by Roxie Noir
“Everything is good, right?” he finally asks.
Fuck, I don’t know. Good seems like far too banal of a word for whatever’s going on right now, but it’s not exactly bad either, right?
“Delilah?”
We stop. I sigh.
“I’m going to murder Vera dead,” I tell him, matter-of-factly. “But I can wait until tomorrow so I don’t ruin Ava’s big day.”
Wyatt just raises one eyebrow, and I wave my hand dramatically.
“All shall be revealed in time,” I say, because I don’t have the emotional reserves to rehash it right now.
“Well, it’s very grown up to kill her later,” he says, and we start walking again.
“I strive for maturity in all scenarios,” I tell him.
Wyatt just snorts as he opens the door for me.
Chapter Fifteen
Seth
Bernadette rolls her eyes, the wine glass in her hand sloshing from side to side as she shifts her stance.
“It’s all isopods all the time right now,” she says. “I swear, those blind nightmare shrimp are gonna be the death of me.”
“They are,” the man she’s with says, nodding. “One day last week I swear she woke up screaming, isopods!”
Bernadette just laughs.
“Are there too many, or too few?” I ask.
“Yes. Both,” she says. “See, I can’t even answer that question. Did you know that each cave in the region has a slightly different subspecies? Sometimes they’re two hundred feet apart. Different subspecies. Nightmare.”
“I had no idea,” I say, which is certainly true.
Bernadette is a biologist for the Forest Service, and we used to date.
Okay, we didn’t date. We just fucked. We had a thing that lasted a few months. Purely physical, just two people scratching an itch. It ended about two and a half years ago when she met someone she was serious about — this guy, maybe. Our split, if you can even call it that, was perfectly amicable.
I’ve slept around. It’s not a secret.
But let me say this: I’m not a dick about it. I state my intentions upfront. I don’t lie, cheat, or promise something I’m unwilling to give.
I like the game of it. I like the moment of clarity when I realize that a woman’s interested. I like the rush of seeing someone new naked for the first time. I like the ego boost. I like how easy it to get what you want, as long as you don’t want too much.
Or at least, I liked all that once upon a time.
“…whether it even matters if some subspecies goes extinct,” she’s saying. “I mean, of course it matters because of biodiversity and on some level, every critter is precious, but does it really matter?”
“She gets like this when she’s drunk,” the man jokes. “Starts talking about wiping them all out.”
Bernadette laughs, then shakes her head.
“I would never,” she says, just as a hand slides through my elbow. “But keeping track does get exhausting.”
“There you are,” I say, looking down at Delilah. I say it casually, as if she takes my elbow all the time. As if her hand on the other side of my shirt and jacket isn’t suddenly all I can think about.
“Sorry, Georgia got very specific about the streamers,” she says, smiling and rolling her eyes. “And then poor Olivia managed to spell married wrong, and we had to wash it off and start over, you know how these things go. Hi, I’m Delilah.”
Her hand on my arm tightens as she holds the other out, fingers pointed and bladelike.
“Bernadette,” the other woman answers, smiling. “This is my fiancé, Gary.”
“Bernadette works with Levi for the Forest Service,” I explain while they shake hands. “She was just telling me about all the problems with forest shrimp.”
Technically, I’m not lying. Everything I just said is completely true, but the lie-by-omission still feels bad as it settles in the pit of my stomach.
“Is the first problem that there are shrimp in the forest?” Delilah asks, hand still in my arm, laughing politely.
“Shockingly, no,” Bernadette says, and before I know it Delilah and Bernadette are talking about blind freshwater crustaceans who live in caves and how there are both too many and not enough, why it’s important to have a dozen different subspecies, or why they might not be important at all.
When we say goodbye and head in opposite directions, Delilah keeps her hand on my arm.
“Drink?” she asks. “My first few are wearing off and there’s still so much wedding to get through.”
I glance over, through the pseudo-trees and across the ballroom to the stage and the crowd dancing in front of it.
“There is?”
“They haven’t even played the shoe game yet,” she says.
I just look down at her, because I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Eli didn’t play the shoe game at his courthouse wedding?” she asks, dryly.
“I’m not even sure if this is a euphemism or not,” I tell her.
“Sadly, no,” she says. “The bride and groom interrupt the fun party to sit in chairs, back-to-back, hold each others’ shoes, and then someone asks cute questions like who snores louder? and they hold up that person’s shoe.”
We pause at the bar. Delilah orders something called a Dark and Snowy that comes with part of a tree stuck in the glass. I just get more whiskey.
“How do you score points?” I ask as we keep walking.
“It’s not that kind of game.”
“So how does one person win?”
“Oh, everyone loses.”
We come to a stop in front of one of the tall windows, the old glass wavy, sheer curtains floating gauzily at either side.
“I feel like I’m missing something,” I admit, and Delilah finally laughs. “They answer questions by holding up shoes and no one gets points and no one wins?”
“You got it,” she says, merrily, taking a sip of her cocktail. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
I glance out the window to the dark garden, pools and squares of light beyond it, a few lit paths leading away from the manor house.
Don’t ask, I tell myself. Don’t ask, don’t ask.
I take another sip of whiskey.
“Did you play it?” I hear myself say.
Delilah goes perfectly still, one hand holding her drink, one hand on the windowsill. She watches me warily, like she thinks I might suddenly transform into some toothsome beast.
“No,” she says, after a long moment, her voice polite, neutral. “Vera pushed for it, but I stood my ground for once.”
I want to ask her a hundred more things. I want to ask if her wedding was like this. I want to ask if she glowed when she walked down the aisle, like Ava did; if they kissed every time someone clinked a glass; if her sisters decorated their getaway car.
I want to ask why him. Why then. What the hell he had that I didn’t.
Instead I drink more whiskey.
“I wouldn’t want to touch someone else’s dirty shoe either,” I admit.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t. We’d have lost pretty badly,” she says.
“I thought everyone lost.”
Delilah laughs again.
“True,” she says. “But it’s really bad when the shoe game makes it obvious that the two people who just got married barely know each other.”
I wonder, for a split second, how we’d have done at the shoe game, but I chase the thought away with another sip of whiskey. We promised not to fight, and asking Delilah about her wedding feels like standing next to a pool of lava and debating whether to step in.
“I can imagine,” I finally say.
She looks away. She takes a long drink from her cocktail, head turned to one side, pearl earrings bobbing at her neck.
I watch her, unabashedly. Openly. I start at her elbow and follow the colors and shapes upward, onto her shoulders, hard to see through the pink lace but I know most of it by heart anyway.
<
br /> The tattoos are new, though they aren’t really. They’re new since we broke up, and every time I’ve seen her over the past eight years, during our very intermittent couplings, she’s had a new one. It’s part of the rush, part of the discovery, seeing how she’s changed.
Now I’m looking at her left arm: an ocean, a sailing ship, a tentacle wrapped around it. Another ship, a similar fate; a third being pulled upward by a flock of birds, and at the top, a purple-red Kraken, tentacles trailing across her shoulder blade, curling onto her chest.
Though today, the tentacle seems to end just past her shoulder in a blurry line, and I’m still studying it as she speaks.
“Bernadette,” she says, still looking away. I follow her gaze to where the other woman is standing across the room, talking to an older couple I don’t recognize. “Since we’re asking questions. Did you?”
She turns back, looks me square in the eyes.
“Yes,” I tell her, and make myself stop.
Delilah looks over at her, then back at me.
“Two and a half years ago,” I say. “Just a summer thing. It was nothing.”
“Don’t say it was nothing,” she tells me, softly, her glass up to her lips.
I push a hand through my hair, glance out the window into the darkness. I fight the urge to confess everything to Delilah, as if she’ll absolve me of my sins even though she’s made it clear she’s not interested in doing so.
“It was casual,” I amend myself. “That’s all.”
“She seems nice,” Delilah says.
“She is.”
I don’t say: she was almost last. I want to tell Delilah that it was Bernadette that summer and into autumn, then a one-night-stand with a woman named Susan, and then it was Fall Fest and the backseat of Delilah’s car and then it was nothing and no one.
Two years, three months, and sixteen days of no one.
“You got shorter while you were gone,” I say, changing the subject.
“Oh, I stopped by my chateau on the way to doing the car and changed into flats,” she says, sticking one foot out from under the dress that now falls all the way to the floor. “I think I’ve already got blisters, though.”
I glance over at her, frowning down.
“Your chateau?”
Delilah laughs, though she still doesn’t look at me.
“It’s a cabin,” she says. “But because this place costs a fortune, they insist on calling the rental cabins chateaus because if you name something a French word, they’re suddenly worth a thousand dollars a night.”
I just make a noise. It’s unintentional, but holy shit.
“I know,” she says, finally looking up at me. “And yes, I’ve suggested that they could probably end hunger in the state and still give Ava a very nice wedding, but my thoughts were not taken into consideration.”
“Please tell me that liquid gold comes out of the faucet,” I say.
“I wish.”
“Precious gems sewn into the sheets?”
“Just fabric.”
“Trained monkeys to fan you and feed you ripe fruit.”
“There’s a fireplace, a flat-screen TV, and jacuzzi jets in the tub,” she says. “I imagine the closet has some nice robes. I didn’t check, though.”
Outside the window is dark, the moon behind the manor house, paths through the garden picked out in low yellow light. I can see two rows of small buildings that must be the chateaus, and beyond that, a deep darkness that can only be forest.
“But no, it’s not really worth nearly a thousand dollars a night,” she goes on. “Particularly when you live in the area and could easily get a ride back to your house and sleep there, but since I’m not the one paying for it, I choose not to look a gift room in the… door.”
“Look a gift room in the door?”
“In the fireplace?” she tries again, laughing, her nose wrinkling.
“What’s in that?” I ask, pointing at her drink. “Besides a tree.”
She takes the very small branch between two fingers and stirs the drink with it.
“This, Seth, is Ava and Thad’s signature drink, a dark and snowy,” she says. “And the tree is a rosemary garnish, thank you.”
“Looks like a tree,” I deadpan.
“For someone who makes a living from booze, you sure are shockingly unsophisticated,” she teases.
I grin and drink the last mouthful of whiskey in my glass.
“Shockingly?” I say, putting my glass down. I hold out my empty hand. “Can I try?”
She takes another sip, then holds it out to me.
“It’s rum, ginger beer, cider, and… I forget, something else,” she says.
I take a drink of it, the garnish grazing my face, faint lipstick smudges visible on the rim of the glass.
“Cranberry,” I say when I finish, handing it back to her.
“Not bad, right?”
I take a step closer to her and there it is again: the urge to touch her, brush a stray curl from her temple, take her hand. I do exactly what I should do and ignore it.
“Finish it and come dance with me,” I tell her.
Her eyebrows go up and her lips twist slightly as she keeps herself from laughing, an expression I learned long ago.
“I think what you mean is, I’d be ever so thrilled if you would honor me with this dance, Delilah,” she says, her voice breathy as she fakes her worst Gone With the Wind accent.
“What I mean is come dance with me,” I say. “You still owe me one from before.”
“I owe you no such thing.”
“Well, you said you’d light me on fire if I danced with anyone else,” I say. “Here’s your chance to avoid arson.”
“Is that a threat, Seth Loveless?”
“No,” I say, and now I’m grinning as she tries not to laugh. “It’s an opportunity.”
“I don’t think I exactly said I’d light you on fire,” she points out. “I’m pretty sure it was much more confusing than that.”
I take a step closer. How long ago was it that I touched her chin? An hour, ninety minutes? Too long. I feel like we’re in a bell jar, the outside world hushed and blurry, just the two of us here.
I feel like I should kiss her, even though I know that’s not true.
“Delilah,” I say, quieter, lower. “Come fucking dance with me.”
“That was even less polite,” she whispers, eyes alight.
“If I asked nicely you’d chew me up and spit me out.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she says, and she actually looks puzzled.
“Wel, I’m not going to risk finding out,” I say.
“Would it be so bad?”
“Letting you chew me up and spit me out again?” I say. It’s too honest.
I manage to stop my tongue before I say I don’t mind so long as you leave teeth marks, which she has. She’s left them more than once. I think she’s left teeth marks on my heart.
“You’re really overestimating my powers, Seth,” she says softly.
I’m not overestimating a damn thing. I’m half convinced Delilah’s a sorceress for the power she has over me.
I lean down until our bodies are just barely touching, put my lips an inch from her ear.
“Please?” I ask, and I swear I try to sound as polite as I can but it comes out all dirt and gravel, the word ripped from somewhere deep in my chest.
Her hand is on my shoulder, and it feels more dangerous than staring at a pack of hungry wolves.
“Only because you asked nicely,” she murmurs, and she takes my arm, and we head to the dance floor.
Chapter Sixteen
Delilah
I’d forgotten how Seth can dance.
It’s not that he’s an amazing dancer from a technical standpoint. He knows the same handful of moves as anyone else, knows how to stay on the beat, can move his body in the same rhythms.
It’s that none of those things account for the experience of dancing with Seth, the way that he throws hi
mself into it wholeheartedly, as if being on the dance floor with this wedding cover band is the crowning experience of his life.
He’s mesmerizing, magnetic, perfectly careless in the most breathtaking way, and before I know it I’ve forgotten about my family, about the crowd, about everyone else on the dance floor and it’s just the two of us, touching and swirling, pulling closer and pushing farther as the band works through a long medley of golden oldies.
We dance without speaking for three songs, or maybe five, or maybe ten. I have no idea, because there’s nothing but the moment, nothing but Seth’s hands around my waist, nothing but the swish of my long dress as I twirl and he pulls me back, nothing but his hands on my hips as I lean back against him, my head on his shoulder, his lungs filling against my spine in a brief, still moment before we’re moving again.
Everyone’s watching us. I can feel it, that strange, heady rush of being the center of attention, or at least in its reflected glow. I’d forgotten what it was like to be the girl with Seth, the girl who’s got the guy no one can ignore.
Of course he’s fucked his way through Sprucevale. How could I have ever imagined differently?
The singer belts out one last note and the trumpets flare and Seth is watching me, smiling, his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, my hand in his. There’s sweat trickling down my spine and between my breasts. I’m breathing hard, I’m suspicious of my bra again, and I can only pray that my makeup is still in place.
But it doesn’t matter because my hand is in his as the song ends and he pulls me in hard, catching me, breathless and still a little unsteady on my feet.
“You’re a better dancer than I remember,” he says, fitting one hand around my waist and the other into my own, my arm over his, my forehead briefly against his heated shoulder.
“I’m afraid to ask what you remember,” I say, even as I try to ignore how easily we fit together like this. Being with Seth is instinct and muscle memory: arm here, hand here, head turns like this and hips move like this and then, and then, and then…
“Senior prom?” I guess.
“Was that really the last time?”
I take my head from his shoulder, right myself from where I fell into him, stand up straighter. Not too straight. Not so straight that we aren’t still touching.