The Way We Learned to Love ✓

24 - lily

april-may 2018 : 2 years and 4 months ago

When Lily was a kid, her parents took her to church every week without fail. Sunday School was kind of weird in hindsight. She remembered how at the end of each year - because everything in life apparently needed to be a competition - the teachers would give all of the kids "awards" for which "Fruit of the Spirit" they showed the most in class - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control. The only one Lily never got was self-control.

But now she was thinking that she ought to march back in there and ask for a self-control award ten years late. She earned that freaking award moments ago when she used every last atom of self-control she had to put on her seatbelt instead of what she wanted to do: lean over and kiss Liam the second they were alone in the car.

Now she was too busy having her daily internal crisis about him to talk much.

She told herself that this was gonna happen - that she was gonna think she had the situation under control and then start falling for him faster than she anticipated she could. But of course she had to be dumb and go let it happen, anyway.

He wasn't at all the brash person she thought he might be after their first encounter. Not that he wasn't smooth; he sometimes pulled comments out of nowhere that made her heart flutter in ways it never had. But he listened much more than he talked. He made her feel seen in a way she hadn't before. And he called her Lils. She still had no clue how he came up with that or why he decided to let it stick, but every time he said it a warm feeling sprouted up in her heart and spread all the way out to her fingers and toes like she was being wrapped up in a cozy blanket. Lily was a short name, so no one had bothered to come up with a nickname for her before.

And yet she had no clue if everything between them meant the same to him as it did to her. Was this just fun for him? She couldn't blame him if he wasn't as serious about it as she was. It wasn't like he was obligated to want the same things out of whatever this sometimes-flirting sometimes-not relationship was as she did. But she was longing for someone who would be there for the long haul, who wouldn't run away when life got hard.

She was too attached to the idea of what they could be to ask him what they were, even though she was setting herself up to be hurt further by waiting. She didn't know how to ask. Or how to explain that she was a mentally-unstable mess. She was scared of the infinite number of things he didn't know about her.

And how much she didn't know about him.

She noticed the scar on his wrist for the first time when she pulled him up off the bench.

It was a tiny white line. That was all. She shouldn't have been fazed, but that tiny white line carried a lot of connotations with it - connotations that other people had planted in her head.

Just as she was on the verge of completely forgetting about those rumors about him, they all came swarming back into her consciousness. What he did or didn't do to Caroline Davis or what she did or didn't do to him or what he did or didn't do to himself.

He seemed so gentle, like he wouldn't hurt a fly. But no one thought it was a coincidence that he had shown up at school with a bandaged wrist at the same time everything supposedly started going downhill for those two. Something clearly happened there and it was just enough to plant the seed of doubt in Lily's mind. She never saw any issues in people until it was too late. She wanted to ask about it, but she was too apprehensive to do it here in the car where she couldn't step away if his answer wasn't what she wanted to hear.

So she watched out her window instead. They were on this stretch of road where you could see the downtown skyline lit up in the distance. The light almost appeared to vibrate like the city had a heartbeat of its own, pulsating from all of the activity bustling within it. It had a way of drawing you in and tempting you to take big chances and leap into the unknown like you had nothing to lose. There was something comforting about the two of them being separate from that, here in their own little bubble of the car where they could take life as slowly as they needed to.