"It was last year."
A lifetime ago, and yet I remember it like yesterday.
"I'd met Lily for the first time one night as she was leaving your old place. One fifteen-second conversation. Then again at the diner with all of us, and I don't know what my face was doing because Rome laid down the law right after." I shrug. "She's off-limits."
"And you just agreed?"
"She was leaving soon after. Rome was supposed to leave too, remember? I figured I'd never see her again and the promise wouldn't cost me anything."
"And yet here we are."
"And yet here we are."
There is not much else to say after that. The waitress comes by, Ramsey orders another round without asking, which means he's not done with me yet.
"Can I ask you something?" I ask, because I need someone else's input, not just mine and Rome's.
"Shoot."
"Isn't it strange?" I turn the fresh bottle in my hands. "Me being interested in a twenty-two-year-old? It's been a long time since we were twenty-two."
"Erin and Rome have the same age difference."
"But Erin's not twenty-two."
"No. But that's not what matters and you know it." He leans forward, elbows on the table. "Do you respect her? Is she making her own choices? Because from where I'msitting, that girl makes more of her own choices than most people twice her age."
"I don't know..."
"Look." He waits until I meet his eyes. "I'm not telling you to break your promise to Rome. I'm telling you the promise was wrong to ask for and wrong to give. If something real is happening here, Rome is going to have to deal with that like an adult. And so are you."
I have no response so I sit there, staring at the table.
"You figure out what you want, Cal. And you figure it out soon." He finishes his beer. "Because dancing around it isn't good for anyone. Not for you, not for her."
He lets me sit with that for a while before we drift to other topics. When the night ends, I pay the tab and walk out into the cold.
Ramsey's wrong about one thing. It's not about age. It's not about whether she can make her own choices. She can. She does. That's half the problem.
The other half is pure math. She's here for a year, maybe less. Then she goes back to school, back to her life, back to becoming the doctor she's been working toward since she was a kid. And I stay here. In this town. In the same house I grew up in.
I will never leave my dad and I'm not even regretful about it. So she'll leave, and he'll be okay, and he'll go back to talking to the ghost of my mom, and we'll find our way back to a routine that doesn't involve Lily coming by anymore.
If I did what I wanted, at best I would get a few months. At worst, I get a few months and then I have to watch her at every holiday, every wedding, every birthday Rome and Erin throw for the rest of our lives. Smiling at her across the tablelike she didn't ruin me. Making small talk like I don't know exactly how she hums when she's concentrating.
She's not temporary, that's the thing. She's Rome's sister, Erin's family. She's woven into every part of my life that matters, which means if I touch her, if I let myself have her and then lose her, I don't get to walk away clean.
I will lose her forever, in a room I'll have to keep entering. This way, at least I don't know what she feels like. What she tastes like. It's better I don't know what I'm missing.
11
CAL
March bled into April. April became May. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped counting the ways Lily Moreland was making me lose my mind and started accepting it like bad weather. Like something that just happened to a person.
Gran is a Saturday institution at the station. She shows up every week with baked goods that make grown men go quiet and grateful, and Chief Morales once described her lemon squares as "a genuine morale resource" and put it in the log.
She usually comes alone. This time Lily is standing next to her.
