Chapter 97
0097
(Lily POV)
After I finished telling James what I knew about the night that Stephanie died, we sat silently for over an
hour. We each were processing the weight of my words. For me, it was the weight of re-living the
memories. For him, it was the weight of hearing the story for the first time.
I was not sure what James was thinking and whether he believed me, but the longer that we sat there in
silence, the more I wondered if he might.
Eventually, I felt James begin to rub circles on my back again. This time, I did not brush his hand away. This time given that I was no longer actively re-living the memory of my almost rape- I felt comforted by the gesture.
I looked up at James, meeting his blue eyes for the first time since the beginning of the story. I could see
his flurry of emotions, and I felt badly for him. I had always known that my sister and Sheila had a
horrible, evil side to them, so even if the night Stephanie died was traumatizing to me, it was not
shocking. James, on the other hand, had loved Stephanie and had trusted Sheila. I could only begin to
imagine what he might be feeling.
“Question 2,” I spoke softly.
“What? You want to keep going with the game?” James asked in shock.
“Don’t you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. How much worse will it get?”
I gave him a sad smile, and then I reached out and squeezed his hand. “I think that was the worst of it.”
He nodded, although he did not seem completely convinced. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“Question 2. Do you believe me?”
James looked at me in disbelief. “That is your question?”
“Yes.”
“Talk about meeting an eye for an eye.”
I smiled. “Yes, but your answer to my question should be a lot shorter.”
James ran one of his hands through his hair.
“I don’t know.”
I looked away, feeling hurt although not surprised.
He gently grabbed my chin and forced me to look at him again.
“What I mean is, I don’t know what to think right now. I believe you. Luke believes you. But neither of us
want to. It is a lot to process. What you are saying, it changes everything. I feel like I am stuck in the
middle of a tornado’s funnel cloud and I am being lifted off the ground with debris flying everywhere, and
here you are asking me in the middle of it all if I believe that there is solid ground underneath me. Deep
down, I know that there is, but at the moment, all I can see is the storm.”
“Are you saying that I am the storm?”
“No, I am saying that what happened that night is the storm. My life is the storm. The feelings and beliefs
that I have held my whole life are the storm. You, Lily, are the stable ground underneath. I want to
believe you, and deep down I do… but it is hard…so incredibly hard… to see past the chaos of the storm.”
His metaphor was a little strange, but it somehow made sense to me.
As I sat there thinking through the metaphor, I felt an unexplainable, irrational, and sudden urge to offer
James some sort of comfort or reassurance. My resulting actions shocked even me, and a part of me
knew I might come to regret them. Nevertheless, at that moment, they felt like the right thing to do.
Perhaps I only felt that way because it was getting late and I was tired, or maybe perhaps it was because |
too still felt overwhelmed by a chaos of conflicting emotions. Or perhaps it was that the honesty in
James’ words stirred something in my heart.
Whatever it was that motivated me, I soon found myself reaching up and pulling James’ face to my own.
And then I kissed him.
The kiss felt very different than the one that I had had with Brady. Whereas the one with Brady was filled with a sense of desperation and lust, this one was filled with a sense of comfort and emotion. This kiss
felt almost as though we were trying to communicate something through the kiss that we could not
communicate in words.
When the kiss was over, James looked at me somewhat breathless and in surprise. “What was that?” he
asked me.
I looked down, suddenly feeling shy. “That was me trying to remind you that the stable ground does
exist.”
James did not say anything, so I quickly added an apology. “I am sorry… I should not have done that.
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