by Roxie Noir
I stand there for a moment, looking around, soaking it in. Even if I’ve never been in here before, it feels oddly familiar and comforting. Like it’s a home I never knew I had.
Upstairs, a hair dryer starts, and I head into Delilah’s kitchen. It matches her living room: a breakfast nook with benches upholstered in bright floral fabrics, wall above it covered in art, windows looking out onto her front porch. White cabinets, marble countertops.
After a few tries, I find her liquor cabinet. Delilah’s selection is unusual, but I like a challenge, so I push up my sleeves and get to work.
I’m just pouring my concoction into the glasses I found when I hear footsteps on the stairs. Moments later, she walks into the living room.
I almost knock a glass over.
“I meant grab a beer and sit on the couch,” she says, laughing. “You didn’t have to play bartender.”
I just shrug and glance at my hand so I can make sure I’m putting the cocktail shaker down squarely on the counter and not dropping it into empty space or something.
“I had to do something while I waited,” I tease, still staring.
She’s wearing a dress, the bright green of fancy olives. It’s high-necked, long-sleeved, knee-length. It’s tied around the waist and moves with her and even though this dress is modest enough to wear to a meeting with the Pope, I feel like it was designed specifically to remind me of what’s under it.
Her hair’s down, her mane tumbling past her shoulders. Gray tights, brown boots. Freckles on her face, her neck, her forearms when she pushes up her sleeves and leans against the far side of the kitchen island.
I tear my eyes away long enough to crack open a can of seltzer that I found in her fridge.
“What are they?” she asks, raising one eyebrow. “I didn’t know I had ingredients for… anything.”
“A creation of my own devising,” I tell her, pouring the seltzer. “Sweet vermouth, rum, a splash of lime, a little grenadine, and soda. Oh, and celery bitters.”
“Fascinating,” she says, putting her chin in one hand. “You think it’s a good idea to make us drinks?”
I give each glass one quick stir and push one toward her.
“I’ve got no idea what you mean,” I say, holding mine up. “I’m just a near-stranger who you let rummage through your kitchen. Besides, they’re pretty weak.”
She lifts her glass, clinks it gently against mine and we both take sips. Delilah raises one eyebrow.
“Huh,” she says, thoughtfully, as we both lower our glasses.
“Well,” I say. “It’s not bad.”
“I didn’t know I had vermouth or celery bitters,” she says. “Would you believe I don’t actually drink that often?”
“Based on what I found, yes,” I say. “For the record, you’ve also got Creme de Menthe and tequila, but I couldn’t work those in.”
“Thank God.”
We both take another sip. The second one is better.
“Do I get a tour?” I ask.
Delilah scoops one hand under the glass, holds it from the bottom.
“You treat all your first dates like this?” she asks, smiling.
“Only the ones who give me free reign while they dry their hair.”
“True. You could’ve stolen my TV, but look what you did instead,” she says, sipping again. “You know, this really could be worse. I think I kind of like it now.”
With her other hand she picks up the cocktail shaker and swirls it once, like she’s seeing if there’s any left, and when it catches the light I realize there are letters on the side: DPN.
She sees me looking and puts it back on the counter, takes another sip of her drink.
“It was a gift,” she says, as I puzzle at it for another moment. DPN aren’t her initials.
“A wedding gift,” she specifies, then looks at me, rolls her glass between her hands. “How clean is this clean slate, Seth?”
Delilah and Nolan Prescott. Of course.
“Whistle,” I say.
“I used to be married,” she says. “Got the cocktail shaker in the divorce.”
“Don’t tell me that’s all,” I say.
“There’s an etched glass carafe here somewhere,” she says, dryly. “And I’m pretty sure I wound up with the monogrammed napkins, too.”
“You kept all those things?” I ask.
As if I’m a neutral party. As if these are interesting facts and nothing more.
“They come in useful sometimes,” she says, shrugging.
I want to ask her what else she kept. I want to demand a detailed, itemized list: what she kept, why she kept it, whether she thinks of him whenever she uses it. What was so great about it.
And then, despite myself, I’d like to find everything on that list and break it.
“Are you going to tell me where we are going?” Delilah asks, draining her glass. “I can’t believe I’m letting a near-stranger virtually kidnap me.”
“Dinner and a sock hop,” I say. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“So the answer is no, you’re not going to tell me?”
I push the shaker and the carafe and the napkins from my mind.
“The answer is you’ll know when you get there,” I tell her.
“You sure are pushing it for a first date.”
“You haven’t kicked me out yet.”
Delilah laughs, still fiddling with her empty glass, sliding it back and forth along the counter.
“That’s your standard?” she teases. “If a lady doesn’t kick you out she must be having a good time?”
I put my empty glass down, grip the edge of the counter, lean in.
“Tell me, Delilah,” I say. “Are you having a bad time?”
“Not at all,” she says, her smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. “You still want that tour?”
“Of course,” I tell her, and she nods me around the island and into the living room.
It’s a brief tour. We don’t even move from where we’re standing, because when you’re standing next to her couch you can see everything: the kitchen I’ve already acquainted myself with, the living room itself, the stairs, the second floor with a bedroom, a bathroom, and an office-slash-studio.
“Can I see the studio?” I ask her when the one-minute tour is over.
“Aren’t we already late?” she asks.
“Then five more minutes won’t matter.”
Delilah sighs. She’s wearing a long necklace with an amber pendant at the bottom, a scorpion trapped inside, and now she starts fiddling with it.
“I don’t like showing people unfinished pieces,” she says. “Or doodles, or anything that I’ve put down and I’m not sure I’m going to pick back up, or ideas I had that I abandoned, or just… anything not fit for public consumption.”
I open my mouth to tell her that I’m not people, for God’s sake, but I don’t. The whole point of this is that I am people, so I just nod and say, “Fair.”
I don’t ask if I can see her bedroom.
As we’re getting our coats, I notice the photographs on the wall by the front door. They’re vivid, oversaturated, so bright I can’t believe I missed them when I first came in. On the left is a photograph of a window, taken from across the room. Between the lens and the window is a couch with a girl sprawled on it, looking away. On the right is a photograph of an open door, a welcome mat in front of it, the greenest grass and bluest sky beyond the threshold.
“My mom’s,” she finally says. “When I moved back I started going through all her stuff that’s been in storage.”
I think, briefly, of the things I’d say if this really were a first date. I’d say, I’d love to meet your mom someday or why is her stuff in storage or she can’t tell you where it is?
But I’m not that much of an asshole, so I let the clean slate smudge because I know this part of the story: car accident, underage drunk driver. The teenager who was blitzed at eleven in the morning walked away, but Delilah’s mo
m was pronounced dead on the scene. A month later, Delilah moved here and started her sophomore year at Sprucevale High.
“I like it,” I tell her.
“Thanks,” she says, and together, we consider the photographs for a long moment. “She mostly did weddings and babies and stuff, since that paid the bills, but the artsy, moody stuff was her favorite. Ready?”
I study the photograph for one more moment, then turn away, open the door for her.
“Ready,” I confirm, and we leave.
Chapter Thirty-One
Delilah
“You named them?” Seth is saying, face lit by the blue light of his dashboard.
“I couldn’t just call them that one, that one, and that one,” I say.
“You absolutely could’ve,” Seth says.
“We have a relationship.”
He just gives me a look.
“I bought them the fancy dog food!”
I get that look again, for an extra second this time.
“They eat garbage,” he says, sounding baffled. “They’re varmints.”
“You really are from around here,” I tease.
“Because I said varmint?”
“Because you said it with that tone of voice.”
“Tell me, Delilah,” he says, a smile on his lips. “What tone of voice do fancy city folks use when they call critters varmints?”
“I’m pretty sure most fancy city folks think that varmint is a flavor of chewing gum,” I say, laughing. “Anyway, Larry, Jerry, and Terry are very happy to be my masked backyard friends.”
Seth just shakes his head as he puts on his blinker, then turns off the main road and into a driveway.
Next to it there’s a big wooden sign that says FROG HOLLER in colorful letters, and suddenly, everything falls into place.
“We’re going square dancing?” I ask, turning to face him.
Seth just grins.
“You nerd,” I laugh.
“What’s nerdy about square dancing?” he teases.
“Besides everything?”
“You’ve never even been before,” he says, gravel crunching under his tires. “Square dancing is cool.”
“We had to learn it in middle school gym, and it is not cool,” I laugh. “I can’t believe you’re taking me on a date activity that I did in a gymnasium while the boys spent the week in health class learning about their dicks.”
“I assure you none of the boys learned a single thing that week that they didn’t already know,” Seth says.
I lean my elbow on the window ledge, looking over at him. He’s even hot when he drives, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other touching the gear shift with two fingers, relaxed and confident and in control.
“What?” he laughs, when he sees me looking.
“I don’t have a response that falls within the bounds of our agreement,” I tell him as he pulls up next to a pickup truck and shifts into park.
“Which part?” he asks, narrowing his eyes at me. “The clean slate part?”
He shuts the car off, cuts the lights, pulls the keys from the ignition and suddenly it’s near-dark.
“The no sex part,” I tell the dark as I unbuckle my seatbelt.
“We agreed not to do it, not to keep from talking about it,” he says, and his voice is a lazy drawl, his features starting to come into view. “Unless you’re telling me you were about to say something about middle school sex ed so intensely erotic that I was going to throw the whole agreement out the window.”
“Ew,” I say, laughing.
“Good,” Seth answers, and I can hear the smile in his voice, nearly see it in the dark. “Come on, let’s go square dancing.”
Outside the car he takes my hand, and we walk toward the converted barn together.
“Unless,” I say. “You brought me here to do corporate espionage.”
Frog Holler is a cidery, so they make hard apple cider. Seth Loveless half-owns a brewery. Surely there must be some competition.
“Would that make it nerdier or less nerdy?” he asks.
“Depends on the espionage.”
“Which is it if you flirt with the owner while I break into the backroom to discover their brewing secrets?” he teases, and I laugh.
“I think you’re more Marcy’s type,” I say.
I wish I hadn’t the moment it’s out of my mouth. All I meant is that Marcy’s straight and Seth is male, but the moment I say it and he doesn’t respond that bright, ugly flower blooms in my chest.
“I doubt either would work,” he says, after a moment. “How do you know Marcy?”
“We took a — uh, a dance class together,” I tell him.
Did he fuck her? He can’t have. She’s married. He wouldn’t.
Right?
I take a deep breath and try not to show it.
Starting over, let it go. Clean slate.
“We hit it off and she ended up hiring me to paint the mural on the other side of the barn,” I go on.
Seth stops in surprise, looking over at me.
“The big one?” he asks, pointing off into the dark. “With the frog and the apples?”
“Is there another mural?”
“I didn’t know you did that.”
We’re almost to the barn, and from inside a voice calls: “All right, everyone, if you ain’t got a place yet, find one!”
I study Seth’s face for a moment.
“Is this a clean slate thing, or…”
“No,” he says, and smiles, looking a little sheepish. “I’ve been it a hundred times and didn’t know.”
“I made the front page of the paper,” I tell him as we walk through the door. “You didn’t see that?”
I guess it was a slow news day. Seth just shrugs.
“No,” he says. “Hand to God, I had no idea I’d been looking at your mural all this time.”
“You two!” a man’s voice calls, from the stage. “You here to dance? Get your coats off and get up front!”
“Nerd,” I whisper to Seth, shrugging out of layers.
He just winks at me.
“You like it,” he whispers back.
Fine, I like it.
Turns out square dancing is totally fun, which isn’t something I ever though I’d say.
As soon as we get our outer layers off, the man directing us from the stage informs us that we’ll be joining the square nearest him.
His name is Bill, he’s wearing a Texas tuxedo, and he informs us that we’ll be joining the square near the front of the dance floor so he can keep an eye on us.
After he says that, he winks. If he had a mustache, I think he’d be a dead ringer for Sam Elliott.
“You better watch out,” I murmur to Seth as we walk onto the dance floor. “I bet Bill’s got moves.”
That gets a hand pressed to my lower back and a tingle up my spine.
“I didn’t bring you here so you could do-si-do with someone else,” Seth teases me.
“Did you bring me so you could steal cider secrets?” I ask, innocently.
“I brought you here because I’ve never tried square dancing and, to be excruciatingly honest, it sounds fun,” he says. “There you have it. You’re here for a fun date. That’s all.”
“Sorry,” I say, laughing.
Turns out the square in square dancing is four couples who stand facing each other in — you guessed it — a square. Our square is us, one other first-time couple, and then two middle-aged couples who might the most pleasant and patient people I’ve met in my entire life.
“All right,” Bill’s voice announces, a few minutes later. “Welcome to beginner square dancin’ night! Now I know most of y’all haven’t done this before, so we’re gonna start you off real easy with a square through — curlicue — fan the top to a half tag — trade — scoot back — relay the deucey!”
Stunned silence reigns for a few seconds before about half the people there start laughing.
“I’m just pullin’ yer leg,” Bi
ll says, and this time he waves to the still-chuckling musicians behind him, and they start playing a fiddle and a banjo.
Seth and I exchange an I guess this is square dancing humor look.
“Now,” says Bill. “The person you brought is your partner, and the person to your other side is your corner. To start things off, you’re gonna bow to your partner, bow to your corner, and then join hands and walk in a circle.”
Right away, I step on Seth’s foot.
The square dancing lasts for two hours. Bill gives us a thirty-minute break in the middle, so we get hard cider from the bar at the end of the barn and then sit on hay bales, drinking and laughing and talking with the other couples there.
Seth seems to know at least half the people in attendance. He even gets their names right and does things like ask how grandchildren and dogs are doing. How kitchen remodels are going. Whether they bought that new truck they were thinking about.
The whole time, I can’t help but think: no wonder he’s so popular with women. I knew he was charming, but until Ava’s wedding it had been years since we were together in public, so I never really saw it in action.
The second round is harder than the first, because I guess easy mode is over. Afterward, I’m sticky and sweaty, holding my hair off my neck, pretending that I’m not breathing as hard as I am.
Seth, on the other hand, is grinning at me, both of his hands on his hips. He’s also slightly sweaty — it’s hot in here — the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled right above the elbow, his hair slightly askew in that rumpled, unguarded way.
I keep looking at his forearms, because Seth has nice hands and really nice forearms: muscular and solid, distracting whenever he clenches his hands. I can see the veins, but they’re not weird. Just… hot.
“So, you gonna be buying rhinestone cowboy boots and joining the circuit?” he asks.