Track 17 #3
Emmett is quiet for another long moment. “Yes,” they say at last. “I could have. If he asked me to.”
“But he didn’t?” Emmett shakes their head. “And you didn’t volunteer.”
They look up at her, expression unreadable, and finally say, “No.”
“Why?”
Emmett hesitates. Delilah takes their hand again, more cautiously this time, and Emmett wraps their fingers around hers.
Delilah wants to slip her other hand into the sleeve of their sweatshirt, to stroke the skin with her fingertips until she finds the part of them fading away from her before she can even decide if she wants them to stay.
“Because I didn’t know what he’d do,” they whisper, so softly that Delilah almost can’t make out the words, for all that their heads are tipped together, nearly temple-to-temple, like children sharing secrets in the dark. “And I wanted to live.”
Emmett says it like a confession, so quietly it hurts to hear. “And there’s nothing you can do? Now, I mean? To stop it?”
Emmett shakes their head. “It was an order. I have to.”
“But isn’t there something—he had all those notes, didn’t he?
Those journals? Couldn’t we—” The words come out wild and desperate, a jumble of disorganized half-sentences, and she doesn’t really even know what she’s asking, but—“It just…If you want to live, you should be allowed to live. Why does he get to decide what happens to you when he’s not even here anymore? ”
“ ‘But I am a worm, and no man,’ ” they say, clearly quoting. “Psalm twenty-two. And a regular reminder. I was never—it was never supposed to be my choice.”
Delilah wants to pull Emmett’s head down to her shoulder, wrap her arms around them, and tell them she will never, ever let anyone hurt them again.
Instead, she says, “This is fucked.”
Emmett snorts.
“No, I mean it. Here’s me, casually suicidal as hell, bitching my way through staying alive—”
“You’re really a little more nonchalant about that than I think you should be.”
She ignores that. “And meanwhile, you actually want to be alive, but you’ve got this fucking…compulsion on you that’s dragging you to your stony ritual death. How is that fair?”
“It’s not.”
They sound tired, a soul-deep weariness in their words that Delilah knows intimately—the kind of exhaustion that can’t be pushed through or pushed aside. Only endured. “I’m sorry.”
Emmett squeezes her hand. “I know.”
Delilah makes herself breathe, the same way she’s been making herself breathe every day for as long as she can remember. In and out, in and out. “Let’s go to bed,” she whispers.
Emmett takes her hand, and lets Delilah tug them down.
They kiss her slowly at first, uncertainty giving way to a growing surety when Delilah winds her arms around their neck and pulls them closer.
She steps back until her legs hit the bed and she sits down, drawing Emmett with her, and when they’re bending over her, she scoots farther onto the mattress until she can lie back.
Emmett follows her down onto the bed, catching their weight on one elbow, their other hand carefully cupping the side of Delilah’s face, tilting her up to them.
It’s so different from kissing Sam. With Sam, Delilah had had so much practice, so much familiarity.
She never had to ask questions because she knew every place to put her mouth, to brush with her fingertips, to bite down.
Emmett is new, and different, and she doesn’t know what they have under their clothing—or if it even stays the same all the time, and isn’t that a thought—but she wants to, her body tense and shivery with it.
She breaks the kiss just enough to lift her head and lean up to kiss the side of their neck, the soft skin under their ear, and gets a tiny, deeply gratifying gasp in response.
It makes her bolder, and she slides her hands under their shirt again, skimming her fingers along their ribs.
Their breathing catches when she reaches the rough, ragged stone, and she pauses, craning her neck to look up at them. “Should I—should I not?”
Emmett swallows visibly. They look young and unsure and—worried? “It’s not…it’s not normal.”
Not human, Delilah hears. She spreads her fingers so she can press her palm against their ribs and says, “No. But it’s you.”
Their lips part, surprise or confusion or uncertainty or all of the above.
And then they lean down and kiss her again.
Nothing too serious, they had agreed, when Delilah invited them to bed, and she’d meant it.
They keep their clothes on, their hands only wandering over fabric.
Emmett’s fingers brush delicately, almost shyly, over the swell of Delilah’s breasts until she takes their wrist and presses their hand more firmly against her.
She catches hold of the waistband of Emmett’s sweatpants, pulling, guiding, and Emmett gets the hint, moving between Delilah’s legs in a slow, shuddering grind that has her body tightening and Emmett’s shaking in response.
She doesn’t know how to think about what they’re doing, but somehow it feels serious, feels important.
Their movements are rudimentary, just caresses and friction and deep, wet kissing, but all the same, Delilah feels dizzy.
They’re still kissing when Delilah comes, unexpected and hard, heat and pressure giving way to a gasping release.
Emmett sucks in a sharp breath and chokes out a broken “Oh—” that borders on a sob, and Delilah drags them back down as they shudder against her, fingers digging into her shoulders, trembling like they might break down and cry.
“You’re here,” she whispers. Emmett tucks their head into the crook of her neck, damp skin on damp skin, and she strokes their hair.
They’re heavy where they’ve let their weight drop down onto her, but she can’t imagine asking them to move.
She doesn’t know why she says it, only that it feels right. “It’s okay. You’re still here.”
Outside, it starts to rain.