Track 3 Delilah #2
Something in his voice makes her feel like he means it, that he’s not just being polite. Delilah holds on to his hand for just a second too long. “I’ll do my best,” she says, faking a cheer she doesn’t really feel.
It takes only a few moments for Emmett to gather up his backpack and his cup and leave the café, sparing her a final smile and an awkward little wave that makes Delilah laugh despite herself as she returns it.
From her seat by the window, she can watch him walk to the corner and wait patiently for the light to change—Smart man, she thinks, her internal monologue as dry as ever—before he half jogs across the street to join the little cluster of people waiting for the bus.
And just like that, she’s alone again.
Delilah huffs, shaking off the thought, and pulls her phone out of her bag, just to have something to do with her hands and her eyes besides wistfully looking out across the street.
The missed calls from Alex are no surprise, given Delilah’s last text to her.
Delilah briefly considers not calling her back, but she knows Alex well enough to be pretty sure that she’d make good on her threat to track Delilah down and throw her into the trunk of her car.
She taps on the most recent call and puts the phone to her ear.
Alex picks up on the first ring. “I’m going to fucking murder you.”
“Hi to you too,” Delilah says.
“Please tell me you didn’t pick up a fucking hitchhiker in the middle of Manhattan.”
“I would never do that,” Delilah says.
“You literally sent me a picture—”
“We were in Brooklyn.”
“…I swear to God, Delilah.”
Delilah rolls her eyes. “Stop it. I’m fine. He stopped me from walking into traffic, and I bought him a cup of coffee and drove him to his bus stop. Nobody got murdered.”
Alex’s tone is very even in the way it gets when she’s staring at the closest ceiling in hopes of some kind of divine intervention. “You’re like a serial killer’s wet dream.”
Delilah hums thoughtfully, propping her chin on her hand and letting her gaze drift out the window again.
There’s a decent cluster of people waiting for the Greyhound now.
Emmett is the only person not on a phone or wrangling a small child.
People seem to weave around him as if he’s not even there. “Great name for the album rewrite.”
Alex sighs. “I guess I should be glad you didn’t actually invite him to drive all the way out to California with you.”
“Obviously I didn’t invite him out to—” Delilah pauses. Considers. “Huh.”
“Delilah.”
“Hold on, I’m thinking.”
“Do not start thinking.” There’s an edge of hysteria in Alex’s voice. “Delilah, do not—”
Looking across the street, Delilah puts the call on mute.
Here is the thing she will never tell anyone: At the end of the day, Delilah is not, and never has been, a particularly brave person.
Manic Delilah is bright and impulsive and spontaneous and exciting, always the first person to say yes to any idea, no matter how wild or dangerous or ill-advised.
Stable Delilah, on the other hand, has faked her way through every moment that has ever made her special, from the first song she performed in public to the decision to chase her dreams in LA to the first kiss she’d given Sam six years ago, the two of them tucked into a dark corner of the Abbey, drunk off their first show together.
Stable Delilah puts on the face and the personality and the beaming grin like the wacky club kid makeup Iris taught her to apply the very first time they went out together when they were eighteen with the world at their fingertips, ripe with possibilities that Delilah pretended weren’t terrifying but that left her shaky in the aftermath every time.
And Depressed Delilah…well. Every risk she’s ever taken hasn’t been with the understanding that she could fail but with the secret, shameful hope that she would.
After all, bravery is easy to fake when what you really are is self-destructive.
When what you’re hoping for is that this might be the moment something goes wrong enough to justify every cruel thing you’ve ever told yourself and more.
Across the street, Emmett has crouched down next to a small child of maybe four or five, a cherubic little blond creature of the age when they’re old enough to babble enthusiastically but too young to remember not to talk the ear off a stranger.
Even from here, Delilah can read the expression on his face, open and thoughtful and kind, his eyebrows raised as if the words coming out of that little mouth are the most interesting things he’s ever heard.
Serial killers don’t look at people like that, Delilah thinks.
She unmutes her phone.
“—and I swear to God I will get your mother on the phone if you don’t stop ignoring me, do not think I won’t, you absolute problem child, I—”
“Hey,” Delilah interrupts. “I’m getting back on the road, okay? Chill out.”
“Alone, right?”
“I’ll call you from Philly!”
“Alone, right? Delilah? Del—”
Delilah hangs up, picks up her coffee, slings her backpack over her shoulder, and heads out the door.
She’s still half a block away when the Greyhound bus pulls up to the corner. Emmett starts to join the line of people preparing to show their tickets to the driver, and Delilah quickens her pace, raising her voice to get his attention. “Emmett!”
He turns to her with obvious surprise, moving out of the line to meet her on the sidewalk. “Delilah?”
“Hi,” she says, unexpectedly breathless. “I have kind of a crazy question.”
The pundits talk about “risky behavior” in queer communities like it’s proof of concept: some kind of evidence that we aren’t just full of immoral urges, but we also can’t be trusted to make good decisions.
Safe decisions. A higher percentage of queer people do drugs than straight people; we fuck more people than straight people do; we get wasted and wild well into our thirties while our straight friends are getting married, getting settled, getting those two-point-five kids we’d have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in IVF to have ourselves.
They say it like a gotcha, but they never ask why.
Why people who are told that they’re worth less would treat themselves like they’re worthless.
Why we’d go seeking the rush of a good fuck, a good trip, a good adventure, just to feel alive in a world that wants us dead.
Is it a good idea? No, probably not, but what’s the alternative?
Lord Byron, Patron Saint of Bisexual Hedonism, once said: “The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.” Words from a man whose memoirs were said to only be fit for brothel readings, burned by his friends before they could be seen by public eyes.
Every destructive kiss, every fantasy, every thrill a risk, not even to be shared in death.
But what would you do, in pursuit of feeling alive?
—Always Here with Iris Gold, season 4, episode 6: “Risky Business”