Chapter 10
A/N: Here we are now at the end of the story. Thank you to everyone for reading and reviewing. I hope you've all enjoyed reading this story as much as I've enjoyed writing it.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. No infringement intended.
The first thing Miley noticed when she opened her eyes was Lilly's mouth on hers. And Lilly's hands on her chest, pushing, pushing, moaning Miley's name. Miley felt herself starting to drift back into dreamland as she enjoyed whatever it was Lilly was doing to her body. But a nagging doubt forced her eyes open, and she realized that Lilly wasn't touching her in a tender way. Lilly was performing CPR.
"Come on, Miley," Lilly said as she hovered over Miley's face. "Breathe for me, girl."
The blue orbs of Lilly's eyes were watery with strained. Miley tried to take in a breath, just to make Lilly stop looking so sad and afraid, but she found that she couldn't. She tried to pull in a breath, and nothing happened. Frightened, Miley tried to raise her arms to cling to Lilly, but she couldn't move them. She began to panic.
Fortunately for Miley, her panic clouded her perceptions enough that later on she would be unable to remember the events of the next five minutes, which mostly consisted of vomiting up water, as well as her lunch, and trembling violently as her body, no longer in imminent danger, bled off excess adrenaline. When Miley returned to a calmer state of consciousness, she felt weak and cold, but she could breathe and control her limbs again. She couldn't really move her limbs, though, because Lilly was behind her, her arms wrapped tightly around Miley, holding her in place as they both sat on the tile floor beside the pool.
"Lilly," Miley said, her voice a gravelly croak, "Lilly, what happened?"
"You scared me half to death is what happened!" Lilly said, her own voice weak from the terror that had gripped her only minutes before. "You dove into the pool the same way you dive into everything, eyes closed and mouth wide open. Do you think you can stand up? We need to get you back into dry clothes and get you home."
"I think I can do that," Miley said weakly.
Lilly got up on one knee held out both hands, grasping Miley by her wrists. Rising slowly, Lilly got Miley standing on her feet and put her arm around Miley's lower back to support her as she guided her back to the locker room to retrieve their belongings.
"How long was I out?" Miley croaked.
"Just a couple of minutes," Lilly said shakily. "But you weren't breathing. I thought I was going to lose you." Impulsively, Lilly seized Miley, wrapped both arms around her again, holding Miley as close to her as she could, and placed a kiss on Miley's cheek, next to her ear. Tears streamed from her eyes. "I thought I was going to lose you," she repeated.
"I have to tell you something," Miley said, "but not right now. I can barely talk."
"Let's get you home and rested," Lilly said, "then we can talk."
"Sounds good," Miley said.
The girls returned to the lockers. Lilly set Miley down on the bench between the rows of lockers. She didn't want to let go of Miley, not even long enough to let her get dressed, but Miley assured her that she was recovered enough to dress herself. Miley wasn't entirely sure this was true, but she felt like a drowned rat and was reasonably sure she looked like one, too. If Lilly was going to peel Miley's clothes off, Miley wanted it to happen in much different circumstances.
Fortunately for Miley's vanity, she was able to get into her dry clothes without Lilly's assistance. Once Lilly was dressed, she got Miley's car keys from her and went to the parking lot to pull the car up beside the pool building. Returning to the locker room, Lilly slung both her backpack and Miley's over her left shoulder, then hooked her right arm into Miley's left, supporting Miley as they walked out to the car.
x.x.x
When Lilly pulled Miley's car into the front driveway, she saw that both Robby Ray's and Jackson's cars were gone. She was more than a little relieved; she didn't feel like explaining to Robby Ray how she had nearly gotten his daughter drowned. Jackson, of course, was Jackson, and Lilly simply didn't feel up to dealing with him in any capacity at the moment.
Lilly parked the car and walked with Miley to the barn-turned-bedroom that they shared.
"Lilly," Miley said as they walked through the door into the bedroom. Her voice was already starting to clear up, sounding more grainy than gravelly now. "I'm going to brush my teeth and get into my pajamas. Will you do me a big favor?"
"Anything," Lilly said emphatically.
"Will you make me some soup?"
Lilly smiled warmly. "Gladly," she said.
Ten minutes later, Lilly returned to the bedroom to find Miley in her bed, lying on her side, facing the door. Lilly carried with her a food tray with a big bowl of steaming chicken noodle soup set on top of it. Miley sat up in her bed and Lilly placed the tray in front of her. "Here you go, beautiful," Lilly said as she got the tray settled into place. "I'll be right back with a glass of milk." As she moved to the door, she placed a hand on Miley's shoulder, squeezing softly.
"Can I just have a glass of water?" Miley asked.
"No!" Lilly said sharply, her thumb rubbing circles against the top of Miley's arm. "No more water for you today, Miles."
Miley chuckled. "I guess you're right," she said. "Milk is fine."
Lilly returned with two glasses of milk and a sandwich she had made for herself. She sat on the side of the bed and joined Miley in silence as they ate. When the food was gone, Lilly returned the dishes to the kitchen, then returned to Miley.
"Are you feeling better?" Lilly asked as she crawled into Miley's bed and wrapped Miley in a tight embrace.
"I feel a lot better," Miley said, snuggling into Lilly's hug and stroking her back soothingly. "Are you okay?" she asked.
Lilly looked into Miley's eyes and smirked unconvincingly. "I'm not the one who almost drowned, Miley," she said.
"But you are the one who's probably blaming herself for something that isn't her fault."
Tears welled up in Lilly's eyes and started to spill over. "It is my fault, Miley," she said. "I pushed you to learn to dive, and then you almost died."
"Because I didn't listen to you, Lilly," Miley said. "You told me I should practice diving off the side of the pool more, but I didn't listen. Then you saved my life, which you wouldn't have had to do if I had listened to you in the first place. You have nothing to feel guilty about."
"I can't help it," Lilly said. "I can't stop asking myself what if—"
Miley cut her off. "No 'what ifs' allowed," she said. "You were there and you saved my life. That's the long and short of it. Nothing else."
Lilly smiled. "Thanks, Miley," she said.
"Shouldn't I be thanking you?" said Miley.
"Let's just both be thankful to each other," Lilly said. "And for each other."
"I like the sound of that," said Miley. "Thank you, Lilly, for saving my life and for being Lilly." Miley leaned in and kissed Lilly's forehead. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she repeated, tightening her arms' grip around Lilly.
The girls held each other quietly for several minutes before Lilly broke the silence. "What was it you wanted to tell me earlier, Miley?" she asked.
Miley directed her intense gaze directly into Lilly's eyes. "I wanted to tell you that I understood how you felt. When you said you thought you were going to lose me. While I was under the water, I had a dream. It must have been a dream, but it felt completely real. I was a prisoner, and so were you, and we weren't allowed to see each other."
"Why not?" Lilly asked.
"We were being held by an evil king," Miley explained. "Well, he seemed evil at first. He kidnapped us to dance at a Masquerade Ball he was putting on. But when he introduced us at the Masquerade Ball, he said the strangest, most beautiful thing. He said that the love we have for each other is pure and eternal, but that we would never speak it. He said that our souls touched in a way our bodies never would. When he said all that stuff, I realized something that had been right in front of me for what seems like forever, but I never opened my eyes long enough to see it, never shut my mouth long enough to hear it."
Miley paused, then took a breath and spoke again. "I'm in love with you, Lilly."
At the sound of those words, Lilly surged forward and pressed her lips against Miley's, kissing her briefly but intensely. "I love you, too," she said before engaging Miley's lips once again. As Miley returned Lilly's kiss, she tasted the salt of tears. Opening her eyes, she saw that tears were streaming down Lilly's face and dripping onto her own. The salty taste told Miley all she needed to know about how long Lilly had felt this way about her.
"I'm sorry I never saw it before," Miley said, separating her lips from Lilly's just enough to speak. "I'm sorry you had to feel this way alone."
"You were worth the wait," said Lilly.
"When I was under the water, in that dream I had, someone asked me a question, Miley said. "He asked me if singing and dancing was my whole life. I told him that singing and dancing was almost my whole life, but that you're the rest of my world."
"That's beautiful, Miley," Lilly said. "You're beautiful. Thank you for being you."
"Hey, if I wasn't me, I wouldn't know what to do with myself," Miley said. Lilly laughed.
There was a sudden thump from the walkway outside the barn doors, startling both Lilly and Miley. The thump was followed immediately by the loud hissing of one of the stray cats that lived out in the nearby woods. The hissing was accompanied by the rapid singing of an alarmed bird. Miley jumped up from the bed and crossed the room, opening the top half of the barn door in time to see a vividly colored bird flutter to a perch on top of the bottom half of the door. The bird had a shining, purple head, a body made up of whirls and speckles of different blues, and an orange breast.
Miley and Lilly gasped at the same time. The colorful starling cocked its head back and forth as if examining Miley, who was standing as still as she could, afraid any sudden movements might scare the bird away. Lilly got out of Miley's bed and crept toward Miley and the bird.
The bird's attention turned to Lilly and it started to sing its slow song. The bird turned back to Miley, repeated its song, then, without warning, took flight, flapping away and out of sight. "Cantari . . ." Miley mouthed silently after the bird.
"Miley!" Lilly whispered. "Do you know what kind of bird that was?" she asked excitedly.
Miley turned to look at Lilly incredulously. "Do you?"
"On summer vacation one year, I think I was eight or nine that year, my Dad took up bird-watching," said Lilly. "To make a long story short, he ended up driving the whole family all the way up to the Canadian border, stopping at every other tree to see if we could find a new bird."
"And you saw one of those?" Miley asked.
"No," said Lilly. "They're called Hildebrandt's starlings. I learned about them when my Dad started collecting brochures on African safaris."
"You went on a safari?" Miley interjected.
"No, my Mom put a stop to that as soon as she found the brochures," said Lilly. "But I still looked through his bird-watching guide, and I remembered that one because it was so pretty."
"And they only live in Africa?" asked Miley.
"That's the only place they're native to," said Lilly. "That one was probably somebody's pet that broke out of its cage."
Miley smiled. "I think that's probably exactly what happened," she said.
The girls' hands found each other, and they stood there leaning into each other, quietly watching the sky pass from late afternoon into early evening. At last, Lilly broke the silence.
"Miley, what are you going to do about Jesse?" she said.
Miley scrunched up her nose like she did whenever she didn't know what to say but was dead set on saying something anyway. "Change my phone number and then we run off to Paris?" she offered.
"Ooh, Paris," Lilly said, smiling dreamily and cuddling closer to Miley. "Lilly likie. But you do have to tell him."
"What about Oliver?" Miley asked.
Lilly sputtered with laughter. "Oliver? Miley, I've been dating him to make you jealous. He knows I'm in love with you; he was just trying to help me get my girl." She kissed Miley on the cheek, then laid her head down on Miley's shoulder.
"Why couldn't you just tell me how you felt?" Miley asked, unsure how she felt about the ruse Lilly and Oliver had played on her.
"I was afraid you would say 'no,'" Lilly said. "I didn't think I could take that, so I wanted to know how you felt before I said anything. I'm sorry."
"It's okay," Miley said, shifting so that she and Lilly were standing face to face. "If I hadn't been lying to myself, you wouldn't have had to do that in the first place." Miley leaned in and kissed Lilly's lips. Lilly kissed back and the girls lost themselves for a while, kissing deeper and deeper as their tongues met and then moved together, dancing in time to the music of their souls.
Hours later, after the girls had migrated back to Miley's bed to find new pleasures in each other, after Lilly had kissed and caressed Miley's porcelain white breasts, after Miley had writhed and moaned and finally screamed beneath Lilly's attentions, after Lilly had lain back down on the bed only to be pounced upon by Miley a moment later, and after both girls had screamed each other's names numerous times, they lay cuddled against each other, Miley lying on her back, Lilly on her side snuggled against the crook of Miley's neck. Miley held Lilly's hand, gently kissing each finger again and again, while Lilly placed light, feathery kisses on Miley's neck and shoulder. As Lilly kissed lower on Miley's arm, she saw something that her mind had, until that moment, been too preoccupied to notice.
"Miley," she said, her voice muffled by Miley's arm, as she didn't bother to stop placing her kisses while she spoke, "how did your arm get all scratched up? It looks like you got clawed by a giant cat."
Miley, her eyes wide in amazement, turned to look at the scratches on her arm. She looked up from her arm and into Lilly's eyes. "I did get scratched by a giant cat," she said, "but it was in the dream I had when I was underwater. It wasn't real."
"Maybe it's a side effect of being you," Lilly said after a thoughtful pause.
"What do you mean?" asked Miley.
"I mean," said Lilly, "that you're like the physical incarnation of dreams coming true. You're a world famous pop star, you live on a ranch with horses and hot tubs in a place where the weather is nice year-round, and after all those dreams come true, you have a dream that leads to us here, cuddled in each other's arms and happier than we've ever been. With all those good dreams coming true, maybe picking up a few scratches from the bad dreams is par for the course."
Miley smiled lovingly at Lilly and kissed her gently. "I'd take any number of scratches, any injury at all, as long as it led me to you," she said, then kissed Lilly again.
"I love you, Miley," Lilly said.
"I love you, Lilly," Miley said as she increased the pace of her kisses.
Soon, the girls lost themselves in each other's arms again.
A/N: Much of the imagery in this story was inspired by Dio's 1983 album, Holy Diver, particularly the songs "Holy Diver" and "Rainbow in the Dark." If you like hard rock or heavy metal at all, it is an essential classic, and it's what I listened to for most of the time that I was writing this story. It's an amazing album and I hope that many of you will give it a listen if you haven't heard it before.