CHAPTER 18 DELILAH
DELILAH
“Which part?” I ask.
Mark looks at me like I’m stupid.
“Which part?” I ask again, slightly hysterical. My phone is buzzing in my pocket and Jackson’s is too. I can feel it where he’s tucked up against me. I’m so embarrassed I can’t bring myself to look at him, locking eyes with a regretful-looking Mark instead.
“I stopped it as soon as I could,” he says. His gaze slants toward Jackson. “But I heard you ask her to kiss you.”
Jackson tips his head back and closes his eyes. I stand next to him absolutely mortified.
“And did you hear—”
“Yeah,” Mark says. He swallows. “I heard everything, which means everyone else heard everything too. The stream has been finicky this morning with the winds. We were jammed and then we . . . weren’t.” His face softens. “I’m sorry, Delilah.”
Jackson whispers another emphatic fuck under his breath while I continue to have a full-blown existential crisis next to him.
“What are our options?” he asks.
Mark watches me for another minute. “You have your radio check-in this afternoon, and another broadcast with the evening news. I’ll tell production back at the station this was mucked due to technical difficulties, but—” He makes sure I’m looking at him. “You’ll need an explanation.”
A laugh bubbles out of me. My phone stops buzzing in my pocket only to pick up again. I pull it out and glance at the screen.
KEITH
I silence it.
Jackson grips my arm right above my wrist. My gaze snaps to his, like a key sliding into a lock.
“Mark,” he says. “Can you give us a second?”
I’ve never seen Mark more relieved in my life. “I’m gonna pack up the equipment,” he says before high-stepping out of the alcove.
Then it’s just me and Jackson and my dangling microphone wire, the repercussions of my carelessness scattered around us like the snowflakes spinning wild from the sky. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to make an impact. And now I’ve ruined everything.
Hot tears fill my eyes.
Jackson’s hands cup my face. He must have taken his gloves off, his thumbs rubbing at my cheeks. He is almost eerily calm, his jaw set in a firm line.
I hiccup a breath. “Why aren’t you panicking about this?”
“Because,” he says, “I’m with you.”
I huff out a laugh. “Well, as current evidence clearly shows, that might not be in your best interest.”
I close my eyes, reaching up and looping my fingers around his wrists. I hold on to him while he holds on to me and I try to calm down the heavy thump, thump, thump of my heart. I feel like I’ve been sliced open. A moment that was meant for me and Jackson was just shared with the entire city.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
I blink open my eyes. Behind his head, snowflakes float lazily from the sky. I wish I was one of them, drifting away.
“What can we do? Everyone heard. I’m going to be—” The words stick in my throat, thick and heavy. The bridge of my nose burns. “Jackson, I took this assignment because I didn’t want to be a joke anymore.”
And now I’m going to be the weather girl who kissed her partner in the middle of a snowstorm.
I’ll never outrun the assumptions people make of me.
Silly, whimsical, happy-go-lucky Delilah.
I’ve cemented every last one of them into place.
Why should anyone ever take me seriously, if I can’t even manage it for myself?
Jackson’s thumbs rub another circuit under my eyes, over the swells of my cheeks. “You’re not going to be a joke. I won’t let it happen.”
“How?”
Tell me what to do, I want to beg. Tell me how to fix this.
Jackson seems to hear everything I don’t say, because his face settles into something determined.
“We aren’t going to say anything.”
“What?” I laugh, thick and disbelieving. “Jackson. The entire city of Baltimore just heard us kissing. Our bosses. God. Their bosses. No one’s going to let us get away with that without an explanation.”
“There are no rules that say we can’t. We haven’t done anything wrong. It’s our business.”
“We can’t just ignore it, Jackson.”
“Then we tell them the truth.” And what, I immediately want to ask, is that? He ducks down a little, meeting my eye. “You were helping me work through my on-air anxiety. Distracting me, right? It doesn’t need to be more than that.”
I bite my lip and stare down at our feet, embarrassed. I don’t know what I thought, but I guess—he had sounded so earnest when he asked for my help. Like he needed it. Like he needed me, specifically.
Maybe I let myself think it was more than it is.
It doesn’t have to be more than that.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Jackson repeats. His fingers press against my cheekbones, urging me to look at him. “Can you repeat it for me?”
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” I warble.
Logically, I know it’s true. A kiss is hardly the end of the world.
If anything, we just dangled a giant, scandal-clad carrot in front of our viewers.
And if we don’t address it—don’t explain it—people will be watching our every move, trying to decode the thing between us.
We’re a piece of the news now. A delicious, enticing question.
I guess I just wish I knew which part of this is the truth and which is the lie.
We decide to do our phone calls separately.
Or it’s what I decide, anyway. Jackson clearly has a problem with that plan, lingering in the open door of our shared room, his palm propped against the door.
“I’m telling Maggie it’s not up for discussion,” he says. “That we’ll continue to report the weather, but we won’t be discussing anything else.”
“Okay,” I agree. We’ve been through these talking points at least twelve times, and every time he repeats those words, it sinks like a stone in my chest. I’ve got a whole collection of pebbles in there, weighing me down. “What about your sisters?”
Jackson sighs and drags his hand through his hair. “I’m going to call them first.”
What will you tell them? What version of the truth will you tell the two people you love most?
But I’m busy sinking deep into a spiral of self-loathing and self-admonishment, so I keep that to myself.
“You sure you don’t want to do this together?”
I shake my head. I’m not interested in drawing out my humiliation by having Jackson bear witness to whatever this call with Keith will be. Keith already thinks the worst of me. I can only imagine what he has in store.
I fix a smile on my face that’s only eighty-three percent forced. “I can handle a single conversation on my own, Jackson.”
“I know you can. I just—”
I stare at him, arching my eyebrow. “You just?”
“I don’t want you to apologize,” he tells me with another bone-deep sigh, still hovering in the doorway. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know that.”
Except it feels like I did. Maybe not to Jackson, or Gianna—who has been texting me motivational support memes for the duration of the afternoon—or Mark, even. But it feels like I’ve done something to let myself down. Made the wrong choice. Or wandered too far down a path that leads nowhere good.
Still, I repeat it to myself like a mantra while the phone rings. You didn’t do anything wrong. One more with feeling when Keith answers and barks a short, agitated hello.
I press my forehead against the glass of the window, letting the cold sink into me.
“Keith,” I say. “I’m returning your call.”
His silence is loaded. He waits just long enough to have me on edge. Something I’m sure he practiced between all those missed calls.
“Been busy out there, have you?”
Another slice against all my tender parts. My shoulders hike up to my ears. You don’t have to explain, I remind myself. You didn’t do anything wrong.
“Mark said there were some technical difficulties with the broadcast earlier. I understand there was a situation with my mic, but I—”
“It’s fine,” he interrupts.
I stare at my reflection in the window, blinking. “Um . . . what?”
“I said it’s fine,” he repeats. A loud slurp, likely from whatever frozen Dunkin’ drink he sent a poor intern to retrieve. “Can’t say I’m shocked, Delilah.”
“What do you mean?”
His laugh is like an oil slick. “We can always count on you to be our good-time girl, can’t we?”
With one sentence, Keith has diminished my confidence to the size of a thimble. This is exactly what I was afraid of. Keith didn’t need to lift a finger to humiliate me. I made myself the butt of the joke, all on my own.
“What you heard,” I try to explain, reaching for something that’ll make sense, “it isn’t what it sounded like. Jackson just—”
“Delilah,” Keith interrupts. “Do you think I actually care?”
I’m confused, floundering ten feet behind this conversation while Keith breaststrokes ahead.
“No,” I answer, my voice faint. “No,” I repeat, louder. “There’s nothing to care about because it was a mistake, and it won’t happen again.”
I hate that I sound like I’m about to cry. The last thing I want is for Keith to have any sort of satisfaction that his opinion matters to me. But I’ve always struggled with buttoning up my own emotions. I’m an open book, a bleeding heart. Usually, I’m proud of that fact.
Just not right now.
“Frankly, Delilah, I don’t care what you do or don’t do out there. I was concerned, at first, about your professionalism. But I realized something while I was waiting for you to return my call.”
I almost don’t want to ask. “What’s that?”
“You’re a puff piece, at best. The expectations for this series were pretty low across the board. It’s no skin off my back if you fail to meet them.”
I suck in a sharp breath and close my eyes. “All right,” I manage. “If that’s everything, I need to go run some reports for the radio spot. Thanks for your feedback.”
He huffs some unintelligible string of sounds and then he hangs up. I sit in the window for a long time after, watching the lake and the snow that melts easily against it.