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She’d kissed Pippa once.
It’d been an impulse born of desperate exhaustion, in the middle of a night spent camping under unfamiliar stars. Lily couldn’t even remember what the story they were on location for had been about - had stopped caring halfway through and Pippa and the then-intern Wes had picked up the slack. She got like that sometimes, so consumed with guilt and grief and she’d lash out, or become vacant, and Pippa would pretend like everything was fine. That she was still Lily, and that she was still a phenomenal journalist (and maybe she was right, but it didn’t feel right.)
They’d been camping under the stars, in a place that felt foreign and unfamiliar, but Pippa didn’t pull her punches. With Lily, she never did. She was smooth and quick witted and beautiful and honest. Tough, unassuming. Brave. She made Lily feel like she could be all those things too.
So Lily had kissed her.
For a moment, it felt like she’d made the right choice for once. Maybe her only right choice ever. It felt like nothing else mattered except skin on skin. Hands on hands. Lips on lips.
It didn’t matter that they’d failed to get the one interview they’d had lined up for the day. It didn’t matter that intern-Wes had accidentally erased about an hour's worth of edited footage. It didn’t matter that Lily had spent an hour huddled in the bathroom, trying her hardest not to throw up the breakfast she hadn’t eaten. It didn’t matter that she’d woken up from a dream about Sammy kissing her brother who had turned into some kind of shadow demon before shattering into a billion tiny pieces as she watched helplessly from behind a pane of glass, leaving her shaking and unsettled for most of the day.
It mattered that Pippa had told her she mattered. That she was still Lily fucking Wright, and she could do anything with that.
So she’d kissed her, and it had felt right, until she pulled away laughing and breathless, and seen the miserable look on Pippa’s face.
Pippa who had stared at the unfamiliar stars, and sighed out a name. Lily didn’t even wait for an explanation, because what difference did it make. Pippa didn’t owe her one. Nobody owed her anything.
She was Lily fucking Wright, and that was the problem.
When you were Lily Wright, people always left.
Her Mom had been first, and she and Jack had held each other through the night, silently promising to pretend they couldn’t see the others tears. Their cat had run away the month after.
Her first best friend (besides Jack, of course) had moved countries without so much as a goodbye, and it had suddenly felt like cosmic cruelty.
Her grandmother had died on her 10th birthday taking with her Lily’s belief in fairy tales and happy endings. There’d be the car accident four weeks later, and she tried really hard not to think about that.
There’d be a lull for a while after the loss of all her high school friends, instigated by her quick, easy friendship with Sammy Stevens, and all that brought with it.
Introducing him to Jack seemed natural, easy, perfect. For a while, it was. Until it wasn’t.
She didn’t know which time losing Jack had hurt more.
Interns dropped like flies, but she convinced herself it wasn’t personal. They just weren’t cut out for journalism (and maybe she wasn’t cut out for happiness.)
But when Pippa and Mike had left, taking her audience and her podcast with them, she couldn’t keep pretending.
She’d lost her innocence and her sanity. Her safety and security. The only thing that never left her was the burning in her throat as she drank bottle after bottle of bitter truths she couldn’t avoid.
And then Sammy had tried to leave her again.
She’d only just gotten him back, and he tried to leave her again.
She doesn’t remember the rest, really. She’d woken up in Ben’s apartment, and they told her she wasn’t allowed to leave. She’d protested, this was unethical, it was a joke, kidnapping, treason, a crime against humanity. She’d taken one look at Ben’s face, and sighed, “I maybe have a problem.”
“No shit,” Sammy had said, but it lacked the cruel edge she’d become accustomed to, and so she made a choice.
She’d met Katie through Loretta. Lily had pulled a face when Sammy had insisted she spend the night at the Kreighouser place after walking in on her attempting to cut off all her hair, but when Katie had pulled up with a delivery for Troy, she suddenly felt like everything had been worth it.
Some days she could picture herself in King Falls forever. Sammy would speak to her without contempt to his voice, and Ben would throw his arms around her despite her half hearted protests and Emily would laugh at one of her jokes without being prompted to do so, and Lily would think ‘oh.’ Because that felt like love. It wasn’t the kind of love her and Jack used to dream about having. The kind that was so far removed from their own lives as to feel perfect. Untouchabley perfect.
It was real and raw, unadulterated love. The kind that left her wracked with sobs the day Sammy and Jack left, or the morning she woke up to the news that Jack was gone and everything had broken inside her. Because that was it, wasn’t it? Love was giving Sammy the power to hurt her again, and trusting him not to. Love was folding into Ben’s hugs, and teasing him like he was just another one of her brothers. Love was slipping books into Emily’s backpack because she was too shy to tell her that she thought she’d enjoy it, but wanting her to experience the thing nonetheless.
Love was the way Katie called her ‘Miss Lily.”
Love was eating pancake puppies with her every Tuesday morning, even though she hated pancake puppies (especially with syrup.)
Love was worry over her injuries, and awe over her triumphs. Love was whispering at 3am that she was scared. Scared of Jack, alone and terrified and unable to be saved. Scared of King Falls and all it’s flaws. Scared of being vulnerable, because where had that ever gotten her?
Love was picking up her phone at 5pm, and admitting that today had been hard. Love was milkshakes in the park, and napping in the back of her patrol car.
Love was staying put, when everything inside her was yelling at her to leave.
Love was terrible movies that Lily “only agreed to see because of the promise of popcorn.” Love was falling asleep on the couch without having to fret over snoring or drooling or nightmares.
There was something different about standing under the stars with Katie. The same stars she’d stood under with Pippa, sure. Except this time, they felt familiar. Safe. Bright, and full of hope.
They felt like King Falls. Like a promise. Like love. Like home. (Lily would pretend she knew how to process that.)
Katie would poke her in the stomach, and Lily would practically giggle with reactionary joy, before pulling her close. They’d stand like that, for a moment or two, gazing dreamily into each other’s eyes, like they were in some kind of cheesy romance novel - Katie’s bemused smile making Lily feel a special, dizzying kind of wonderful. She’d stand on her tiptoes and gingerly press their lips together.
She was scared of a lot of things, but Katie rejecting her wasn’t one of them.
Love is being afraid, but taking steps forward in spite of that fear.
It was probably worth it.
Katie would probably disappoint her one day, most everyone did, after all. Lily would inevitably disappoint her too. They were messy and broken and human, it was unreasonable to expect anything else.
And she was only Lily Wright. (although she thought - maybe for the first time -that wasn’t such a bad thing to be after all)