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When Sammy opens the door to Lily’s hotel room, he can’t help but recoil a little.
“You live like this?” he says, eyeing the empty wine bottles, discarded pizza boxes and – Jack in the Box Jesus – dirty underwear littering the floor. He’d thought there’d been a smell back when Ben had dragged him here for Lily’s dumb podcast, but now it’s so thick he can almost feel the air coagulating. He tries not to breathe through his nose.
He hadn’t been sure about bringing her back to the hotel. Honestly, his first thought was that he should go to the hospital . He isn’t sure how much Lily has had to drink, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that it’s somewhere around the stomach pumping level.
Lily doesn’t respond, just shoves past him and stumbles towards the room’s tiny bathroom. Sammy takes one last deep breath of fresh mountain air before heading in after her.
He finds her with her head in the toilet bowl, making awful retching sounds. He sighs and pulls her hair out of her face, gathering it in one hand and then pulling his own hair tie out with the other.
“What…” Lily starts to say, but interrupts herself with another round of retching.
“That’s it, get it all out,” Sammy murmurs, tying her hair up and rubbing her back between her shoulder blades. He has a visceral flashback to when their roles had been reversed and Lily had done this for him, and is overcome by a sudden and strange sense of homesickness.
She leans back, glaring up at him blearily. “Fuck you, Shotgun,” she says and then twists her head suddenly back into the bowl, not quite moving fast enough to avoid getting sick on Sammy’s shoes.
Sammy screws his face up in disgust, trying not to think too hard about the life choices that have led him to this particular moment. “That’s fantastic. Great work, asshole.”
Lily flips him off with one hand, still face-first in a toilet bowl, so really, who’s the real loser of this argument?
He kicks his shoes off, making a mental note to burn them in the morning, and digs around in the bathroom cabinet until he finds a glass and some mouthwash. He fills the glass with water and sets both down on the floor next to Lily.
Lily leans back and rests her head on the tiled bathroom wall with a pathetic little moan.
“You done?” Sammy asks, gently.
“Fuck off,” Lily says, not gently.
Sammy hands her the glass of water, makes her spit it into the toilet bowl, and then refills it and hands it back.
“You’re gonna drink all of that and then,” he points towards the mouthwash, “you’re gonna gargle some of that. Got it?”
“Fuck off,” Lily says again and Sammy sighs.
“I’m genuinely trying to help here, Lily. Could you just not? Just for one second?”
“No, seriously,” she says, pulling herself up to her feet. “I gotta pee, so fuck off.”
“Christ,” Sammy mutters, leaving the bathroom and pulling the door shut behind him.
He sits on the bed and lets out a shuddering breath, giving in to the need to put his head in his hands. He closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths in and out, trying to slow his heart rate which had been pounding out a panicked staccato ever since he heard Lily’s voice on the hotline.
He hears gargling coming from the bathroom and yells at the closed door, “However much mouthwash you just used, it’s not enough!”
There’s a muffled response that at this point he’s just gonna assume is another “fuck off”.
When Lily finally steps out of the bathroom her face is wet and her shirt is dripping, as if she just held her head under the running tap. Probably a good idea, Sammy thinks.
She looks at him, not so much drunk now as just bone-deep exhausted, closes the door and leans back against it, letting herself slide slowly to the floor.
He walks slowly over to her and sits down next to her, resting his back against the wall.
“Feeling better?” he says, lightly.
“What are you doing here, Sammy?” she says, bluntly.
“I drove you here.”
“No really. You could have just let Troy chuck me in the drunk tank.”
“I couldn’t,” Sammy says, seriously. “Come on, Lily. You have to know that much.”
“Do I?” Lily says with a sad half-smile, then reaches into some mysterious pile of laundry or something and pulls out a full bottle of wine.
Sammy is suddenly furious. “Are you serious? What do you think you’re doing ?”
“I’m fine ,” she waves him off. “I just threw up.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Sammy says incredulously.
“You don’t have to babysit me. I’m a grown ass woman and I can make my own fucking life choices.”
“Oh yeah? Is that what this is? You being a grown up?”
But despite her words Lily doesn’t try to drink the wine, seemingly content to just cradle the bottle in her lap, picking at the label with her nail.
“I’m fine. Just. Just go,” she says quietly, not lifting her eyes from the bottle in her lap. “Just leave. Everyone leaves.”
Sammy is taken aback by the vulnerability in her voice. He’s never seen her so unravelled. It’s unsettling. She’s obviously hurting, and despite how much of a pain in his ass she is, he can’t just leave her sitting on the floor of her sad little hotel room drinking herself to death.
“I’m not going anywhere, Lily,” he says firmly. “Look, are you… are you okay?”
She looks up and gives him a meltingly disdainful look. At least she’s herself enough for that, he thinks dryly. “Oh yeah, because all of this just screams ‘okay’.”
“Come on now, we can’t both be falling apart,” he says with a wry smile, trying to find some semblance of humour in the ongoing tragedy that is their lives.
Lily lets out a derisive snort. “You know Sammy, I actually do know this is hard for you too – believe me everyone knows – but it’s just not the same, okay?”
“Lily…” he warns. He can sense where Lily is going with this, and he can already feel the painful twist in his stomach that accompanies the mention of Jack’s name.
“We both miss Jack, but our pain is not the same. For you, Jack’s been missing for three years but, for me, he was gone long before that.” Lily’s voice tightens at the end of the sentence, the edges of her anger fraying.
Sammy feels a pang of familiar guilt. He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
“You broke my heart when you left,” Lily says. “You both did. Why – why did you have to do that?” Her voice is a small, trembling thing, and for a terrifying moment Sammy thinks she might cry, but instead she takes a shuddering breath and continues. “I know you’re in pain Sammy, I do. But honestly? Fuck you.”
Sammy lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. This, at least, is familiar territory. He knows this game. Anger he can deal with. He opens his mouth to say something cutting, but Lily isn’t done.
“And you know what? Fuck Jack . Fuck him for leaving me for some shitty, brainless, shock jock show. And fuck him for leaving you to come to this crazy godforsaken town. And fuck him for disappearing into thin fucking air. Fuck him for leaving – for leaving us .”
The fury she’s worked herself into disappears in an instant and she leans back against the bathroom door with a dull thunk. She lifts the bottle of wine to her lips and Sammy doesn’t try to stop her from taking a long swig.
“Lily,” Sammy says carefully, “I know you’re angry at Jack – at both of us – and that’s… okay. That’s deserved – well, at least, partly deserved – but, you have to understand – ”
“Oh please ,” Lily spits, “spare me your condescending bullshit, Stevens. I’m not a fucking child, so don’t talk to me like one.”
Sammy bites back the urge to snap at her. “Actually,” he says, voice surprisingly steady, “I was trying to talk to you like a friend .”
“Friends? Is that what we are?” Lily looks at him then, her gaze turned sharp and searching.
“Of course – I mean, we could be. Friends. Again. I – I want to be.”
“Do you?” Lily says, sitting forward so that they’re face-to-face. Sammy feels pinned to the wall. This must be what people feel like when she interrogates them for a story, though he imagines that her breath doesn’t usually smell vaguely like regurgitated pepperoni. “Do you really want that, Sammy? Because it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you want to run as far away from me as you can.”
Sammy takes a deep breath. Honesty. He can do this. “You’re...not wrong.”
Lily flinches, and he can see her guard starting to slam back up. Her face twists into something distant and mocking as she opens her mouth, but he interrupts her before she can get a word out.
“Wait,” he says. “Just hear me out okay? I know – I know – but just, listen.”
To his surprise Lily nods and waits for him, quiet and expectant.
“I was – am – running. When you showed up in King Falls it was like every lie I’d ever told, every secret I’d ever kept, was suddenly out in the open – even before, you know, they suddenly were . You know me, Lily. Better than anyone, except for, well…”
He swallows hard, then pushes forward.
“I was scared. Actually, no, I was fucking terrified . You always were one to dig out the uncomfortable truths – I feel like such a fraud around you. And I just knew that with you in town everything was going to come out. No pun intended.”
Sammy scrubs his face with his hand. Honesty is one thing, but Lily’s unwavering eye contact is frankly unnerving.
“And it’s not just that, it’s… I was doing a pretty good job of pretending, you know? That I was, I don’t know, making progress. Or that something would just happen , the way things seem to just happen in this place. And then you show up, digging and asking questions and doing a better job than I ever did, and it just hit me. Like, none of it fucking mattered. Nothing I did here mattered. And nothing I do is going to matter. If Lily fucking Wright can’t solve this then… then I don’t know that it can be solved.”
His throat tightens but he shakes his head and forces himself to keep going.
“Jack’s not missing, he’s gone . And there’s no force in this world that can bring him back. And I’m… I’m not even that, Lily. I’m not even – I never even stood a chance. You did, and even you couldn’t… ” Sammy takes a shaky breath but he can’t seem to find the words to continue. He hasn’t been this open with Lily in a long time. He feels like all the air has gone out of him.
They sit in heavy silence for a moment until it becomes clear that Sammy has no intention of continuing.
“You’re so full of shit, Sammy,” Lily says, flatly. “You can’t actually believe that. Just look at your pocket-sized producer buddy – you don’t earn that kind of loyalty from nothing. ”
“Watch it,” Sammy says, reflexively coming to Ben’s defence, but Lily just steamrolls right past him.
“And it’s not even just him. It seems every other person in this town has a story of how you personally helped them, or showed up for them, or suplexed the mayor – that’s not nothing, okay?”
Sammy shakes his head. She just doesn’t understand. “But I – ”
“No,” Lily cuts him off. “You’ve said your piece. It’s my turn now. I’m not the reason you’re scared, Sammy. I am not personally responsible for your emotions. I’m not here to make you feel inadequate or to – to fix everything. And how dare you put that on me? I’m scared too. And with Pippa gone... I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I’m just making it up as I go. I mean, just look at me!” She gestures expansively to the dingy hotel room. “You don’t have a monopoly on being a fucking mess, okay?”
“I’m sorry,” Sammy says, quietly. “You’ve just always been so strong . I never could figure out how you did it. It’s like some kind of superpower.”
Lily shakes her head. “ Stop . I don’t have superpowers . I’m just a person. A person who lost her brother and her friend and her – and everyone. And even then I kept trying on my own. But I’m tired, Sammy. I’m just so fucking tired.”
“Lily, you haven’t lost me,” Sammy says.
“Haven’t I?” She says dully, staring at the wine bottle still dangling from her hand.
“ No ,” Sammy says firmly. “Look, I’m sorry I… reacted the way I did when you got here. And, you know, all of the moments after that too. We’ve both been… not the best.”
Lily snorts. “Understatement of the year.”
“And I’m sorry for leaving with Jack to, well, to become Shotgun Sammy. That was – honestly? I regret that decision every single day of my life. I’m not the same person I was then, Lily. I’ve changed – I’ve grown.” Sammy reaches out to touch her hand – may as well go for broke. “And you’re not alone, Lily. I’m here for you – or I can be. I know we haven’t been friends for a long, long time, but I’m – I want to try. Not to get back to how things were – I don’t really think we can go back, not without… but, maybe we can start something new?”
“I’d like that,” Lily says softly. “I think I need that, actually. And I know I’m not, I mean, I’m not Ben . I’m not comforting or supportive or any of that. But, for what it’s worth, I’m here too. For you. You’re not alone either, okay?”
“Okay,” Sammy says.
“Okay,” Lily says.
They’re still for a moment and then Lily slowly slides further down the wall, resting her head on Sammy’s shoulder. She turns her hand – the one Sammy is still resting his own on – palm up and links their fingers together. And despite what she just said, Sammy does feel comforted. Like he’s back in another town, in another radio station, another time. With another body pressed against his other side.
“You know, it’s funny,” Sammy says, breaking the silence at last. “I keep expecting to cut to commercial. I’m not used to heartfelt conversations that aren’t broadcast live to the whole town.”
“Maybe if you had a modicum of professionalism you wouldn’t air your dirty laundry, well, on the air. ”
“Says the woman who treats her podcast like it’s her personal diary.”
“Hey!” Lily says, leaning away from him. “I am a – ”
“ Phenomenal journalist, yeah, I know,” Sammy says, rolling his eyes.
She glares at him for a moment, but then breaks out into a shit-eating grin. Suddenly the tension of the whole evening – hell, of the past several months, years even – cracks and they both burst into helpless, cathartic laughter.
“You’re an asshole,” Lily says, sounding almost fond. She takes another swig of her wine bottle and thrusts it in front of Sammy.
“Right back at you.” He takes the bottle and brings it to his lips.
She settles back in against his shoulder and they sit together on her ( filthy ) hotel room floor, passing the wine bottle back and forth in silence.
Sammy doesn’t know if this tentative truce, if this fragile new friendship, will hold up in the light of day. Maybe it’s only something that can exist now in the liminal space just before dawn, with the soft orange glow of street light filtering in through the grimy window. Maybe the next time they talk it’ll be back to hostility and barbs and defensiveness and lashing out. But for now, in this moment – if only for a moment – he closes his eyes and feels at peace.