One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  Delilah takes a step back until she’s against the wall, then sighs, leans back, looks at the ceiling.

  “Seth,” she says after a moment. “Would you like to be my date to my little sister’s wedding?”

  I eat another forkful and pretend to think.

  “When is it?”

  She just looks over at me.

  “I think I’m busy that day,” I tell her.

  “You’re impossible,” she laughs. “Come on, there’ll be good whiskey and you can drink champagne straight from the bottle.”

  “Can I drink the whiskey straight from the bottle?”

  “What were you, raised by wolves?”

  “I’m not the one who brought champagne and no glasses,” I point out.

  Delilah steps closer, reaches around me, puts her empty cake plate on the side table. I stack mine on hers as she takes the bottle.

  “I only have two hands, and I figured you’d prefer cake to manners,” she says, taking a long drink.

  Maybe it’s the whiskey, or the dancing, or the way she’s lit or maybe it’s everything, but there’s something fierce and defiant and beautiful in the way she moves, drinking champagne straight from the bottle.

  When she finishes she wipes the corner of her mouth with the pad of one finger, the movement delicate, precise, oddly graceful for the moment.

  “Here,” I say, and swipe at my own lower lip. “You’ve got icing.”

  She runs a finger along the outer edge, raises her eyebrows at me.

  “Almost. Closer to the corner.”

  Delilah tries again, misses. I shake my head, and she tries again.

  It’s nothing. It’s the barest pink streak of icing, almost unnoticeable, certain to come off of its own accord in the next few minutes. I should just tell her it’s gone and move on, but I don’t.

  I reach my hand toward her, stop an inch before her chin.

  “Can I?” I ask.

  “Thanks,” she whispers.

  I flick one finger along the edge of her mouth. She’s soft and warm and I’m teetering on the edge, standing on a cliff, staring down into a pool I promised I wouldn’t dive into.

  But I could. I could dive right now, ignore the rocks at the bottom, let the cold water submerge me and knock the air from my lungs just one more time.

  Without thinking I stick my finger in my mouth, lick it off. I take the bottle from her hand, drink again.

  She’s staring, and her gaze feels like molten steel sliding down my body. Good. Delilah can stare at me all she wants, especially when I’ve had this much whiskey.

  “Think you can still dance?” I ask, handing the bottle back.

  “I think champagne only ever makes me a better dancer,” she says, drinking.

  She turns her head to the side. I watch her from a foot away, unashamedly, unabashedly, too drunk to care if she notices and too cognizant of the past to worry about her reaction.

  I’ve spent far too much time with my face between her thighs to care that she knows I think she’s pretty.

  Behind the lace over her chest, in her slight cleavage, there’s an odd, hard shadow. She pulls the bottle from her mouth, wipes her lip with one finger.

  “You got a new tattoo,” I say, pointing at my own chest.

  “Shit,” she says, and looks down, pulling at the lace. “You can see it?”

  “Only a little.”

  She hands the bottle back, lifts the lace away from her chest, looks into her dress.

  “Where?”

  “Further down.”

  She pokes gently at her chest, like she’s afraid to touch it.

  “Further,” I prompt, and she glances up at me.

  “Don’t watch,” she says, though she’s half-laughing. “This is unladylike.”

  “I’ve never seen that before.”

  “C’mon.”

  Ever the gentleman, I turn my back, take another drink of champagne.

  “What is it?” I ask the flowers on the side table.

  There’s a pause.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Something you don’t want polite society to see,” I say. “Just how raunchy is this tattoo, Delilah?”

  “It’s a huge, photorealistic dick,” she says, and I turn back before I can stop myself.

  Delilah bursts into laughter when she sees my face.

  “Veins and ball hairs and everything,” she says, still laughing, poking at her chest through the neck of her shirt. “It’s just, like, the dick-est dick that ever did dick.”

  I don’t have a comeback for that, so I just watch her as she smooths the lace back over her chest, looking down.

  “Better?” she asks, grinning.

  I take a good, long moment to stare at her.

  “Better,” I confirm and hand the bottle back. “You gonna tell me what it really is and why you don’t want anyone to see it?”

  “I don’t want Vera to see it,” she says, drinking.

  “I’ve never been more curious in my life.”

  She takes one more drink.

  “It’s a clockwork heart,” she says. “Vera still doesn’t know because it’s a giant tattoo right on my chest, and I think it might give her a stroke.”

  A memory taps at me, floats into my brain: Delilah, holding a fruit basket at my front door, pulling her shirt to cover gauze.

  “Seems like she’s about to know if I figured it out,” I say, taking the bottle back.

  “She’s got better things to do right now,” Delilah says, shrugging.

  I take a drink.

  “Than stare at your tits?” I ask. “Like what?”

  Right here, right now, I cannot think of a better pastime to save my life.

  “I thought we were friends, Seth.”

  “It’s a friendly stare,” I say, but I lift my eyes to her face. “Friends can’t look at tattoos?”

  Suddenly the lights in the hall dip low, until they’re almost out, then slowly brighten. When they stop, they’re dimmer than they were before.

  “How long have you had it?” I ask.

  It’s so quiet in this hallway that I think I can hear the old house settling, each individual wooden slat shifting a millimeter down.

  “Two years and change,” she says quietly, her eyes meeting mine.

  My hand drifts to her waist, and she moves into me. A tiny, almost imperceptible movement, amplified until her warmth under my hand is all I can feel.

  I can feel her breathing under my fingers. I can feel her heart beat, thumping away, and I force myself not to read into the timeline or into the tattoo.

  Instead I lean into her, again. My face against hers, again, the feeling that my bones are dissolving at her nearness, the feeling that I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

  “Do you have anything new?” she asks, her voice nearly a whisper.

  “No tattoos,” I say, and I keep tracing the flowers on the lace with my fingertips, pressing into her soft flesh, and she puts her hand on my chest, her thumb sliding between the buttons on my shirt. I don’t know if it’s an accident or not, but either way, she doesn’t move it back.

  “I did something stupid and got a new scar. It’s on my shoulder, I’ll show you if you want.”

  Delilah gasps, the tiniest, slightest gasp.

  “Right now?” she murmurs.

  “Unless you’d rather see it later.”

  Now her hand is on the tie that she loosened earlier, the lightest pressure pulling against the back of my neck.

  “What else?” she asks.

  “That’s all.”

  “Two years and nothing else has changed?”

  I haven’t been with anyone else. I haven’t even kissed anyone else, not since the last time we were together, not since she moved back to town.

  Before, when she was hundreds of miles away, I could push her from my mind. I could forget about her for hours at a time.

  Now, that’s impossible.

  “Two years, three months, and sixteen days
,” I say, my voice rough and raw with the truth, and there’s a pull at the back of my neck as she pulls at my tie and finally, finally, I kiss her.

  I feel like a stadium when the lights go out. Like a concert hall when the orchestra stops tuning and suddenly plays the first note of a symphony. The background noise stops and the note swells, shifts, breaks into harmony.

  This is all there is.

  Delilah is all softness, but never pliant. Nothing about her yields even as I feel like I’m sinking into her, lips already parting under mine. She makes the softest noise and it explodes across me like a shock of hot water as she pulls me in harder and I bend to her.

  I snake my hand up her neck, her pulse hot under my fingertips, find her cheekbone with my thumb as she pulls back slightly, my lower lip between her teeth before she comes in again, her softness defiant, pushing, needy.

  I push back. I press myself against her. There’s a rumble coming from somewhere deep in my chest that I can’t locate and can’t control, but now her hand is on my neck, her fingers twisting in my hair and I skim my other palm past her breasts, her stomach, along the outside of her thigh as she makes another noise and stands on tiptoe and pushes her hips against me.

  I’m hard as a rock. She knows. Our tongues curl together and she rises against me and I close my hand around her thigh, trying to pull her into me, and she knows where this is going and I know where it’s going.

  I don’t want to wait to go somewhere private. I want to kneel right here, duck under her long skirt, and make her come in this hallway outside her sister’s wedding. I want to push her against the wall and fuck her without caring who finds us.

  I feel like a time bomb with the counter started: tick, tock. I feel like Delilah reroutes the wiring in my brain, like she bypasses the synapses for reason and logic and self-control and connects lust to impulse to sheer madness.

  I grab her a little harder, growl a little louder, catch her lip between my teeth and curl my fingers in her hair. She rewards me with a breath that hitches in her throat.

  Delilah pulls back, just so our lips are almost touching, clenches my hair in her fist, a cascade of sparks shooting down my spine. She’s breathing hard and I think she’s laughing, so I find her ass and squeeze it as hard and I can, pressing her body against mine.

  The door to the ballroom opens.

  Delilah yelps into my mouth and jolts backward, but my fingers tangle and catch in her hair, her hand going to my wrist.

  “Shit,” she hisses, as the open door hesitates, its blankness facing us. “Fuck, that’s my hair. Ow. Ow.”

  “Hold still,” I whisper, flexing my fingers, relaxing them, pulling back slowly and steadily, her curls sticky with heat and sweat and whatever women put in their hair at weddings.

  Fifty feet away, the door wavers, and then finally, my fingers come out and Delilah exhales.

  “Yeah,” a male voice says, calling back into the ballroom. “One sec.”

  He steps out, sees us, hesitates a moment.

  “Delilah?” he calls.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Delilah

  “Yes?” I call back, and to my relief my voice comes out steady strong and normal.

  I stand up straight, shoulders back, hands clasped in front of me. Like I’m getting ready to sing in the church choir or something, because even though I’m pretty sure it’s either Wyatt or his father, my uncle Doug, it’s hard to tell from that single word this far away.

  At least it’s not Vera. Or, God forbid, my dad.

  He takes a step further, though he doesn’t let the door close and the light and music spills out of the ballroom behind him.

  “Hey,” he calls again, sounding tentative. “Is that Seth?”

  “Hello again,” Seth says.

  He’s got his arm around me, his palm right where my lower back becomes my ass.

  “Huh,” Wyatt says, and leans one arm against the edge of the door, above his head, as though taking his time to consider the two of us.

  “Do you have a message, or were you just dispatched to make sure I’m behaving myself?” I ask, my voice pointed.

  Wyatt laughs.

  “Lucky for you, the first one,” he says, drawing out the words, clearly enjoying himself. “Ava’s gearing up to throw her bouquet, and Aunt Vera has requested the honor of your presence.”

  Seth’s hand moves a fraction of an inch lower. I stand a little straighter.

  “You mean she’s demanded I stand there and let Ava hurl flowers at my face?”

  “That wasn’t her phrasing,” Wyatt says, politely.

  “That was her meaning.”

  “I’m sure I can’t speak to that.”

  Seth’s hand moves another fraction of an inch downward, his warmth soaking through the thin fabric of my dress, drowning out every other thought I’m trying to have. I slide my hand behind myself, put it in his.

  “Tell her I’ll be there in a sec,” I tell Wyatt. “I need to…”

  My mind goes blank.

  “Yes, go on,” Wyatt deadpans.

  “Prepare myself for more bullshit?”

  That gets a grin from Wyatt.

  “I’ll pass along that you’re using the powder room first,” he says. “Get that game face on.”

  He turns back and before the door even shuts, I’ve stepped around Seth and grabbed the champagne bottle.

  “Preparing?” he asks as I drink, swallow after swallow.

  When I finally pull the bottle away I wipe my finger along my bottom lip, short of breath.

  “I thought I was done after the shoe game,” I tell him.

  He’s just standing there, in the low light, sleeves rolled to the elbow, tie loose, collar unbuttoned, and I can barely keep my feet planted on the floor. If Seth is hot in a burlap sack and devastating in a suit, then like this, undone and slightly rumpled, he might be the most fuckable thing I’ve ever seen.

  “But no,” I say, tearing my eyes away. “I forgot the bouquet toss, so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go be the desperate and unwanted divorcee who serves as a warning to any woman who thinks —”

  Seth kisses me with the words still on my lips. It’s rushed, impulsive. His hand slides around my waist and I step back to catch my balance, find the side table with the flowers behind myself.

  “Unwanted?” he says, voice rough, lips barely leaving mine before he kisses me again and this time it’s deeper, harder, his other hand curling around the back of my neck. “Desperate?”

  “I wasn’t fishing for compliments,” I say, one hand holding the bottle, the other on his chest.

  “I’m not giving you compliments, I’m stating facts,” he says, blunt as ever.

  We kiss, kiss again.

  “Fact: if Ava thinks you’re the worst-case scenario, her entire worldview is fucked.”

  I’m grabbing his tie again, pulling his mouth down to mine. Behind me the side table quivers with the movement of our hips, his hard length against my lower belly, desire and lust and pure, unabated need roiling up inside me.

  Does my sweet, angelic little sister really think all those things of me? I don’t know, but after a year of hearing about this wedding constantly and a week of doing almost nothing but helping her prepare, it sure feels like the world revolves around getting that ring and it sure feels like I’m being pitied because I couldn’t keep mine.

  Suddenly, someone clears his throat very loudly. I jerk away from Seth, who turns around casually, drifts one hand down my back.

  Wyatt’s standing there, at the door.

  “In my defense, I don’t love this either,” he says. “But, uh…”

  I step forward and smooth my hands over my skirt as if it can erase Wyatt’s memory.

  “I’ll wait,” Seth’s voice says in my ear, and I look over at him.

  Then I look back at Wyatt, at the light leaking out of the ballroom behind him, and I imagine walking in and Vera steering me to just the right spot and Ava looking over her shoulder to sight m
e before she throws. I imagine everyone looking at me, each of them thinking didn’t she have her chance already?

  I imagine the forest of hands reaching for the bouquet while it’s still in the air, each of them eager for the mantle of next to get married, a mantle I’m not even interested in wearing.

  “You’re gonna want to head that-a-way,” Wyatt says, pointing.

  “Fuck it,” I say.

  Wyatt pauses.

  “It being the bouquet toss, right?”

  “Right. Fuck the bouquet toss,” I say, glancing from Wyatt back to Seth. “Fuck catching some flowers so Vera can feel better about my life choices.”

  “Can I just quote you verbatim?” Wyatt says, sounding exasperated. “‘Hey, Aunt Vera, Delilah says fuck the bouquet toss. Ow, why are you killing me with your mind?!’”

  “You’ll live,” I say, and I step closer to Seth.

  I take his tie in both hands, adjust it slightly, look up at him through my massive fake eyelashes.

  “Want to get out of here?” I ask, too quiet for Wyatt to hear.

  Despite all manner of history and evidence, adrenaline spikes through my veins. I’m afraid he’ll say no. Afraid he’s moved on, that this is some fucked up game he’s playing to get back at me.

  “Fuck yes I do,” he says, lips curving into a smile.

  “Remember me? Still over here, looking at you with my human eyes,” Wyatt calls from the doorway.

  I take Seth’s hands in mine. At the foot of the staircase is a dark hallway, leading into some other part of the manor house, and I walk backward, pulling him toward it.

  “Wrong way,” Wyatt says, sounding defeated.

  “Make up an excuse for me!” I shout.

  “What? No,” he calls, but I’m already half-gone.

  “Thanks!”

  “Delilah! Delilah. Come on.”

  “You’re my favorite!” I shout, and then we slip into darkness.

  Not complete darkness. This hall runs along the side of the manor, overlooking yet another lawn with yet more perfectly-managed decorative elements, all blue-white in the moonlight that doesn’t come through the windows.

  Seth locks his hands around my hips, walks me backward, his thumbs right on the points of my hipbones. He’s disheveled, undone, a look on his face like he might either kiss me or laugh at any moment.