(no subject)
Alright, alright… so I know it’s not a fairytale. But it’s as close to one as a guy like me is ever going to get and a hell of a lot more than I ever thought that I deserved.
When I left L.A. with nothing more than the clothes on my back and a sign on my truck (Thanks a ton, Angel…), the last thing on my mind was what I was leaving behind. I put my sins in the rearview mirror and just drove until I could breathe free again. I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about Lilah Morgan, standing in that boardroom with something like real fear in her eyes and maybe the tiniest bit of gratitude as I made my big exit.
Well. Maybe I thought about her once or twice.
But I sure as hell wasn’t ready to see her again when I ran into her years later in France, of all places. I was doing my best to keep a low profile, maybe carve out a little name for myself again taking small clean cases, and who should stroll back into my life but hell-on-heels herself. A couple weeks of fireworks, a bit of full-on fighting where we came just short of actually drawing blood, and then…
Damned if I can figure out how it happened. They say Paris in the city of romance. Then again, maybe there was something there all along, something we both just looked past in the beginning in order to do our jobs. But it tracked us down just the same, and when I fell for Lilah, it was hard and fast and devastatingly real. Some days it’s hard to imagine what life was like back when we wanted to kill each other. Hard to imagine a life that wasn’t as nice as this… beautiful lady, safe place to live, steady job of the not-evil variety…
“Daddy, what’s ‘stalwart’?”
Speak of the icing on the cake. As I finish setting the table for three, I wander over to find Sarah curled up in one of the big armchairs, a book open on her lap and a slight frown on her young face. “Stalwart?” I echo, leaning on the back of my daughter’s chair. “What are you reading, little lady?”
“The Illiad,” she answers without batting an eye. I shoot her a dubious look. She’s six going on sixty, this girl.
“And how’s that working out for you?”
She wrinkles her nose at me and I hide my grin behind my hand. “I don’t know all the words. But there’s lot of big battles and sword fighting and a guy named Hector. And… stalwart?”
“It means really brave,” I tell her, resting my chin on my fist. “Strong and brave, like a knight. Like a hero. That’s stalwart.”
“Merci, daddy,” she singsongs, turning back to her book. I reach down to muss her hair, heading back to the kitchen.
It’s just about the time that Lilah gets home from the office, so I light the tall candles and settle the wine into the cooler in the center of the table. She’ll tease me mercilessly about being a hopeless romantic and a homebody for somewhere between five and twenty-five minutes, depending on what kind of day she’s had, and then she’ll soften and smile and remember that she’s got folks living here who love her.
“White or red?” I call over to Sarah, who asks, as usual, for red. Cranberry juice it is. I set a little bottle of it from the fridge into the crushed ice with the wine bottle so that she doesn’t feel left out.
I run my fingers over the label on the side of the dark wine bottle, remembering the times when life wasn’t as sweet as this. Back when had Lilah locked herself up drinking scotch instead of wine, staring at a scrap of newspaper that she’d gotten from god-knows-where and trying to pretend that she couldn’t stop crying. That was back when Sarah was real little. Little enough that it didn’t scare her as bad as it scared me, the fact that this was a part of Lilah’s life that I wasn’t privileged to see, leaving me without a single damn thing to do to comfort her.
But that’s ages back and what we’ve got right now is as close to a happy ending as I’m going to get. So I head over to sit next to Sarah, shuffling idly through some case notes (Hell, the hardest case I’ve got is a landlord-tenant thing gone sour, made tricky only by my client’s shoddy English and my even shoddier French.) and waiting for Lilah to come home to us.