoon at the diner, they’ve never really talked about this, never even broached the subject and she wonders how she can tell her daughter that the guy she’s dating is the exact replica of a man she once thought she’d spend the rest of her life with.
“Unbelievably so,” is her reply and she continues on with her list, watching out of the corner of her eye as Serena’s face becomes thoughtful.
“Am I lot like you… like the way you were back then?”
Lily smiles and reaches out for her daughter, cupping her cheek in a motherly way that is so very rare for her, for them. She loves her children, and her children know she loves them, but they aren’t a touchy-feely family by any means. She regrets it. She regrets a lot, too much sometimes, but not this. Not her kids. It’s the only thing in her life she’s ever gotten right.
“Yes.”
A grin graces Serena’s lips, full of teeth and mirth and it reminds Lily of yesteryears and a past that sits too close for comfort.
“Did you love him?”
“Serena,” Lily warns, putting the pen and paper down. “Where is this coming from?”
Her daughter doesn’t miss a beat. “I don’t think you should get married.” There’s a long pause and a shared, hard look between them. Serena sits up straighter, looks older, determined the way her father used to when he took on the board room. “And it isn’t because I don’t like him,” she continues, “and isn’t because I really, really don’t want to be related to Chuck, but because you aren’t happy. And Mom,” she sighs out the word, “if there is one thing you taught me it’s that Van der Woodsens never settle for anything.”
There’s a knock on the door, and they both know it’s Dan, but Serena doesn’t break the gaze. Lily wants so very badly in that moment to warn her against making the same mistakes she did. Wants to explain to her that sometimes you just make so many wrong choices that settling is all that is left to do. There are no take-backs in life.
Serena gets up after the second knock and Lily watches them interact for a second: Dan placing a kiss on Serena’s forehead, Serena gazing up at him adoringly, their hands instantly finding the others and holding on. It’s too familiar, too much, and her breath gets caught in her throat.
A hasty kiss to her cheek and there is Serena’s voice in her ear, “It’s never too late, Mom.”
Lily looks up at her daughter and sees a version of herself: young, careless, ever so brave. She wishes she could be as courageous as the daughter she raised.
[4]
She had called him once.
Long before Serena met Dan and brought the past knocking down their door, long before that day in the gallery. It was the night that things with Eric had gone so horribly wrong. She had been sitting in the hospital waiting room as her son fought for his life and as her daughter was traipsing across Europe for all she knew, ruining her life. She was weak and desperate, caught up with what ifs and should haves, and she desperately needed the one person who always knew what to say. So she had dialed a number from memory; listened to it ring four times before Allison’s voice picked up - cheerful, happy, living the life she had so desperately wanted a lifetime ago. Listened to him in the background, his voice clear as day, and it had warmed her, even then, even during her worst hour.
Lily thinks about that night a lot these days; wonders what would have happened if he had picked up. If she had asked for him instead of hanging up, too scared to admit her mistakes, too scared to see him happy, settled with someone that wasn’t her. Wonders if she would have asked him to meet her, if he would have come or, instead, if he would have responded with the ‘get lost ‘ she would have so rightly deserved.
In her heart of hearts she knows the answer.
“Have you decided where you want to honeymoon?”
Her head snaps towards Bart, and she smiles awkwardly. There’s a glass of wine in her left hand, and she looks at it for a long beat, hating the way the diamonds in her engagement ring sparkle in the dim light of the room. It’s hard to believe, but she never really has been one for ostentatious displays of affection.
Lily thinks of Serena and her eternal optimism (It’s never too late, rings in her head like a mantra) and wishes she loved Bart as much as she loves the idea of Bart, as much as she loved all the things they can accomplish together. She doesn’t lie to herself about this part of their relationship: love is a part of it, sure, but it’s only a miniscule part of the equation.
It’s always been a small part of the bigger picture, and for the first time in her life Lily is sick of settling and hoping for the best.
“Bart,” she sighs and takes a long, slow sip from her wine glass. “I can’t,” she says quietly, without looking at him, before her head had a chance to catch up with her heart.
The look on his face says he’s known it all along.
[interlude]
Truth of the matter is, a part of Lily Van der Woodsen has always loved Rufus. It’s not like they had the homerun out of the ballpark, once in a lifetime kind of love, because they didn’t. Far from it. They just kind of fit together in all the right ways and in all the right places and she remembers, even now, lying in a mass of tangled limbs and sweet sighs and thinking that it was the kind of fit you only find once in a lifetime if you’re lucky. It’s always there, lying dormant in the contours of her heart and once upon a time she had taught herself to ignore it. Once upon a time she thought, albeit foolishly, that she could live with it like that, always present, but numb, masked by the rest of the pain in her life. Yet it still creeps up on her in the middle of lonely nights, strangling her with the threat of never letting go.
Some mornings, even twenty years later, he is still the one she reaches out for.
[5]
A week after her would-be wedding they’re set to move out of the hotel and into a penthouse. The night of the big move when she’s knee deep in boxes and wedding gifts that need to be returned, she cracks open a bottle of champagne, looks down at her bare left hand and sighs something content. It feels good, this kind of freedom. Lily sips her champagne and allows herself to miss Bart, to miss being a part of something, but knows she made the right choice (the only choice) in the same breath.
It’s kind of like a celebration of sorts; the start of the evolution of a different Lily Van der Woodsen. She’s surrounded by boxes that remind her of last fall when she’d thought she could pack the past up in boxes and expect her life to change on its own. It’s lonely, in this big penthouse, sipping her champagne and missing her kids (and a man she left all those years ago instead of the one whose heart she broke last week), but she’s done lonely before, been through, much, much worse and the new Lily is no longer afraid.
When she stumbles across that damn box in-between Serena’s clothes and Eric’s books, she slides it open without thinking twice and delves deeper. Her old Doc Martens sit underneath a pile of crap, right next to an old rusted camera and she slips her Jimmy Choo flats off her feet and the Doc Martens on and smiles at the perfect fit. She thinks of all the things she gave up (traded in) for this fabulous life on the Upper East Side and tries to remember the last time she was happy, truly happy (the birth of her children aside) and thinks of that surf town in California, Rufus’s voice in her ear making promises she knows he would have died trying to keep and her sighs of I love you into his mouth.
Her phone rings and vibrates on the counter and she picks it up on the second ring. A part of her knows who it is before she even answers.
“You called off your wedding,” Rufus greets before she even gets a chance to say ‘hello’ and her heart beats something wild as she chuckles at the proud, smug tone in his voice.
“Don’t be that guy.”
“What guy?” he asks innocently and she notes something different in his voice, something she can’t quite place.
“The guy that assumes I did it for him,” she replies quietly.
There’s a long silence and she counts his breath and breathes her own and tries to picture him: all ruffled hair and half-buttoned shirt, a tumbler of cheap liquor resting on the arm of his even cheaper chair. Lily finds it endearing.
“Why did you do it then?”
“I did it for me.”
It’s really only half the truth.
[6]
She goes to him, because while Rufus has always been good at the grand gestures (he always gave and gave and she took and took until there was nothing left), the new Lily thinks it’s about time for her to be good at them, too. She knocks twice before he answers, and the grin that’s on her lips doesn’t even begin to match his as he leans against the door jam, hair ruffled, shirt half-buttoned looking ever so smug. Lily breathes him in and sighs.
“First of all,” she starts, pushing past him into the loft. “Let’s just get one thing straight.”
Rufus shuts the door behind her. “Okay…”
She turns to him, arms crossed over her chest, eyes hard, mouth pressed into a thin line. “I am not the same person you fell in love with.” He stops, mid step, and stares at her hard, confused, like she’s a lyric in one of his songs he can’t get to flow right. “I’ve changed -“
“You haven’t really, you know,” he says cutting her off, regarding her with a peculiar smile. “Not that much, anyway. You may have traded in your Doc Martens and cut -off shorts for a… fancier attire and drink champagne instead of cheap beer but you’re still the same person underneath. People don’t change that much, Lil, not really.”
She narrows her eyes at him. She wonders for half a second how he can look at her the way he is - scrutinizing and judging in the polite, forgiving way only he can manage and it can still take her breath away.
“We can’t just pick up where we left off, you know,” she says because she’s already there and they’re too old for games now, and she’s way past too tired to skip around what is so obviously between them. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Rufus smiles something beautiful and it reminds her of the night they first met when she’d caught his eye across the room and that very smile had kept her warm all night long.
“I know.”
He’s near her now, incredibly close, and she can count the lines on his face and the specs of gold in his eyes. She feels nauseous, like she usually does when he’s near, because she can feel the situation spinning out of her control; she watches the next few minutes play out in her mind in tacky technicolor, and she should move away (experience has taught her it’s the right thing to do, always, when he’s involved) but instead she leans forward.
Lily sighs deeply, shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “I can’t promise you anything, Rufus.”
“I don’t expect anything,” he replies with a shake of his head.
His hands on her face, his fingers tracing her cheek bone, rough from too many years of playing the guitar. “I -“
“Lily,” he laughs and they’re so close she can feel it in her bones. “You always did talk too much.”
There’s a sigh and it’s a mix between a whimper and an I’ve missed you and suddenly his lips are on hers, his hands tangled in her hair like he used too. The old Lily would have taken this and hit the ground running; the new Lily fists her hands in the cotton of his shirt and kisses him back, breathes him in. He’s everything she remembers and more - he feels the same, tastes the same, kisses her the same way he used to, like forever was a promise and she was the only thing in his world, but there is something different lingering below the surface. Something she can’t quite put her finger on.
When he pulls away, his forehead resting against hers, he smiles at her like he used to and kisses her again, soft, sweet, lingering, and this time she recognizes the difference. It’s the taste of starting over and she welcomes it. She smiles against his lips and wraps her arms around him, pulling him as close as possible. She doesn’t let go.
{end}
Summary: They always did have a thing for horrible timing.
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: 3,280 words. Set directly after Roman Holiday. Title take from the lyrics of This Song which makes me think of Rufus/Lily every time I hear it and very well could be written by Rufus for Lily post break - up in my warped little fandom obsessed mind. Big thanks tostealmy-kiss the lovely for the beta. This is mostly for you, because I know no one else wanted more Rufus/Lily fic than us.
[1]
There is a box, shoved way back in the corner of her closet - buried under Prada and Gucci and Louis Vuitton- and a week after she says yes to Bart, who, despite what people say, she does love (but only just enough), when Serena’s with Dan and Eric is asleep she grabs a bottle of wine and pulls it out. It’s not big, really, which is surprising to her because she hasn’t looked at in ages, and she wonders as she sips her red wine and pulls anxiously at the hem of t-shirt, looking at it like it’s the devil incarnate, how something so small could contain such a monumental part of her past.
Lily has never been one for sentiment, though (which was always a double edged sword of sorts for most men and is why, she assumes, that sort of happiness that never fades has always been just out of reach for her), and she realizes the irony in the moment the same exact second she remembers kisses and touches long past and downs the rest of her glass in single gulp. She refills it a second later and takes a sip, her free hand running over the beaten cardboard, the fraying edges, tracing the outlines of her hasty scrawl in a lone corner, marking a date she knows without even looking.
Inside there are CDs and newspaper clippings, graying photos, concert stubs. Perfectly manicured fingers glide nimbly over the smooth surfaces, remembering. The taste of regret is on the tip of her tongue, lingering like it always is, irritating and alluring at once. She sips her wine to wash it away (she does this often, kind of like a ritual cleansing that never gets her all the way clean) and after she swallows she waits a beat, always hopeful, but the bitter taste still remains.
The sound of a key sliding into a lock and laughter that could only belong to her daughter drags her out of the moment. She picks up a lone picture, with crinkled edges and fading colors and faces that are all too familiar and shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans as she kicks the box back in its rightful place. Hidden but never forgotten.
[2]
Rufus was always good at declarations. He wrote songs and serenaded her to sleep and never not told her he loved her. It was just the way he worked and Lily always loved it and hated it in the same breath because it was just not the way she worked. The I never should have let you let me go stays with her for weeks, months really, long after the engagement, long after Allison left (for good this time, or so she heard)and keeps her warm throughout the cold New York winter.
There’s some sort of soiree, a benefit of sorts for Constance Billiard and she goes because she has to. She’s without the Fiancée due to business, without her kids because Serena’s too busy with Dan and this is just not Eric’s type of thing. She perches herself at the bar because she is a Van der Woodsen after all, and she sips her champagne and twists the rock on her finger and tries to ignore the fact that she feels his presence before she even catches a glimpse of him.
Fingers against her back, soft and fleeting, and she inches forward, away. It’s too much.
“Fancy meeting you here,” is his greeting, carefree and smiling, like they’re old friends, like they’ve talked to each other every day since his Christmas day phone call that she never returned.
“Indeed.” She sips her champagne for lack of better things to do.
“How’s Bart?” he asks, and she notices him eyeing the ring on her left hand at the same time she notices the lack of one on his.
They always did have a thing for horrible timing.
Lily rolls her eyes and goes to slide off her seat the same exact time he moves in. The smile is gone, and he’s so close she can name the brand of his cheap shampoo from memory (Rufus always did like consistency, even if he always denied it), smell the heady scent of must and aftershave that she always, without a doubt, associates with him, even now. He looks like he’s leaning for a second, his eyes tracing her face, and she braces herself, grips her champagne glass. Turns her head away.
“I would have made you happy,” is all he says, simple and to the point, his voice a whisper and rough with emotion and something pools deep inside her belly. She sips her champagne and believes him.
The “happiness isn’t everything,” slips out of her lips before she can stop it, and she slides past him before she can think twice, ignoring the feel of his eyes on her, steady and certain, until she disappears out the door.
She doesn’t look back.
[interlude]
Some nights when she has trouble sleeping and has had a little too much to drink, when the weight of her mistakes (old and new) weigh down on her like a rock, Lily will turn on her side and draw her knees up to her chest. Close her eyes and let herself remember. It’s a private moment, a weak moment, and a lone finger will trace the inside of her wrist like he used to, tiny shapes caressed into her skin soft and sweet, barely there. It’s almost the same, but not quite.
[3]
Serena asks her about it once. The wedding is fast approaching, and they are knee deep in flower and seating arrangements, arguing over which catering company is best. Which champagne to serve at the reception. Serena thinks her mother should wear white; Lily laughs at the idea.
“Was Rufus a lot like Dan?” Serena asks during a lull in conversation as she runs her hands through her hair, like she’s asking for a weather report or how her day was.
Lily pauses, pen to paper right in the middle of making a list of things to do for the following day. Besides that afternoon at the diner, they’ve never really talked about this, never even broached the subject and she wonders how she can tell her daughter that the guy she’s dating is the exact replica of a man she once thought she’d spend the rest of her life with.
“Unbelievably so,” is her reply and she continues on with her list, watching out of the corner of her eye as Serena’s face becomes thoughtful.
“Am I lot like you… like the way you were back then?”
Lily smiles and reaches out for her daughter, cupping her cheek in a motherly way that is so very rare for her, for them. She loves her children, and her children know she loves them, but they aren’t a touchy-feely family by any means. She regrets it. She regrets a lot, too much sometimes, but not this. Not her kids. It’s the only thing in her life she’s ever gotten right.
“Yes.”
A grin graces Serena’s lips, full of teeth and mirth and it reminds Lily of yesteryears and a past that sits too close for comfort.
“Did you love him?”
“Serena,” Lily warns, putting the pen and paper down. “Where is this coming from?”
Her daughter doesn’t miss a beat. “I don’t think you should get married.” There’s a long pause and a shared, hard look between them. Serena sits up straighter, looks older, determined the way her father used to when he took on the board room. “And it isn’t because I don’t like him,” she continues, “and isn’t because I really, really don’t want to be related to Chuck, but because you aren’t happy. And Mom,” she sighs out the word, “if there is one thing you taught me it’s that Van der Woodsens never settle for anything.”
There’s a knock on the door, and they both know it’s Dan, but Serena doesn’t break the gaze. Lily wants so very badly in that moment to warn her against making the same mistakes she did. Wants to explain to her that sometimes you just make so many wrong choices that settling is all that is left to do. There are no take-backs in life.
Serena gets up after the second knock and Lily watches them interact for a second: Dan placing a kiss on Serena’s forehead, Serena gazing up at him adoringly, their hands instantly finding the others and holding on. It’s too familiar, too much, and her breath gets caught in her throat.
A hasty kiss to her cheek and there is Serena’s voice in her ear, “It’s never too late, Mom.”
Lily looks up at her daughter and sees a version of herself: young, careless, ever so brave. She wishes she could be as courageous as the daughter she raised.
[4]
She had called him once.
Long before Serena met Dan and brought the past knocking down their door, long before that day in the gallery. It was the night that things with Eric had gone so horribly wrong. She had been sitting in the hospital waiting room as her son fought for his life and as her daughter was traipsing across Europe for all she knew, ruining her life. She was weak and desperate, caught up with what ifs and should haves, and she desperately needed the one person who always knew what to say. So she had dialed a number from memory; listened to it ring four times before Allison’s voice picked up - cheerful, happy, living the life she had so desperately wanted a lifetime ago. Listened to him in the background, his voice clear as day, and it had warmed her, even then, even during her worst hour.
Lily thinks about that night a lot these days; wonders what would have happened if he had picked up. If she had asked for him instead of hanging up, too scared to admit her mistakes, too scared to see him happy, settled with someone that wasn’t her. Wonders if she would have asked him to meet her, if he would have come or, instead, if he would have responded with the ‘get lost ‘ she would have so rightly deserved.
In her heart of hearts she knows the answer.
“Have you decided where you want to honeymoon?”
Her head snaps towards Bart, and she smiles awkwardly. There’s a glass of wine in her left hand, and she looks at it for a long beat, hating the way the diamonds in her engagement ring sparkle in the dim light of the room. It’s hard to believe, but she never really has been one for ostentatious displays of affection.
Lily thinks of Serena and her eternal optimism (It’s never too late, rings in her head like a mantra) and wishes she loved Bart as much as she loves the idea of Bart, as much as she loved all the things they can accomplish together. She doesn’t lie to herself about this part of their relationship: love is a part of it, sure, but it’s only a miniscule part of the equation.
It’s always been a small part of the bigger picture, and for the first time in her life Lily is sick of settling and hoping for the best.
“Bart,” she sighs and takes a long, slow sip from her wine glass. “I can’t,” she says quietly, without looking at him, before her head had a chance to catch up with her heart.
The look on his face says he’s known it all along.
[interlude]
Truth of the matter is, a part of Lily Van der Woodsen has always loved Rufus. It’s not like they had the homerun out of the ballpark, once in a lifetime kind of love, because they didn’t. Far from it. They just kind of fit together in all the right ways and in all the right places and she remembers, even now, lying in a mass of tangled limbs and sweet sighs and thinking that it was the kind of fit you only find once in a lifetime if you’re lucky. It’s always there, lying dormant in the contours of her heart and once upon a time she had taught herself to ignore it. Once upon a time she thought, albeit foolishly, that she could live with it like that, always present, but numb, masked by the rest of the pain in her life. Yet it still creeps up on her in the middle of lonely nights, strangling her with the threat of never letting go.
Some mornings, even twenty years later, he is still the one she reaches out for.
[5]
A week after her would-be wedding they’re set to move out of the hotel and into a penthouse. The night of the big move when she’s knee deep in boxes and wedding gifts that need to be returned, she cracks open a bottle of champagne, looks down at her bare left hand and sighs something content. It feels good, this kind of freedom. Lily sips her champagne and allows herself to miss Bart, to miss being a part of something, but knows she made the right choice (the only choice) in the same breath.
It’s kind of like a celebration of sorts; the start of the evolution of a different Lily Van der Woodsen. She’s surrounded by boxes that remind her of last fall when she’d thought she could pack the past up in boxes and expect her life to change on its own. It’s lonely, in this big penthouse, sipping her champagne and missing her kids (and a man she left all those years ago instead of the one whose heart she broke last week), but she’s done lonely before, been through, much, much worse and the new Lily is no longer afraid.
When she stumbles across that damn box in-between Serena’s clothes and Eric’s books, she slides it open without thinking twice and delves deeper. Her old Doc Martens sit underneath a pile of crap, right next to an old rusted camera and she slips her Jimmy Choo flats off her feet and the Doc Martens on and smiles at the perfect fit. She thinks of all the things she gave up (traded in) for this fabulous life on the Upper East Side and tries to remember the last time she was happy, truly happy (the birth of her children aside) and thinks of that surf town in California, Rufus’s voice in her ear making promises she knows he would have died trying to keep and her sighs of I love you into his mouth.
Her phone rings and vibrates on the counter and she picks it up on the second ring. A part of her knows who it is before she even answers.
“You called off your wedding,” Rufus greets before she even gets a chance to say ‘hello’ and her heart beats something wild as she chuckles at the proud, smug tone in his voice.
“Don’t be that guy.”
“What guy?” he asks innocently and she notes something different in his voice, something she can’t quite place.
“The guy that assumes I did it for him,” she replies quietly.
There’s a long silence and she counts his breath and breathes her own and tries to picture him: all ruffled hair and half-buttoned shirt, a tumbler of cheap liquor resting on the arm of his even cheaper chair. Lily finds it endearing.
“Why did you do it then?”
“I did it for me.”
It’s really only half the truth.
[6]
She goes to him, because while Rufus has always been good at the grand gestures (he always gave and gave and she took and took until there was nothing left), the new Lily thinks it’s about time for her to be good at them, too. She knocks twice before he answers, and the grin that’s on her lips doesn’t even begin to match his as he leans against the door jam, hair ruffled, shirt half-buttoned looking ever so smug. Lily breathes him in and sighs.
“First of all,” she starts, pushing past him into the loft. “Let’s just get one thing straight.”
Rufus shuts the door behind her. “Okay…”
She turns to him, arms crossed over her chest, eyes hard, mouth pressed into a thin line. “I am not the same person you fell in love with.” He stops, mid step, and stares at her hard, confused, like she’s a lyric in one of his songs he can’t get to flow right. “I’ve changed -“
“You haven’t really, you know,” he says cutting her off, regarding her with a peculiar smile. “Not that much, anyway. You may have traded in your Doc Martens and cut -off shorts for a… fancier attire and drink champagne instead of cheap beer but you’re still the same person underneath. People don’t change that much, Lil, not really.”
She narrows her eyes at him. She wonders for half a second how he can look at her the way he is - scrutinizing and judging in the polite, forgiving way only he can manage and it can still take her breath away.
“We can’t just pick up where we left off, you know,” she says because she’s already there and they’re too old for games now, and she’s way past too tired to skip around what is so obviously between them. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Rufus smiles something beautiful and it reminds her of the night they first met when she’d caught his eye across the room and that very smile had kept her warm all night long.
“I know.”
He’s near her now, incredibly close, and she can count the lines on his face and the specs of gold in his eyes. She feels nauseous, like she usually does when he’s near, because she can feel the situation spinning out of her control; she watches the next few minutes play out in her mind in tacky technicolor, and she should move away (experience has taught her it’s the right thing to do, always, when he’s involved) but instead she leans forward.
Lily sighs deeply, shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “I can’t promise you anything, Rufus.”
“I don’t expect anything,” he replies with a shake of his head.
His hands on her face, his fingers tracing her cheek bone, rough from too many years of playing the guitar. “I -“
“Lily,” he laughs and they’re so close she can feel it in her bones. “You always did talk too much.”
There’s a sigh and it’s a mix between a whimper and an I’ve missed you and suddenly his lips are on hers, his hands tangled in her hair like he used too. The old Lily would have taken this and hit the ground running; the new Lily fists her hands in the cotton of his shirt and kisses him back, breathes him in. He’s everything she remembers and more - he feels the same, tastes the same, kisses her the same way he used to, like forever was a promise and she was the only thing in his world, but there is something different lingering below the surface. Something she can’t quite put her finger on.
When he pulls away, his forehead resting against hers, he smiles at her like he used to and kisses her again, soft, sweet, lingering, and this time she recognizes the difference. It’s the taste of starting over and she welcomes it. She smiles against his lips and wraps her arms around him, pulling him as close as possible. She doesn’t let go.
{end}