Lillian Rhodes is eighteen and fresh -- fresh faced, fresh out of high school, and willing to get fresh with the frontman of a band in exchange for a cigarette, and maybe a drink and an orgasm later.
Her hair is long and her pants are skinny, just like the rest of her.
Rufus likes to think he never saw it coming. Hurricane Lily, he likes to call her, and his bandmates snort.
Allison just slams things whenever he mentions her.
"What's with her?" he always asks.
The drummer, her boyfriend, shrugs.
***
She ran away from home when she was fifteen. Lily knows she should be used to this, after two and a half years of public school on the wrong side of the tracks, but she still wears Chanel Number Five and her jeans are Calvin Klein.
Lily blows her bangs out of her eyes. I can do this, she thinks, her hand on the door. I can't do this, she thinks, drawing her hand back.
Lily's studied photography since she was a kid. One of her dad's girlfriends got her started, giving her a camera and a pat on the head. They had a darkroom built in her mother's ranch; a present for something, Lily doesn't remember what. Despite her parents' involvement, it makes her feel free when she has a camera in her hand.
No one's looking at the photographer other than to smile, she reminds herself. She opens the door to the club, draws her camera out of it's hiding place in her coat. I can do this, she thinks to herself.
Sure enough, camera in hand, no one looks twice at her as she enters the crowded bar. She's relieved, after years of special treatment and "can I buy you a drink, here let me get the door for you"s because of her money and her looks. This is her first real assignment, a paying (barely) gig for a low-rent Brooklyn music magazine, taking shots and covering the concert scene that the other photographers have too much attitude for.
She's barely eighteen and this is her first time away from home, first time really trying to support herself and be on her own.
Carol leaves her messages on her machine, "You know Lily, it's okay to come home."
But it isn't. Home means... Well Lily isn't sure what home means anymore, because it used to be a ranch in Montecito, and then it was Carol's happy home in West LA with a bunch of low-income punks for friends that adopted her despite her three million dollar former existence. She dated surfers and musicians and basically anyone her parents wouldn't approve of, no matter how nice or mean they were.
Home stopped being home though, when her mother informs her that she's filled out Lily's college applications for her, and it's time to stop slumming it and time to go to college.
College seems like the opposite of everything she wants. She wants to not live a privileged existence her entire life, falling back on Mommy when ever anything goes wrong.
It's a cage, a gilded one to be sure, but a cage nonetheless. Lily wants to fly free.
She sets up shop in the corner where she can get a good angle on the stage.
The opening band's setting up, and she takes some shots, but they're lackluster, uninspired. Even Lily, who was late to the punk scene, can recognize that. When she's more interested in the pretty girl with the birdlike face fixing things for the next band on the sidelines, Lily knows the band needs more showmanship.
"They're pretty terrible," a voice next to her remarks into her ear.
"Well," she starts nervously. Who is this girl, this nervous girl?
"Still, they'll probably end up being famous. Just look at how pretty the frontman is."
"...But he has no stage presence!" she cries, finally lowering her camera from her eye and looking at the man next to her. Oh, she thinks. He's cute. More of a boy than a man, despite his voice, if his awkward stance and beat-up converse are anything to go by.
"True," he says. She watches him bite his lip. It may well be the cutest thing she's ever seen. She fingers the pack of cigarettes in her pocket. He's cute, and she's lonely here, miles away from the only homes she's ever known.
"Do you smoke?" she asks.
"Do you?" He looks surprised, his eyebrows somewhere near his incredibly shaggy hair. All of him seems out of fashion, but she wouldn't be surprised if it's the next big trend.
"I do," she says. The band has finally, mercifully stopped making what could be politely termed as noise, and are packing down their instruments. The bird-faced girl has stopped her fluttering around the sidelines and is now glancing over at her every five seconds, with her hand on a muscular boy's-- the drummer, Lily guesses, from the drumsticks peeking out of his pocket-- arm.
"I would, but I can't just this second. I'm up next."
Her mouth widens into a o, and she watches him bounce toward the stage.
"Meet me out back after the show," he calls back to her, and she smiles slightly.
His toes tap with nervous energy the entire show, and she feels her own tap along. Her shutter clicks in time to the music.
She meets him out back after the show.
***
They start a routine. Lily always meets him in front of the venue, bumming a cigarette even though she's got a pocket full of perfectly good ones. Five shows in two weeks around the city and she's taken photographs at all of them. Rufus always meets her out back afterwards, and they smoke cigarettes. He brushes the stray hairs off her face and then kisses her.
Sometimes they stay in the alleyway and kiss for hours, freezing cold. Other nights they repair to a seedy all night diner and eat breakfast with the drunk kids and the homeless men, and he always, always walks her to the subway station.
"You know, I'd feel safer if you took a cab, this time of night."
"Who has money for one?" she laughs easily, and ignores the little niggling voice in her head that says she did, until recently.
***
The skinny bird-faced girl is named Allison, and Lily doesn't find her as pretty on closer acquaintance. It might have something to do with how Allison spends all her time in Lily's presence scowling.
"What's with her?" she asks Rufus one night.
"Who? Allison? She's been in a weird mood lately. Dunnoh," he says, shrugging, and then kisses Lily, hard.
Lily doesn't think that's the end of it, but she likes kissing Rufus too much to pursue the subject further at this particular moment.
***
Three weeks into it, whatever they're doing, she forgets to screen her calls. Lily picks up the phone, expecting Rufus, and it's Carol instead.
"Lilypad! I thought you were dead, that's how often you've been returning my calls." Carol's teasing, but worried, the perfect big sister act, as always.
"Sorry, Carol, I've just been busy."
"Too busy for your big sis?"
"It's better this way, Carol. Mom can't use us against each other anymore if I'm not there."
"Don't say that, Lily."
"It's true," she insists, shaking her head even though Carol can't see.
Lily accepts Rufus's offer for a date, a real date, later that night when he calls.
That's something her mother can't take away from her, she thinks. Her eyes shine brightly with unshed tears, and she knocks over her picture frames when she goes to hang up the phone.
***
"Do you want anything?" Rufus nervously asks, hand on the refrigerator door. They've been fooling around for weeks, but she has yet to sleep with him or see his apartment. It's a first for her. Only Rufus would take it slow.
"I'll have a Tab, if you have one." Lily looks around his cramped Brooklyn apartment. It was a long subway ride out here, and it'll be a longer one home (unless her mother figures out where she's disappeared to instead of starting her freshman year at Vanderbilt or Brown or wherever her mother's put down a deposit for). It's small, and there's flannel and ripped jeans everywhere.
"Flannel, huh?" she says, picking up a shirt from the top of the futon-couch it's crashed on.
"And Doc Martens," he says, pointing to the boots piled up by the door. "Someday they'll be saying I was fashionably ahead of the times."
She eyes his aging radiator, potted plants on the windowsill. It's all oddly domestic for a rock star (not that he's one yet, but some day...). There are coffee cups littered in the sink and a handful of tape cassettes littered by the TV.
"Repo Man?" she says, lifting up the cassette box.
"It's a surprisingly versatile film," Rufus says with a straight face. Lily smiles, watches him put the kettle on for tea. She settles down next to the radiator with her Tab and waits for Rufus to join her.
He kneels in front of her, eyes serious. "Lily, the band's going on tour, and I want you to come with us."
"What?"
"I mean, not as my girlfriend or anything. As our photographer."
"You certainly know how to flatter a girl, Rufus Humphrey."
"Well, kind of as my girlfriend. But it wouldn't have to be if you're uncomfortable with that."
"Let's just see how it goes," she says.
"Does that-- Is that--?" His lips start to smile.
"Yes."
A goofy smile lights up his face, and he leans forward. They kiss with the sunlight streaming into his tiny apartment, and Lily laughs into his mouth.
"What?" he mumbles into hers.
"Nothing, it's nothing," she says, and kisses him fiercely.
***
Touring isn't all it's cracked up to be. There's long days of driving in a crowded tour bus, endless games of poker and Egyptian ratscrew and miles of scenery followed by truck-stop breakfasts and fast-food lunches. Still, it's something new, an adventure, and one where her mother will be hard-pressed to find her.
And Rufus-- Rufus isn't perfect, no one is, but if she ever thought she could love someone for good, Rufus might be it.
They've been sleeping in the same room the entire trip, the unspoken assumption being that Lily is Rufus's girlfriend (she doesn't remember agreeing to use the term, but she's not going to be so impolite as to argue semantics), and Rufus is (unfortunately) a perfect gentleman.
Lily's had enough by the third week of their trip and surprises Rufus by taking her top off in the middle of their nightly makeout session.
"Are you sure?" he asks, and she raises an eyebrow, smirking.
"I'm the one who took off my top, aren't I?"
His stubble gives her a rash, but she can't stop smiling the next day.
Allison glowers more than usual.
***
The band gets bigger out on the road, and before they know it, more dates are added onto the tour, international dates. Rufus refuses to go without Lily, despite the label's protests, and she's secretly glad for his insistence. She misses Europe, and she doesn't know what she'd do without Rufus for months while he's abroad.
***
They smoke cigarettes outside in Montreal, huddled in scarves and coats. She looks lovely with too much makeup and her long hair braided to the side. He watches her slim fingers lift the cigarette to her mouth, one he's kissed so many times.
He kisses it again, and again, until she pushes him away laughing, taking another drag. She holds her cigarette up to his mouth, and he inhales slowly.
She tugs on his scarf, and they kiss once more, for good measure.
***
They're lying on the bed, limbs akimbo and fingers intertwined. She's never just stared up at the ceiling with someone before, never lain on her bed with a boy for something other than sex.
"I don't love you," she says. "At least not that much."
Rufus is used to her idiosyncrasies and doesn't say anything back. He squeezes her hand and then lifts it up to his mouth to press his lips against it. They're chapped, but she doesn't say anything.
She's too busy pretending she's not in love.
It's too late, she knows. Home is now wherever Rufus Humphrey is.
She takes eight rolls of film that night, and Rufus kisses her dress off once they're back to the villa where they're staying.
They share a cigarette after, holding hands, looking out on the ocean.
***
They don't sleep in Paris, they don't even leave the bar. It's a shame, she thinks, she's always wanted to visit.
They have sex in the dingy bar bathroom in between Jack and Cokes.
Lily photographs the graffiti on the wall after they're finished.
"A memento," she says.
"I'll give you a memento," he growls, pulling her back into his arms.
She shrieks with laughter as he attacks her next. "Rufus, you're insatiable!"
They walk back out into the bar holding hands, and Allison stares. Rufus pretends not to notice while Lily orders pomme frites. He holds her hand under the table, watches as she chats animatedly with his bandmates, her other hand gesticulating with her cigarette.
He's loved her for a while (probably since he first laid eyes on her, he's a romantic like that,) but this is the first time he's not able to imagine a future without her in it. They'll have kids (two, a boy and a girl) and grow old together and he'll write songs about them all.
He'll wait to buy a ring though. Lily'd be horrified if she knew what he was thinking.
***
Allison and the drummer break it off.
"Good," Lily says, with a contented hum.
"But who's gonna do merch at our shows?" the bassist asks. The drummer chews his ham sandwich and finally waves it in Lily's general direction.
"No way," she says with a horrified look on her face. "I'm your photographer, remember?"
"Maybe Bitsy can do it," Rufus says quickly.
"She's eight months pregnant, man."
"I'm--" Lily starts, and then quiets. She lets the band argue (discuss, they'd say) around her, and finally gets up and goes back to her room.
She stares into the mirror and wonders how she got here.
"I'm pregnant."
"My mother's going to cut me off," she says, rolling the words in her mouth. It's a test, saying them aloud. She imagines saying them to Rufus, his brown eyes staring into hers. She loves and hates that about him.
He's never been okay with her money, never been okay with the fact that she's worth more than him, and she's never been able to pretend she's from the wrong side of the tracks. She knows she's had a charmed life, knows everything's come easy to her, Daddy's little girl always gets her way.
But Daddy's dead now and Mommy wants her to come home or else.
Rufus will hold her hand and tell her it'll be okay and they'll start a family in a few years and live in a shotgun shack and everything will be blissfully perfect.
But she's poor and she's pregnant and nothing will be easy again.
***
"You packed light," he remarks. "That's not like you."
"Rufus..."
"Come on, Lily, let's go."
"I'm not going, Rufus," she says. "I'm going home."
He stares at her, hurt.
She wishes she could kiss away the furrow between his brows, kiss it and make it all better.
"Then I'll go with you," he says, the 'home is where you are' unsaid.
She shakes her head, blows her bangs out of her eyes. "You have a tour to get to."
"You're more important."
"Don't--" she starts.
He'll follow her anywhere, and she refuses to ruin whatever happiness they've had with a shotgun wedding and a baby who'll be raised by two parents with two dollars and ninety eight cents between them.
"I'm leaving you, Rufus," she says simply.
***
She reads the newspaper every day in the sanatorium (wayward home for pregnant girls is more like it). It's a luxury they never had on the road; no one ever had twenty five cents for a phone call, let alone a newspaper. She remembers all the nights dining and dashing, scrounging for change in love seats and city gutters. It was a thrill then, but now-- she's got this baby to think of.
Rufus would never give it up. Rufus would do the right thing.
She loves and hates that about him.
***
Lily's eight months pregnant when she reads the paper and sees Rufus kissing Allison and a mention of their engagement.
Bastard, she thinks, and she stops regretting the lie of "I've found someone else."
She gets married five months later to a Van der Woodsen when she finds out she's pregnant again.
It's easier this way, a society approved marriage and all the money she'll ever need in between classes at Brown and daycare for her tiny blonde children.
***
Her memories aren't all idyllic, but she likes to think that they are.
It makes it easier to pack her bags and go back to him, time and time again.