The Stars Will Shine (31 page)

I walk slowly past the open room where the grand piano still sits. My eyes land on the black surface, still a shine beneath the layer of dust that has gathered atop it. I can’t resist the pull of its body, the way it calls to me as the sea does a sailor. Just once, I want to touch it again…if not to play it, to feel it. To feel those keys beneath the pads of my fingers. To bring my fingers home.

The piano bench creaks when I take a seat, a sigh of contentment.
This is where you belong
, it tells me.
I’ve missed you so
.

Pushing up the keyboard cover reveals the perfectly lined black and white extensions that lead to the piano’s soul. My fingers hover over them for a moment then softly caress the length of the keyboard, from its center to its farthest ends. My heart surges in my chest, and I take in a breath, long and slow. Pulled forward, I close my eyes and let my fingers press softly against the keys, to move from memory after all these years. When the first chord transitions into the next, it takes every ounce of my being not to break down and cry. I never truly knew until this moment what I missed when I gave this up.

My fingers glide over the keys, note after note and chord after chord, until a melody is formed from my own making, from my own mind. Something melancholic and haunting…its power in its tenderness, its strength in its delicacy.

I don’t know for how long I play, but tranquil shadows and warm buttery light slowly pass over the windows, signaling the setting sun. When nightfall is here, I stop, pull my hands back to my lap, and for a moment forget to breathe.

“Never have I heard someone play as breathtakingly as you.”

I turn around, finding my father’s face. He watches me for a long while, sincerity in his eyes, and I watch him back, nodding ever so slightly until suddenly a flood of emotion surges inside of me. Every damned feeling I’ve felt since the passing of my mother swells thick in my throat until I choke on it all in a sputtered breath that turns into heart-wrenching sobs. I don’t even register that my father has moved forward until he sits beside me on the bench and pulls me into his arms, cradles my head against his shoulder and makes calming shushing sounds low in my ear as he runs his hand down my hair, time and again.

“It’ll be okay,” he tells me. “It’ll all be okay, honey.”

I sob so hard that I hardly make a sound now, my voice completely lost in this strange mix of emotions. So much pain; yet, in my father’s arms, I feel as if, for once, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Shhh,” he breathes. “Shhh, sweetie, just close your eyes and let it all out.”

It must be a half an hour before my cries turn to sniffles. My dad turns a little more toward me, and I bury my face further into his neck.

“Dad,” I get out. “I’m so sorry for everything. I’ve been a terrible daughter.”

I feel Dad’s chin move back and forth across the top of my head. He’s shaking his head. “No, Delilah, I’ve been a terrible father. I’ve pushed you away when you’ve needed me. I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before, but seeing you now after these months apart, I realize how much you’ve needed me. I think a part of me just didn’t want to admit that I’ve failed as a father.”

“That’s not true, Dad.” I sniffle into his shoulder and wrap my arms around him more tightly. I can’t remember the last time I hugged him, it’s been so long, but it’s amazing that all along, his hugs held these cathartic powers. Is it inconceivable to think that maybe mine have the same effect on him?

Dad kisses the top of my head and pulls back to look at my face. “This right here,” he tells me. “This is the best birthday present I ever could have asked for.”

I look down at my lap. “I’m sorry I haven’t answered any of your calls.”

“Sweetie, I know, and I understand why. We said and did things we regret. But you’re my daughter and I’m your father. That will never go away. No matter what, I will always love you.”

I peek up at him, fresh tears swelling at the bottom rims of my eyes. “I love you, too, Dad.” It’s the first time I’ve said it in years. The words feel foreign on my lips, but they feel right.

“You and you brother, you two are the most important pieces of my life. Never forget that.”

We spend another fifteen minutes in each other’s arms, slowly piecing back together more than a few shards of our shattered hearts.

The rest of the night is spent on two shared bowls of popcorn and bad eighties movies Dad insists were the highlights of their time. I know there is so much more he and I need to discuss when it comes to fully mending our relationship and understanding each other—after all, we’ve spent the majority of our last four years on opposite sides of a sprawling canyon, despite living in the same house—but for now, this is enough. And enough feels good.

Chapter Nineteen

I wake up to disquieting darkness.

A glance at the clock on the nightstand tells me it is two in the morning and that I should close my eyes and go back to sleep. But there’s something in the stillness and the quiet that unnerves me, prevents me from giving in to the slumber. Lifting myself up to my elbows, I hear it. The soft and steady climb of feet up the stairs. Confident and unrushed, but hushed all the same.

Every person that has ever walked this earth has walked it with a unique step. And these footfalls growing ever closer to me now…Well, I memorized them a lifetime ago.

I lay back down and shut my eyes, consumed by the unwelcome familiarity of this moment. The anticipatory state of mind. The hollowness in my chest I hope he can fill. The fears I will him to wash away. The misgivings only he can soothe. All blanketed with the knowledge that I shouldn’t feel this way.

The door to my room creaks open, just as it always did—once a comforting sound, now a scream into the dead of night. I pretend to be asleep when Tommy comes to me. Maybe that way he’ll leave me alone.

But he doesn’t.

The bed sinks beneath his weight, drawing my body a little closer to his. Always the black hole to my starlight. Even the memory of him has sucked the shine and vivacity from me all these years.

There’s alcohol on Tommy’s breath. Whiskey from the smell of it. But on his breath, it’s thick and foul. It slithers over me and repulses my every being. It’s nothing like how it floated from Aiden, sweet and refined, a mystic magnetism in its aroma. Tommy leans over me and clumsily tries to move the strands of hair covering my face. When his thumb jabs my cheek hard, I rip away from him, sit up in bed, and unleash a glare that chills the dark space between us.

“Why are you here, Tommy?” His name burns a hole right through my tongue, and all the words I want to say to him escape me through it. Tommy reaches across the space for me. I don’t move away or forward, just let his fingers hang out there, calling for my body but receiving no response. Eventually he drops his hand and looks at me with hooded eyes.

“It’s been so long,” he says. It comes out only a little slurred. “And you’re prettier than ever.” I look away, heart falling, failing. “You were always pretty, but now—I mean, God, look at yourself, Delilah. You’ve really grown up.”

“Why are you here, Tommy?” I repeat, crossing my arms over my chest. The way he’s eyeing me gives me chills. A pained want, a hunger he wishes he didn’t have. I know that look all too well. It’s the same one he wore that first night he ever came to my room and kissed me, when he paused in the doorway. An internal battle of wills to either move forward, to cross that threshold, or to go back, knowing that, if crossed, things would never be the same again.

And just as he gave in then, he does so now. He lifts his hand once more, and his fingers touch my face. “I want you, Delilah. I miss what we had. I’ve missed
you
.”

I find myself leaning into his touch, subconsciously trying to draw from it what I once felt for him, trying to find the boy I used to love somewhere inside of this fool before me. Shuddering, I pull away, sick with myself.

“I can’t forgive you for what you did to me,” I say quietly, and in my periphery, I see his shoulders slump. “You used me. I trusted you like family, and you used me. Do you know how crushed I was when I found out I was just some girl, one of many you liked to stick your tongue down and thrust your dick into?”

There’s an ache in Tommy’s voice when he says, “I’m sorry. I was so stupid. I was young—”

“No,
I
was young, Tommy.
I
was young, and you were four years older than me.” I’m staring right at him again, having found a fire within me to cast away the cold. “Between the two of us, you should’ve been the more responsible one. And you should’ve been mature enough, content enough to live on as my brother’s best friend, not the guy who took my virginity and self-respect.”

“But I liked you.” It comes out weak, a pathetic plea for forgiveness disguised as an excuse.

“And I
loved
you. In my”—I wave my hand—“naïve, thirteen-year-old-self way. That was the big difference, wasn’t it? If you didn’t feel that way about me, you should’ve let me go. You should’ve been mature enough to say no to those teenage hormones that made you want to touch me. Because if you didn’t love me but knew how I felt about you, yet used my feelings to fleetingly satisfy yourself anyway, and in doing so crush my entire world, then that just makes you one of the biggest douchebags to ever walk this earth.”

“I got scared,” he whispers. “I got scared about what Dave would think. What he would do. I cared about you, but I went about it all wrong. I still care about you. And I know now, I should’ve waited until you were older.”

“Just stop, okay? I don’t want to hear about your regrets and your pain because it’s nothing compared to how you left me. At any time, you could’ve ended it, talked with me about it. You didn’t have to take the easy way out by kissing some other girl in front of me. And you definitely didn’t have to come back to me afterwards, crawling into my bed again and telling me you wanted me, just to confuse me all the more.”

“I didn’t want to let you go.”

“Well, I guess it’s good you finally did. Because it was always headed to the shitter. Right from the start. It never would’ve worked between us.” I think of Aiden and how he made me feel, magnitudes more appreciated and loved than Tommy ever did. “Honestly, I don’t know what I ever saw in you.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do.”

Tommy looks right at me, a penetrating stare filled with hurt. I swallow hard and have to look away. Do I mean that? For all he did to me, we did grow up together. For much of my life, he was family. Some of the best memories I have from my childhood involve him; I just never let myself think about them anymore because it pains me that we can’t go back to that. That we can’t just erase everything that happened between us.

“You’re still doing it, Tommy. Even after all these years, you’re still doing it. Longing after something you don’t really want. Believe me, I know the feeling all too well. I wasted four years of my youth, tossed them all away because I couldn’t get over some guy that would never want me in the ways I thought I wanted him. Because I measured my self-worth by how much I was worth to
him
, which was nothing.”

Quietly, Tommy discloses, “You weren’t worth nothing to me.”

“Your actions speak otherwise.”

Tommy moves forward then, so fast I don’t have a second to think, to comprehend what he’s doing. His mouth is on mine, hot and wet and all wrong.

Then he pulls back and whispers, “Do they?” looking as deep into my eyes as his partially glazed over ones will allow. “Because, to me, that felt right.”

Before I can speak, he goes for me again, pushing me to my back and crawling over me, even as I cry out and wriggle to get out from beneath him. He pins my wrists against the pillow and kisses me again, so hard and sloppily his teeth bruise my bottom lip. I buck beneath him, trying to shove him off me, and squeal protests in the back of my throat because I can’t get words out with his mouth smothering me. But it only seems to urge him on. For some reason, in his twisted mind, he doesn’t understand that I don’t want it.

Tears burn the corners of my eyes. The feeling slithers over me, this terrible wrongness. Never have I wanted something less in my life.

In a panic, I thrash back and forth, finally knocking his forehead with mine. His hands tighten on my wrists, and I know they’ll leave bruises. As if he hasn’t already left enough marks on my soul, now he has to leave them on my body.

“It’ll be just like before,” he promises. “Just like old times.”

I’m finally able to shove him off of me, and when I do, I tear myself away from him and slap him, hard. “Don’t you ever fucking touch me again. You don’t get to do that.”

His eyes go wide. Jaw unhinged, stunned, he finally closes it enough to talk. “Delilah, I—”

“Go.”

“I just wa—”

“
Go.
” I suck in a breath. “Be a man for once and leave when you know you should.”

And with a weak nod, he does. Tommy leaves my room with only one glance back, and by the look in his eyes I know it’s the last time.

I fall asleep shaking and crying. Never have I felt such heart-pounding, blood-boiling fury. But never have I felt more proud of myself either.