Instrumental Emmett #2
She trails off, leaving the question horribly open-ended. Emmett regrets every single moment of this conversation and wishes they’d just guided her right through Roscoe’s door and into bed, with Emmett as firmly on the other side of the door as possible. “No.”
Delilah looks surprised. “Seriously?”
Emmett wishes for the ability to sink into the picnic table and disappear.
But of course the answer is no. If friendship requires vulnerability, requires honesty of all kinds, then surely intimacy, or romance, or anything like it requires even more.
Emmett’s body was made to be strong and capable, but they don’t even know if it’s made to—to function in those ways, and even if it is, how could they…
“I wasn’t supposed to think about it,” Emmett says quietly. “It wasn’t…Jacob told me that it wasn’t appropriate for—for someone like me.”
They risk a look back up at Delilah, and find her eyes narrowed.
“Someone like you?” she echoes. “What the fuck? There’s nothing wrong with you!
You’re—” She cuts herself off abruptly, catching her bottom lip between her teeth.
Her eyes, heavy-lidded with alcohol and exhaustion, look like a storm-dark sea in the starlight.
“You know there’s nothing wrong with you, right? ”
Emmett swallows. They were made with a purpose—to recognize any human expression, know how to respond, and match themself to every minute, unspoken request. But Delilah’s face is full of something they’ve never seen.
They want, suddenly and impossibly, to know if they could pick that expression apart. If they could just get close enough.
There’s a loud crack as a twig snaps in the fire at a nearby campsite, and Emmett startles. Delilah flinches too, and then jumps abruptly up to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have had that third drink. Whiskey always makes me stupid.”
Emmett automatically starts to stand as well, but grinds to a stop when the world twists and wobbles around them as a sharp pain lances across their side.
Their vision goes gray around the edges and they reach out for the table, unsteady, their body going liquid, unformed, and then tight enough to choke them.
Emmett puts a hand to their throat, gasps in a breath they don’t need. Sits down again. Realizes, too late, that someone is calling their name. It takes a long moment before they can say, “Delilah.”
“Jesus, Emmett!” She’s holding their shoulders, all traces of tipsy languor gone from her expression, her hazel eyes wide and golden in the lantern light. “You just scared the shit out of me! Are you okay?”
Emmett blinks twice. Their vision is already clearing.
“I was ju—” they stop, stumbling over the lie of just before it can twist around their tongue and turn itself into something they’re not allowed to say.
“I was lightheaded, but I’m all right now.
” They straighten up and away from her. “It’s late.
I just need to grab my sleeping bag and—”
“Absolutely not,” Delilah says firmly. “You’re sleeping in the van.”
Emmett freezes. “What?” The foldout bed is designed to sleep two, but a comfortable two. And Emmett has never…“No.”
Delilah puts her hands on her hips. “If you don’t want to share the bed, I’ll sleep out here. But no way am I letting you sleep outside when you just almost collapsed.”
Danger, a voice that sounds all too much like Jacob’s snaps in Emmett’s ear. They shake their head. “But you said—”
“Forget what I said.” She takes their arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Emmett is too used to obedience to protest. They let Delilah hustle them into the van, where she twists around to close the door and then to start unfolding and setting up the bed.
Emmett finds themself staring instead of helping, watching as soft white linens and knitted blankets and fluffy pillows emerge from a complicated series of hideaway cubbies, the fairy lights twined around the bedding area painting the entire interior in soft light.
The whole effect was probably designed to be very romantic. Emmett swallows. “Delilah,” they say. “You really don’t have to…”
Delilah smooths the last blanket into place and then turns to face them. “I promise to be a perfect gentleman,” she says. Her cheeks are still flushed, but not, Emmett thinks, from the alcohol. At least, not anymore. “Or, if you want, I could sleep in one of the seats up front. They recline.”
When Ruth was six and on a monthlong streak of refusing to wear anything on her feet except a pair of bright yellow rain boots, Emmett had told her that she was the most stubborn person they’d ever met.
The last twelve years hadn’t changed that opinion, but in Delilah, they think they might have met Ruth’s match.
Emmett sighs. “I’m really all right to sleep outside,” they try, one more time.
“You really almost slammed your head into a picnic table and got a concussion,” Delilah counters. She crouches down and unzips her suitcase. “Now, turn around while I change. I might be letting you into bed, but that doesn’t make this a peep show.”
Emmett’s face feels hot, and their head is fuzzy, and they have no idea whether to blame it on the dizzy spell or something…
entirely different. They turn quickly to rummage through their own bag for the pair of sleeping pants they packed, mostly for appearances, and then change into them, being careful to keep their back to Delilah the entire time.
They keep their long-sleeved tee and overshirt on. Just in case.
The bed, when they climb into it, isn’t as tight a fit as Emmett feared.
There’s plenty of space between them, and Delilah makes sure they each have their own blanket.
She even rolls another into a long log that she lays between them as a barrier, then gives Emmett an exaggerated wink at their confusion.
“To protect your modesty,” she says, her voice solemn but her eyes sparkling. She waves her phone at them. “Music okay? Or more of Iris’s podcast? You’ve been liking the history ones, right?”
“I like all of them,” Emmett says, more shyly than they mean to.
Iris has a nice voice, soothing and smooth.
Delilah has mostly been playing the episodes out of order, but Emmett especially likes the older ones because they can hear Delilah’s voice joining her friend’s. “Thank you. That would be nice.”
Delilah taps at her phone until the musical theme starts to play, then plugs it in and sets it on the counter before reaching up to switch off the fairy lights. Roscoe is plunged into darkness, except for the moonlight filtering through the curtains, casting everything in shades of blue and silver.
“Good night, Emmett,” Delilah says quietly.
Emmett takes a careful breath. “Good night.”
They hold themself still in the dark as the autumn wind rushes around the van, feeling all too conscious of Delilah just inches away, soft and rumpled in her sleeping clothes, curled toward them like an open parenthesis.
They breathe, and try to relax, and stare at the ceiling so that they don’t look at Delilah, because they’re afraid to know what it would feel like to watch her fall asleep.
When Delilah’s breathing finally softens into the even cadence of sleep, Emmett slips a hand under the hem of their shirt until they can press their fingertips to their upper rib cage. The stone beneath their fingers is rough and uneven, cold to the touch.
They thought they would have more time.
Queer bodies are a public square. Society writes stories on them, and we write back—in defiance, in harm, in power.
Our piercings and our tattoos are signal flares and self-expression, sure, but they’re also our way of claiming back some control over our stories.
A way to look at every person who thinks they know who we are, just based on how we fuck, or who we fuck, or who or how we don’t fuck; a way to meet their eyes and see the shame they think we should carry and say: No.
Because what makes our bodies ours isn’t our ink or our piercings or our clothes or the way we flag or what we carry. We take everything the world paints on us, but when we strip it away, what’s left?
We are, my loves. And that is enough.
—Always Here with Iris Gold, season 6, episode 9: “Written on the Body”