by Anna Burke
“There’s more,” she said when Ivy finished.
“More—oh.” Ivy glanced at her empty plate and shrugged almost sheepishly, as if she hadn’t realized she had polished off her serving. “Maybe in a minute.”
Lillian set her own utensils down and wished she hadn’t eaten anything.
“Ivy,” she began, her throat thick. “I—”
Apologizing to Ivy had always been impossible.
“It’s okay. I get it,” said Ivy.
“Get what?”
“This was always going to be messy. You deserve someone who can be there for you. Who doesn’t do . . .what I do. You know.”
“That’s not—”
“I never saw you as a consolation prize, for what it’s worth.”
Lillian flinched, remembering the words she’d flung at Ivy. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, I did, at the time, but not . . . not like that.”
“Then like what?”
This was it. This was the thing she needed to say. She felt the way she had during her first surgery, holding a scalpel over living flesh and praying her hand didn’t slip as she made her incision. She couldn’t afford a mistake now, either. “I don’t think you’re broken. The piano overwhelmed me. You know me. I like to be in control. I don’t feel in control around you. Ever. And then you told me you had MS, and—”
Ivy closed her eyes as if bracing for a blow.
“—and hell, Ives, I thought you were settling for me. I wasn’t good enough for you before, if you remember, and I wasn’t good enough for Brian, either.”
Ivy’s eyes opened with a flash of anger. “You know that’s not true, right?”
“It doesn’t matter. I wanted to hurt you. I wanted you to know how much you’d hurt me. I hate, more than anything else in my life, that I’ve never gotten over you.”
It would be so, so dumb to love Ivy Holden. And yet.
Ivy’s lips parted in surprise. “But you—”
“What I’m trying to say, badly, is I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“For everything. For not believing you could change. For not recognizing that I’ve been just as much of an ass to you as you have to me.”
“I won’t argue with that.”
“Do not make this any harder, Holden.”
A faint smile curved Ivy’s lips. “You deserve someone who pushes you.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I deserve.”
“Oh, but I want to.”
“Fine. What do you think I deserve?”
Ivy tilted her head, the dark circles beneath her eyes adding a seriousness to their play that underscored the tenuousness of the situation. They were hiding behind the familiar, but the stakes had never been higher. “I think you deserve nice things, if you want them. I think you deserve to be happy, because you don’t seem like you are, and I want that for you. I think you deserve passion. Extravagance. I think you deserve to be with someone who can make you happy and who doesn’t run away from her problems—”
“What did you run away from?”
“Everything.” Ivy shrugged as if this didn’t hurt her, but Lillian saw the tightness around her eyes.
“Colorado?”
Ivy shifted in her seat. “I’ve always been good at lying to myself. When I left Kara, I didn’t tell her why. I told myself it was because I was protecting her, when really I was protecting myself. I lied to you, too.”
“About what?” Her heart gave a stutter of fear.
“About why I came here. That was the other thing. I knew it would never have worked out with Kara in the long run because I never got over you, either.”
A relief so powerful she nearly wept swept through her.
“When I realized I might need . . . help . . . after getting my diagnosis, I knew I didn’t want it from Kara. I told myself I didn’t want her to give up on her dreams for me, but again, that was partially a lie. It was a way out. I took it. And I came here because I thought I didn’t care about anything anymore, even you, even though I knew that was a lie, too.”
“Ivy—”
“Wait. Let me finish.” Ivy rubbed the web between her thumb and forefinger and stared at the table. Her next words came out in a small voice. “I’m not strong like you. I run when I’m scared, and I’m scared of everything right now. If you want to end this, please tell me, and I’ll leave.”
“And if I don’t want to end it? What if that scares you, too, like it did before?”
Ivy raised her eyes. “Living without you is a hell of a lot scarier.”
She wasn’t sure how she ended up in Ivy’s lap. One moment she was across the table, and the next her legs were wrapped around Ivy’s waist and her hands were buried in her hair. Honey lingered on Ivy’s lips. She kissed it off. She kissed, too, the hot tears that mingled with her own as her lips pressed against the corners of Ivy’s mouth. Ivy’s hands dug into her back. She hooked her feet around the legs of the chair and pulled herself closer, Ivy’s breasts just beneath hers and the gentle curve of her skull precious in her palms.
“I never wanted to hurt you, Lil,” Ivy said between breaths.
“I missed you so much.” She didn’t just mean over the few days of their stand-off. She’d missed her for years.
“God, Lil. You’ve no idea.” Ivy drew Lillian’s lower lip between her teeth and held it, her breathing strained as she fought back a sob. “Lillian, I love you.”
Her own sob shook her. Ivy’s forehead pressed into hers, steadying the tremors.
“I love you, Ivy.”
Ivy groaned, part relief, part pain. She could taste the emotions on her tongue. She tasted truth, too, when Ivy said, “I always have.”
Tears lit Ivy’s eyes, magnifying the flecks of gold and emerald in her irises. She pulled away long enough to brush a few from her blond lashes. Moss bore that green beneath sunlit water. So did the first new leaves of spring.
Ivy would never be safe. Ivy would always push her. That was what life did, and with Ivy she felt alive.
• • •
Ivy woke in her own bed feeling refreshed for the first time in days. Warmth stirred beside her.
“Hey.”
She opened her eyes to find Lillian watching her. They’d come back to her place after dinner, and before that— Memory rushed in to fill the void.
Lillian loved her.
Lillian had also made coffee, and the gesture, followed on the heels of the meal she’d cooked for her last night, stirred the small flame of hope she’d allowed once more to grow.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Lillian as she brushed a tangle of Ivy’s hair behind her ear.
Ivy relaxed into the touch. “What have you been thinking?”
“That I’d like you to be my girlfriend.”
“I thought that was implied when you told me you loved me.” Even now she couldn’t resist teasing Lillian. At Lillian’s expression, however, she smiled, and added, “yes. I would like that very much.”
“We do need to talk, though.”
“I know.” She knew what was coming and accepted the cup of coffee Lillian handed her.
“I need you to be honest with me.”
“About what?”
“Everything, but starting with your health.”
Nausea gripped her stomach. She set the coffee on her bedside table. “Okay.”
“How serious is this? And what can I do to help you?”
Throwing herself from a moving vehicle or into the frozen river felt easier than answering. Her tongue stuck to her mouth. She opened it anyway, preparing to force herself to speak, but there was no air in her lungs. She drew in a ragged breath, then another, and another, and still sparks danced in the corner of her vision. Distantly, she was aware of Lillian saying her name, just as she was aware of the bite of her bathroom floor tiles digging into her knees as she knelt before the toilet and vomited into the porcelain bowl.
Lillian’s hand rubbed circles on her back, and her voice spoke soot
hing words in a language that might have been English. More bile rose. She vomited again, her stomach heaving up last night’s dinner and leaving only terror behind.
And still she couldn’t breathe. Lillian wiped her mouth with a tissue. Ivy let her because she was too busy shaking to do anything to stop it.
“Breathe,” Lillian was saying, but she couldn’t. She was suffocating on her own fear.
Pain penetrated the panic. She blinked at her arm, and at Lillian’s thumb and forefinger where they pinched the bones of her wrist.
“Focus on this,” Lillian said. “Focus on me.”
Half-blind, she tried to nod and ended up biting her tongue. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. A dog whined. Lillian’s eyes remained fixed on Ivy’s, and gradually she managed to do as Lillian commanded. Her breathing slowed to hiccups instead of hyperventilation. Her stomach stopped trying to empty her organs into the dirty water.
“You need to tell me, Ivy.”
It was the tenderness in those words, and the unflinching resolve, that made her decision. Most people would have told her she didn’t need to talk about it now, or that they could come back to the topic later—but most people didn’t know her the way Lillian did. They would have assumed Ivy needed to be coddled, not pushed. Lillian seemed to know if backed down now, Ivy might never have the strength to say the things that needed to be said.
Between hiccups, she managed, “I’m scared.”
“I am too.”
“It’s bad, Lil.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, it’s not that bad yet, though there are days . . . Fuck. I hate this. I hate that I can’t rely on my body. I hate that I’m weak, and broken, and that there’s nothing I can do. It’s going to get worse. I don’t know when. A month. A year. A decade. Every time I get a flare-up I have to worry that this is the one that isn’t going to go away.”
She pushed away from the toilet and flushed, but she couldn’t stop the words.
“I hurt. I hurt all the time. And I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired, Lil. All I ever wanted was to be a veterinarian, and sometimes I can’t even hold a fucking syringe.”
“You have a technician.”
“What happens when I’m not strong enough to work with large animals? That’s the other reason I liked Seal Cove. It’s a mixed practice. But what about when I can’t walk?”
“Nothing says it will progress that far. I’ve done the research.”
“Nothing says it won’t, either. Nothing says I won’t end up in a diaper by age fifty, and who could love that?”
“Everyone who’s ever had a partner they truly cared about.”
“You don’t understand. My body, fitness—it’s part of me. My work is part of me. Riding. I don’t know who I am without those things, and my mind—what if I start forgetting things? What if the brain fog gets so bad I can’t even practice medicine from a desk? What the hell kind of life is that?”
She was shouting, and it felt good, too good, to say the words that had festered inside her for months out loud.
“I’m selfish. You deserve so much better than someone like me. I was a bitch to you, and now I’m damaged, and you—”
“Oh, shut up, Ivy.” Lillian spoke sharply, and her jaw clicked shut in surprise.
“But—”
“Your problem isn’t that you’re sick. It’s that you’ve let yourself believe your productivity is your only worth. You’re rich. If you can’t work, open a nonprofit. Start a rescue. Fund research initiatives. You still have agency. Your body, which I love and which I will continue loving even if it fails you, is not the prison you think it is. I hate that you’re in pain. You have no idea how much I hate that, but that doesn’t make you worthless or undeserving. Everything you just said is valid, and it’s also dumb.”
“It’s not—”
“We’re veterinarians. We solve impossible problems every day. You’ll find a way to ride. You’ll find a way to exercise. Maybe it won’t be the same, but you also work with horses. Tomorrow you could get kicked in the head and end up in a coma. You could crash your car into a tree. You could get cancer next year, and then MS won’t even matter.”
“Your optimism is really making me feel better.”
“I’m serious. Look.” Lillian took her hands and held them in her own, as gently as if they were a pair of stunned rabbits. “I know this is terrifying. I can’t understand entirely what you’re going through. What I can do? I can cook. I won’t ever let you give up. I’ll humiliate you. I’ll make you laugh. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you going. You want to spend the weekends watching movies on the couch? We’ll do it. I don’t like going out anyway. If you need a change in diet, I’ll make it so damn delicious you’ll be begging me for seconds. If you need me to tie you to your horse, I’ll bring some zip ties. And who even needs to walk? Darwin’s tough. We’ll get you a dog sled. Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Then you deserve me. I’ll remind you of that every day, but I will start to get annoyed if you don’t believe me.”
Ivy managed a squeak of laughter.
“What do you need right now?”
“I’m fine. I—”
“Nope. Tell me what we can do to make you feel better, even if it’s just for a few minutes.”
“Just you.”
“I’m here.”
She thought of her bathtub, and, feeling very small, said, “I could also use a bubble bath.”
“Okay. That’s our plan, then.” Lillian turned on the tap to her tub and found her stash of bath salts, bombs, and bubbles. Ivy sat on the tile floor and watched her sniff them.
“You are allowed to buy me these if you want,” Lillian said as she selected a small bottle of lavender-rose bubbles.
“Noted.”
“Now, stand up.”
Steam from the bath clouded the mirror. All she could see of their reflections were vague shapes, and she shivered in the cold.
“You’re like a purebred dog,” Lillian said as Ivy stepped into the blissfully scalding water.
“How so?”
“Beautiful on the outside, so many problems on the inside.”
She splashed her. “Get in here with me or I’ll bite you.”
Lillian undressed quickly and hissed as her toes touched the water. “Oh, it’s hot.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
The tub held them easily. At first they faced each other, knees breaking the surface of the bubbles like mountains, but then Lillian took her by the shoulders, turned her, and held her against her body. Their legs tangled beneath the foam.
“This isn’t the worst.”
“No. It’s not,” said Lillian.
“Thank you for—”
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Am I wrong, though?”
Drowsily, she shook her head. “Still. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Ivy woke sometime later, back in her bed after a long soak, to the sound of music. She eased herself out of bed and into her bathrobe, which was a luxurious blend of softness and warmth, and followed the sensory stimuli.
A fresh cup of coffee, still hot, waited for her on her bedside. She sipped as she walked toward the bars of music, her mood rising with the notes. The door to the study was open. Inside, Lillian sat, dressed in one of Ivy’s shirts and a pair of sweatpants, her fingers running up and down the scales. She leaned against the doorway, not daring to speak.
Lillian finished warming up and opened the sheaf of music. Hesitantly at first, and then with more confidence, Rachmaninoff filled the house. She felt the music through the soles of her feet and through the door frame. She felt it in her breath, and in the pale morning sunlight filtering through the study windows to fall upon the polished top of the piano, which Lillian had opened. She felt it, too, in the raw, bruised place she’d exposed to Lillian this morning. It eased the ache, each chor
d a salve, a balm, a promise. Lillian missed a few notes, here and there, but the music rose in tumultuous crescendo and broke and rose again as the piece moved through the bars.
“This,” Lillian said as the last notes faded, “is an exquisite instrument.”
“It isn’t a Fazioli or a Bösendorfer,” she said, putting on her best impression of her mother, “but it will do.” In her own voice, she added, “You play beautifully.”
Even Prudence Holden would have been impressed.
“I’m surprised I remembered so much of it, honestly.”
“Practice any time you want.”
Lillian turned on the bench to face her, raising an eyebrow. “I can think of a few other things we could practice.”
“Well, what’s the point of getting insurance if you’re not willing to take a little risk?”
“Oh yeah?”
“Get on the piano, Lee.”
• • •
Sweat slicked her steering wheel despite the freezing temperatures beyond the windows of her Subaru. Ivy sang along to the radio in her passenger seat, looking like a Burberry model in her sweater, scarf, and supple leather boots. Lillian pictured the introductions that were now only a few minutes away. What would June and Daiyu make of Ivy? And what if, at the end of the evening, they decided they hated her? Would that change how she felt?
Darwin had not joined them, but Muffin and Hermione perked up in the backseat as they realized where they were headed.
“My moms spoil them,” she explained as Muffin began whining in almost panicked enthusiasm. Hermione scrabbled over the middle console and into Ivy’s lap so she could press her nose to the car window without getting trampled by Muffin. Today’s sweater had a shark fin on the back, and Ivy toyed with it, smiling down at the little dog. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it.
“Hard to blame them. You’re perfect, aren’t you?”
Hermione wagged her tail in vigorous agreement.
The steering wheel was damp by the time she pulled into their narrow drive. She couldn’t recall her palms ever sweating like this before, and she dried them on her pants, hoping Ivy wouldn’t notice. They sat in a silence punctuated only by the engine ticking as it cooled.