A Lily Among Thorns

𝙴𝙿𝙸𝙻𝙾𝙶𝚄𝙴

"I gotta go," he tells Mama Ruth.

She backs off. "I'm assuming you're not going to the boys' party?"

He grabs his bag and slings it over his shoulder. "I'll see."

He and Mama Ruth part ways and Julian is secretly glad. While he loves her, he knows he just needs a moment alone. The car ride to his home is short and quiet. He doesn't have much to say without an interference of sadness washing over him.

After he pulls into his garage and leaves his car, he goes inside, letting Blaze free from his crate before sitting on his couch.

With the quietness of his home, it fills Julian with a pain he finds hard to describe. He stares off into space and sighs hard. "I miss her, God."

"I missed you too."

He whips around, the voice being criminally familiar, and he faces a grinning Celai. He doesn't waste a moment to jump over the couch and embrace her immediately.

"Stoppp! You're squishing me!" she yells through her laughter.

Julian doesn't care though. It had been three long months without seeing his wife in person. He starts to plant kisses all over her neck, face, and lips before he pulls away. "What are you doing here?" he questions, getting a good look at her.

"We finished filming earlier than expected so I got the earliest flight back and thought I'd surprise you." She puts a hand on her hip. "But we have things to talk about. I heard you've been cranky because I haven't been here. What's up with that?"

He sighs as his confession begins to spill from his lips. "I-I can't do this long-distance thing, Celai. I know you're out in California working on TV shows, establishing your agency, all this stuff, but I just can't do it. My heart won't let me. I'm too clingy. I must admit, every night I thank God that I'm one day closer to seeing you before anything else. I just can't do it."

"Well, did you think it was easy for me? You had your family, I had no one. When I came home, I teared up because I saw Blaze; I thought I was gonna be an absolute train wreck when I saw you. But you wanna know how I managed while I was away?"

Julian sucks his teeth. "I already know it."

"Jesus," they both say.

"Exactly. So why is Mama Ruth calling me to get me to put you in check? Why have you been snapping at her and isolating yourself from everyone? You knew I was coming back," Celai says.

"I don't know, I think I'm just losing it a little bit."

"You're losing something, but it's surely not God. Mama told me she thinks she's losing her grip on you because we're married now; that's why she asked me to talk to you. So to rephrase what I know she told you: you can't put me or our marriage above God. He established it, He must be the center of it."

"I know," Julian mumbles.

"Do you really? Because as the lead pastor of a forever-growing church, that can't be a surface level lesson. You have to live by that."

He sighs. "Yeah. Mama has been getting through to me, but after that first month of you being gone, I started thinking back to when you were in the hospital... how I almost lost you. It just bothered me so much how all of that could've been avoided if that one doctor didn't take back what he said about your heart. And because of him, you were close to dying from another cardiac tamponade. Even though all of that lasted for less than a day, it felt like a lifetime waiting for you to pull through. And I guess you being gone put me in that same headspace."