Track 13 Delilah
Delilah
[excerpt from a Rolling Stone interview]
Okay, so imagine: You have a week off—
Knight: It’s too bad this is for the print edition, I’m really doing the eyebrows.
Ha, ha. You have a week off, and you can do whatever you want. What’s on the agenda?
Cohen: Are we together or on our own?
Knight: You wouldn’t want to spend our spontaneous week off together?
Cohen: I didn’t say that. She’s doing the eyebrows again, are you writing that down? Write down the eyebrows or I’m going to come across like a bad person.
Would the answer be different?
Knight: It would be more romantic.
Cohen: Or at least more exciting.
Which of you is the exciting one?
Cohen: (immediately begins to laugh)
Knight: She’s doing that so you think it’s me, but don’t let those big cow eyes fool you. If we get an extra hour off, she’s already reaching for the tequila. But let me tell you, she makes a mean margarita.
Later, Delilah won’t be sure exactly where things got out of control.
Staying overnight in Chicago was always part of the plan.
Delilah’s concession to Sam’s love of luxury vacations was agreeing to let her pick a hotel every few days as they made their way west, and since they’d been looking to barhop across the city anyway—Chicago being one of the very few cities that still has more than one lesbian bar—it had seemed pretty reasonable that they wouldn’t want to stumble back to the van when they were tipsy and horny and still high on honeymoon bliss.
Delilah had forgotten about canceling the honeymoon bliss, which is probably why, when she opens the door to the hotel room, there’s a bottle of champagne chilling on the entryway table and a spray of rose petals strewn across the bed.
Emmett gives her a wary look, but Delilah just drops her bag, unscrews the wire cap, and pops the bottle with the practiced ease of someone who worked wedding receptions all through high school—which she did.
“Not that I was supposed to be touching the champagne,” she tells Emmett as she pours them each a flute. “One of the barbacks taught me after we hooked up in a storeroom.”
“You’ve lived a fascinating life,” Emmett deadpans, clinking their glass against hers.
Delilah has her first glass of champagne in the entryway with Emmett, then makes sure they’re comfortably ensconced on the sitting area sofa with the book they picked up in Philly while she takes advantage of the oversized tub in the en suite bathroom to run an ostentatious bubble bath.
She pours in every bottle of fizzing soap she can find and refills her glass before locking herself in the bathroom.
She spends a relaxing hour soaking away all the cramps and stiffness from days on the road as she responds to a choice few of Alex’s dozens of messages—ignoring the ones demanding an explanation for the clips already surfacing from the Hall of Fame—and then video-calls her mom while sending Iris an unnecessary number of photos from the last twenty-four hours.
She’s pink all over and more than a little tipsy by the time she makes her way back into the main room.
Delilah blames the steam from the bathroom for the way her face goes even hotter at the look of warm amusement that blooms over Emmett’s face at the sight of her.
Delilah orders them both room service for dinner, a decadent meal full of comfort foods Sam would absolutely have frowned at while muttering about macros and saturated fats.
And then, because thinking about what Sam would have thought about dinner makes her think about her original plans for the night, Delilah props her chin in her hands, looks Emmett over, and says, “Have you ever been clubbing?”
Emmett’s expression goes from comfortable and content to incredibly alarmed so quickly that Delilah almost laughs. “Have I—what?”
“Clubbing,” Delilah says. “Gone out dancing, at a club. With or without alcohol. This is a rhetorical question, by the way, you can stop looking at me like that. I was using it to segue into asking if you want to go clubbing.” Emmett looks bewildered.
Delilah scoots her chair a bit closer to theirs. “Do you want to go clubbing?”
“Um,” Emmett says, “I—” They stop, biting their lip.
Delilah feels just a bit like a lion stalking an antelope that’s been separated from the herd as she leans forward. Except the look in their eyes is less baby antelope and more baby lion that might also want to come on the antelope hunt, and Delilah lowers her voice to a conspiratorial murmur.
“I’m just saying,” she says, “Jacob would probably hate it.”
Emmett’s gaze snaps to hers. They open their mouth—their teeth have made visible imprints on their lower lip—and then close it.
The lip goes under the teeth again. Delilah waits.
“What,” Emmett says finally, “do you wear for that?”
Baby lion, Delilah thinks, and grins. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The answer, it turns out, is not much. Emmett’s backpack contains more books and papers than clothing, but they’re remarkably sanguine about Delilah poking through what’s there.
She finds a decent shirt and a pair of dark-wash jeans, then bullies Emmett into the still-steamy bathroom to change while she trades her own fluffy hotel bathrobe for a minidress that hugs the curves of her breasts and hips, shimmying into a pair of spandex shorts to keep her inner thighs from chafing.
She’s peering into the mirror to determine whether or not the shorts peek out from under the hem of the dress when Emmett steps out of the bathroom.
Their face looks different again, just slightly more androgynous, changed in a way Delilah knows has happened but can’t find words to describe. She focuses on that instead of thinking about how their legs look in the close-fitting jeans, and grabs her makeup bag off the table.
“Perfect,” she tells them, wagging the bag in their direction. “How do you feel about eyeliner?”
Forty-five minutes and a short taxi ride later, they’re tucked together against the bar at Nobody’s Darling, waiting for the bartender to come back with their second round of cocktails.
Well, Delilah’s second round of cocktails; Emmett has been quietly nursing their first and looks like they’ll be perfectly happy to do that all night.
A DJ is setting up in a booth across the room, and Delilah has a few seconds to remember that she had planned to come for an event night when there’d be music and dancing, to complement the drinks, and then nearly spits out her drink, looking up at Emmett in alarm.
“Oh my God,” she says. “It’s Friday.”
Emmett blinks at her over the rim of their glass, and Delilah gets momentarily distracted by their eyes, now gently rimmed in liner.
She’s still a bit shocked at how willing Emmett had been to let her make up their face for the night.
She’d distracted herself from their wide, trusting look and slightly-parted lips when she’d tilted their chin up so she could work by allowing herself to be irritated that their skin really is as flawless as it looks, and deciding that their eyelashes should be illegal. “Yes,” they say slowly. “I know.”
“Are you—should I have made sure you could be doing Jewish stuff tonight?” She grabs her phone in mounting panic. “It’s late, but there might be a synagogue that does their Friday night services on a weird schedule? I could check—”
“Delilah.” Unexpectedly, there’s a soft laugh curling around the edges of her name, and Delilah glances up from her phone to see them watching her with a small smile.
They’d lost the button-down for the evening, at Delilah’s nudging, and exchanged it for the nicest shirt Delilah could find in their backpack, a henley that makes their shoulders look broader and stronger, in contrast with the softness Delilah’s makeup kit brought out in their face.
Emmett had carefully unclipped their kippah before they left the room, tucking it and their tzitzit into a cloth bag inside their backpack.
Then, to Delilah’s surprise, they’d even let Delilah tousle their curls with some of her hair products, loosening them into a soft, faux-messy tumble.
“It’s fine. I mean, that’s what I would have been doing if I were at home.
But it was expected of me. I’ve never had the option to choose before.
” They look around the room and then duck their head, an absentminded, almost shy movement.
“I think I would have chosen something like this, if I could have. At least once.”
“Oh,” Delilah says.
She’s saved from having to say anything else by the arrival of another round for Delilah.
The bartender gives Delilah a quick wink to let her know that she’s been recognized, but everyone’s going to be cool about it.
She takes her glass and smiles as brightly as she can, making a note to double her tips.
Sam always made going out to bars and clubs a thing.
Hours of getting dressed up and perfectly styled like they were going to an awards show instead of out for a drink, sometimes even having someone call the paparazzi in advance just so they’d be seen out together.
Delilah had always just wanted to enjoy being out and having fun, but the second she caught sight of a telescope lens or a raised phone camera, she always ended up spending the rest of the night on edge, convinced that a photographer was going to slip someone twenty bucks to pour a drink on her just to get a picture of her breasts under a soaked-through dress.
It had only happened once, but once had been more than enough.
But this feels different. Private, for all that they’re in public.
Delilah likes not knowing whether someone’s there just to take her picture, likes not constantly looking over her shoulder, hyperaware of how she’s holding her body or what her hair looks like or what she’s doing with her face.
She’s not worried about a camera catching her at an unflattering angle that makes her round face look rounder or gets the chubbiest side of her arms.
Tucked up to the bar next to her unexpected sidewalk-savior-turned-maybe-friend, surrounded by a faceless crowd of women and femmes and queers, the DJ just starting to turn up the volume of their set to shift the mood from cocktail lounge to club, Delilah feels anonymous in a way she hasn’t in months. Maybe years. She feels safe.
It’s a heady feeling. She wants to do something self-indulgent and stupid and wild, something that’s a clear fuck you to practicality and good life choices.
She wants to have six more drinks. She wants to flirt with the bartender.
She wants to find the hottest person in the room, drag them onto the dance floor, and kiss them.
She wants to let a stranger finger her in the bathroom like she’s a college kid again, making bad decisions and learning all the wonderful, terrible, overwhelming things her body can do, and then doing them all over again until she’s perfect at every one of them.
Instead, she nudges Emmett. “Do you dance?”
Emmett gives her a deer in the headlights look. “What? No.”
“Come on,” she wheedles. “Just for a bit!”
“Absolutely not,” they say.
Delilah finishes her drink, manages to catch the bartender’s eye to signal for another one, and turns back to Emmett with her most pleading expression, the one that always makes Alex roll her eyes and Iris shove her face away with a tart Put that away, you know I don’t speak bottom.
“You’re going to abandon me to fend for myself out there? ”
“You could be very brave about it,” they say. Delilah tries to intensify her pout, and Emmett’s face twitches in obvious amusement. “Does that face usually work for you?”
“Nine times out of ten,” Delilah says cheerfully, standing on tiptoe to take her refill from the bartender. “Why, is it working now? Or are you lucky number ten?” She clicks her tongue. “I knew I shouldn’t have put that eyeliner on you. You’re too pretty and too powerful.”
Emmett rolls their eyes, but the flattery seems to be enough. “One dance,” they say. “Do you want to finish your drink first?”
Delilah considers it, then shrugs and downs her drink in one go.
It’s a mistake, and she knows it, but in for a penny in for a pound, or whatever the saying is.
She puts the glass down on the bar, puts an extra twenty dollars in the tip jar, and, taking Emmett by the hand, pulls them into the crowd.