Chapter Seventeen #2
“Some people will say that, yes.” She wasn’t bothered by that.
“But here’s the thing, Marc—you don’t need to believe in it for it to work.
I would never tell someone to use any of this in place of medical care.
But I also believe that the two can coexist. There are reasons Reiki practitioners have been invited into hospital settings. Patients who receive it heal faster.”
“I’ve read about that,” I said. “Using Reiki in clinical environments. It’s fascinating research.”
She stared at me.
“What?”
“You read about it?”
“Yes.”
“You just …” She pressed her lips together like she was suppressing a smile. “We’re not fighting. We’re disagreeing peacefully, and you read research about energy healing. I feel like I should document this moment somehow.”
I lifted my wine glass. “To peacefully disagreeing.”
She clinked hers against it, eyes bright. “I’ll drink to that.” She took a sip and then said, “Tonight is already far better than my last five dates combined.”
The words landed with more weight than she’d intended. The moment the words left her mouth, I saw her immediate reaction—recalibration and retreat—her fingertips tapped against the table, and she bit her lip.
My hand tightened around the fork I held. The thought of her going out with someone else created an ugly feeling of jealousy within me.
“Not that this is a date,” she added quickly. “Or anything. I just meant—”
“Right.” The word felt like pressing a finger to a bruise. “Because it’s not.”
“Right.” She looked at her plate.
The quiet that settled between us was different from the comfortable one before. This one was raw and weighted with everything we hadn’t addressed between us sitting just beneath the surface.
She’d felt it too—I could tell by the way she picked up her wine glass and slowly turned it in her hand. Not drinking. Just holding it.
I thought about my dad’s face through the phone screen. “The one you like, right?”
I thought about twenty years of knowing this woman, arguing with her, and watching her from across the rooms we both happened to occupy while telling myself it was nothing.
I’d spent a lot of years being careful. Precise. Saying the correct thing at the correct time for the correct reasons. And somewhere between the wildflowers, the asparagus, and the way she’d looked at my forearms, I’d run out of patience for that particular strategy.
“What if this was one?” I asked quietly.
She blinked. Kept talking. “This food is delicious. I didn’t know you could cook—” She stopped. Looked at me. Really looked at me. “What?”
“What if this was a date?” I repeated.
The question hung in the air. A breath in, caught somewhere between an inhale and an answer—and then her mouth opened, said nothing, and closed again. For Delaney, who always had words, the silence said more than any answer would have.
“It’s okay to say no,” I said. “I’m not trying to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“I … You’re not,” she said immediately, with certainty. “I’m just—you surprised me, that’s all.”
I figured there was no version of this that got any easier by waiting. “I think, in one form or another, I’ve had a crush on you since I was twelve.”
“Marc …” She exhaled my name.
I held very still. The way you do with a nervous animal—make yourself small, make yourself steady, and let them decide.
I tried to ease the rapid beating of my heart. I tried to tell myself that I wouldn’t crack if she didn’t like me. I tried to tell myself that people got rejected everyday, and they were fine.
But this was Delaney. And I didn’t realize until this moment how much her answer meant to me. I reached for my wine. “So you were saying you were surprised that I could cook—”
“Yes,” she blurted out.
It took my brain a second to catch up. “Yes?”
“Yes,” she said again, and her hand slid across the table and covered mine. Her palm was warm. Her fingers curved around my hand. “I’m okay if we call this a date.”
Something unknotted in my chest so suddenly it nearly stole my breath. “Okay.” I turned my hand over beneath hers so our palms touched, and let my thumb trace a slow path along the edge of her hand. “Good.”
“Good,” she echoed, and the smile that broke across her face was one that she often kept locked away—it was unguarded.
She pulled her hand back eventually so she could keep eating, but I felt the absence of it immediately. Like a sudden change in pressure.
After that, the conversation moved the way it hadn’t before—freely, and without us having to work at it.
She was an only child. I was the second-eldest of four, which she found both impressive and faintly alarming.
She asked why I wanted to be a vet. I told her the real answer, not the polished one I gave at fundraisers.
She told me about how her aunt had never pushed her beliefs onto her, just offered them and left space for Delaney to find her own way—and how different that had been from a childhood of being managed and measured.
I was learning the shape of her. The parts she usually kept tucked away. Every new piece of information seemed to sew another invisible thread between us.
A loud bang from the back door interrupted whatever she’d been about to say next.
“What the hell?” She half rose from her seat.
It came again.
I set down my wine glass. I didn’t even have to look. “Chaos.”
She gasped. “How does something so small sound like that?”
I pushed away from the table and stalked to the back entrance before he could take another run at it.
I opened the door. Chaos had one hoof on the doorframe and was chewing something that had not come from the barn.
He did not stop chewing. In fact, he didn’t look remotely surprised to see me, and I realized I’d played right into his hands.
“We had an agreement you’d stay in the barn tonight,” I told him.
His answering bleat suggested we did not.
Delaney laughed—and Chaos immediately swung his head toward the sound like a compass finding north. He trotted over to her and butted his head against her hand, demanding her attention.
“Oh, does the sweet baby want some pets?” she asked, scratching between his ears as he leaned into it shamelessly. “He’s so soft.”
“He is,” I agreed. “But I don’t know if ‘sweet baby’ is the best way to describe him,” I grumbled. “He tried destroying the loveseat in my office this morning.”
“He didn’t.” She looked delighted, like it was his first milestone. She pulled him closer by the scruff of his neck and pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
We cleared the table together—Chaos underfoot the whole time—and somewhere in the middle of it, the last of the night’s formality dissolved entirely. Delaney even stole a fried caper from the serving dish. I caught her doing it, and she held my eye contact while she ate it, then two more.
I coaxed Chaos into the small downstairs guestroom with the promise of snacks. It held the crate with the elevated platform bed, a small litter box, and a television already loaded with cartoons. Then I rejoined Delaney in the kitchen.
“He has a room?”
I ran my hand over the back of my neck. “Yeah. Self-preservation measures.”
“That is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.”
She’d started the dishes while I was gone. I came to stand beside her at the sink, and the space between us shifted without ceremony into something closer—a few inches of heat, the occasional brush of an arm when one of us reached across the other.
“I usually clean as I cook, but I was nervous tonight,” I admitted.
Her hands stilled in the soapy water. She turned to fully face me, her eyes wide. “You were nervous?”
I nodded.
She gave me a small, tentative smile as she picked up a towel and dried her hands.
“Come here,” she said. “You’ve got something—” She reached up, pressing a wet paper towel gently to my cheekbone, the back of her hand grazing my jaw as she worked at whatever I’d managed to get on my face.
She was close. Concentrating. Her lower lip caught between her teeth.
The furrow between her brows. The way her wrist turned as she worked, careful and unhurried, as though she was taking her time, gauging what it felt like to touch me like this.
I’d spent most of the evening pretending to be unaffected. Every glance I’d deflected, every accidental touch I’d absorbed and moved past, every time I told myself to leave well enough alone. She agreed to a date. Nothing more.
Until now. With her fingers on my skin, the pretense collapsed.
I stepped forward. Her back met the edge of the island with a soft thud, and her breath caught; her eyes wide and dark, jumping up to mine. I braced one hand on the counter beside her.
We were close enough now that I could see the slight unevenness of her breathing.
Mine wasn’t doing much better.
I brought my free hand up, curling my fingers gently beneath her chin, tilting her face up. “Delaney.”
“Yes?” Her voice came out in a breathy whisper.
“I really need to kiss you.”
Her lips parted.
I made myself wait. “Can I?”
She nodded. A small, certain nod.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Marc. Yes. Kiss me.”
I cupped her face and closed the distance carefully—slowly, deliberately, giving her every chance to change her mind. Her eyes fluttered shut as my lips pressed to hers once, lightly, testing. Controlled, so I could determine what she wanted, what she liked. Her pleasure fueled mine.
Her hands came up to my chest, fisting in the fabric of my Henley.
That was her answer.
I kissed her the way I did most things—carefully, at first. Learning.
The soft give of her mouth, the way she tilted into it like she’d decided to commit entirely.
The kiss deepened by degrees, unhurried in a way that required more restraint than I’d anticipated.
The small moan she made against my mouth was perfection and nearly ended the restraint entirely.
Twenty years of completely ignoring this. Twenty years of filing it incorrectly, labeling it wrong, building a case for something that was never the real thing. And now her hands were fisting my shirt, and her mouth was moving against mine, and my heart rate had doubled.
I ran my tongue across the seam of her lips, and when she eagerly opened them, our tongues slid across each other seeking a rhythm that worked for us.
I pulled back just far enough to breathe. The air between us was thin. My voice came out rougher than I’d planned. “You okay?”
Delaney blinked up at me. Color high in her cheeks. Lips slightly parted. Her fingers still twisted in the fabric of my shirt. She seemed to become aware of that as her eyes dropped down briefly to her hands.
“Marc.” She exhaled my name on a short, unsteady breath. The corner of her mouth curved—slow, devastating, entirely aware of what she was doing. “If that was you holding back—” She let the sentence sit there for a moment, unfinished.
I slid my hand from her jaw to her waist. Pressed my fingertips into the soft warmth of her. Felt her shift closer in response—not away, not uncertain. Closer.
“Please don’t hold back,” she said quietly.
The words landed somewhere at the base of my spine.
For years I had been careful. Controlled. I had built distance between us and maintained it with both hands because I thought in the back of my mind, I understood that, in a way, I wasn’t ready for this to happen.
But I was ready now.
And apparently, so was she.
I tipped her chin up again, watched her eyes close, and this time I didn’t hold back at all.