25. Delilah #2
The outside world looks about how I feel. Half-deflated New Year’s balloons bounce along a frost-covered fence near Prospect Park. A man in pajama pants walks a beagle wearing gold antlers, looking green and queasy in the face.
But that’s normal. I almost envy him.
My no-longer-normal life involves sitting beside a crime lord whose mouth I know a little too intimately.
I look over at him.
Kane is in the other captain’s seat, focused on his phone. He jumps between encrypted text threads and email, firing off messages as fast as he can.
In profile, he looks less like a living, breathing person and more like a moody statue in a darkened museum exhibit. His forehead slopes into a straight nose; his mouth is severe, except for the curl that appears whenever an email displeases him.
His black shirt is open at the throat, showing the rose-gold chain and a wedge of tattooed skin. One shoulder rests against the leather seat. The other bunches up whenever he sends something, tendons flexing beneath his cuff.
He’s too pretty. Men who threaten kneecaps should not have eyelashes like that.
Mob bosses should come with warning labels and unfortunate pores.
Maybe dandruff. Something humane.
He catches me staring without turning his head.
“See something you like, Lilah?”
I face the window. “I’m evaluating your screen-time habits.”
“Concerned for my eyesight?”
“Big time. Blue light could damage your ability to menace people.”
His mouth curves.
I feel a little thrill in my stomach.
We turn onto my street. I recognize the house at once. Pale siding in need of a fresh coat of paint. Bare hydrangeas clawing at the snow.
What I don’t recognize is the garbage truck idling at the curb. It’s not garbage pickup day, and even if it were, it’s a holiday.
I also don’t recognize the two men in dark work clothes who are currently emerging from my house.
They’re carrying a long piece of wood down the front steps. One has the footboard. The other holds the dark oak headboard with its leaning left knob.
My heart stops.
We pull in behind the garbage truck. The men lift the headboard toward its metal mouth.
I grab the door handle. “Tell them to stop.”
Kane issues a one-word answer: “No.”
I swing around. “That was my grandmother’s!”
“I know,” he intones emotionlessly.
“Then what the hell are they doing?”
“Removing a shitty memory.”
The truck’s hydraulic lift groans. I lunge for the exit, but Kane’s hand closes around my wrist.
“Let go,” I hiss at him.
He does immediately.
But it’s too late.
By the time I shove the door open, the headboard is gone.
The truck compacts with a mechanical roar. I stand on the icy curb in yesterday’s boots, staring at the place where the antique disappeared. It’s matchsticks now, being swallowed up by the truck’s guts.
Kane comes around the SUV.
“That belonged to me!” I cry.
“Yes, it did—in the past tense. But you’re better off without it. It’s been defiled.”
“So you threw it away?”
“You deserve better.”
I whirl on him. “That is not your decision!”
He’s tall, a black-haired demon slouching against the side of the SUV, surrounded by fresh white snow. “It was the place where they disrespected you,” he says in a violent rumble. “I saw it in the recording.”
The cold catches in my lungs.
He glances past me at the garbage truck. “So did everyone in your mother’s living room. Now, strangers have seen it. That piece of wood became a landmark in your humiliation, and you were going to go right back to sleep under it like it was just a little mistake you could sweep under the rug.”
I feel my lip quivering. No words will come.
Kane steps closer. “They don’t get to keep lurking in your bedroom, haunting you. So if you won’t throw them out… I’ll do it for you.”
The garbage truck pulls away.
My grandmother’s headboard goes with it.
Kane’s not wrong: I have been picturing myself sleeping in that bed again someday. After eight nights on Chateau du Boulangerie’s finest cot, I was almost looking forward to it.
I was just gonna strip the bed, wash the sheets a couple times, and pretend like that fixed everything. It’d be fine.
But no.
It would not be “fine.”
I would have laid there looking at that crooked knob for the rest of my life.
“You could have asked me,” I say.
“You’d have said no.”
“Maybe!”
“That’s why I didn’t ask.”
Then he saunters up my front steps, cool as you like, holds my own door open for me, and waits.
Inside, my house is not my house.
The hall is the same. The closet with the sticking door is the same, and the scuff on the baseboard from when we moved in is the same.
Everything else is different.
The room looks like somebody fed my secret Pinterest board to a very rich burglar.
The green sectional is low-slung and tufted, upholstered in velvet. Beside it sits a walnut coffee table shaped like a kidney, with tapered legs and one brass-capped drawer.
Against the far wall is a teak credenza with tambour doors that slide into the sides. A smoked-glass lamp rises from it on a curved brass neck, beside an orange ceramic horse. The art above it is geometric: mustard half-moons crossing rust-colored blocks.
Actual framed art. Not Connor’s signed poster from a poker tournament where he placed eighty-fifth out of ninety.
The Eames chair has a molded walnut shell and black leather cushions so buttery I want to apologize before sitting.
A starburst clock hangs over the mantel, a wonderwork of slim brass spokes and tiny black diamonds.
Even the curtains are new: nubby oatmeal linen floating half an inch above the floor.
It is warm and weirdly mine.
Except I did not choose a single piece of it for myself.
Worse still, it’s not finished. Men I’ve never seen before pass through the hallway carrying boxes and floral arrangements. Another is on his knees behind the TV doing something with the cables. Somebody is running a vacuum upstairs.
I turn in a slow circle. “You refurnished my house?”
“I wanted no traces of them left in it.” He sweeps a hand around the room. “If there’s anything you don’t like, I’ll have it replaced today.”
“I couldn’t possibly—”
“Say the word and it’s on a truck before noon,” he says over me. “Anything. All of it. There’s no discussion, there’s no invoice, and you don’t need a reason.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I just go wandering through. I open a cabinet to see my yellow tea mugs perfectly in place—and possibly polished?—but Connor’s protein shaker collection is gone.
I keep exploring. Every room is just like the cabinet: mine, but altered. Familiar objects remain where they make sense.
His things have vanished as if they never existed.
Upstairs, the bedroom is almost empty. Fresh white paint dries on the wall where the headboard stood. Two men are measuring the window while another rolls up the old carpet.
Kane stops beside me.
I clear my throat. “I haven’t been back here since… since everything happened.”
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” I admit honestly. “Just… strange.”
Kane reaches inside his coat and takes out a rigid black envelope.
I give it a wary glance. “If that’s another legally binding party favor, I’m going back to bed.”
“Look,” he insists.
He hands it to me.
I take it and open it up. Inside is a photograph printed on thick matte paper.
My breath catches.
It’s us in the coat closet.
Kane’s hand is spread over my hip. My fist is twisted in his shirt. His mouth covers mine while I strain up into him, every soft inch of me fitted against his hard body.
I’m not angling myself sideways to look smaller or hiding behind an inanimate object. I’m fully committed to the kiss, lost in it. Not thinking about my jaw or my hips or one single cruel thing that anybody has ever said about me.
“The photographer took this?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“Is he still alive?”
“He’s fine,” Kane assures me. “… For now.”
He’s watching my face carefully, but I keep stealing new peeks at the photograph. In his arms, I look pretty. Wanted. Wanting and wanted in return.
What a concept.
My thumb strokes over the edge.
The headboard is gone. In my hand is proof of Kane kissing me beneath winter coats while a new year begins.
A good memory sweeping in and erasing the bad one.
I look at the photograph again.
Then at his mouth.
He notices. His eyes darken. And the vacuum’s still going out in the hall and there’s a drill downstairs and it is very cold in here because the window is cracked open, and it’s funny how none of that seems to matter even a little bit, because I am warmed from within in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with the physics of heat.
I take one step toward him.
He stands, huge and still, waiting for me to come close enough to touch.
Then the bedroom door swings open…
And my sister walks in.