36. Chapter 36
Chapter 36
Delilah
B ecause in my post-orgasmic haze I’d forgotten there is no such thing as ordering in in Fern Port, Cedric offered to go pick the food up while I dried my hair. Once that’s done, I put on my comfiest dress, one that’s such a deep pink it looks red, littered with slightly uneven embroidered cherries. It’s super stretchy and leaves my shoulder bare, which makes me feel pretty. I pad to the kitchen with Blaine in tow, who is tracking every movement with round eyes, clearly impatient to be fed.
“Here you go,” I coo as I weigh and pour kibble into his bowl, his puffy tail wagging excitedly from left to right. I wish I could ask him what he thinks of Cedric, though the fact that he follows him around and doesn’t seem surprised by his presence anymore is probably telling enough. The thought of Cedric settling on the sofa with Blaine in his lap makes me bite my lower lip into a smile. I pick up my phone to find a text from Faye.
Is Campbell at your house?
Not right now, but he’s coming soon :)
I bet he is.
Be good!
Never!
I pocket my phone with a chuckle, forever amused by my incorrigible friend. Cedric will be back soon, and at this point, it feels like every second I get with him matters. I close my eyes, smiling lightly to myself at the memories of this crazy, incredible day. When I open them again, my gaze lands on the calendar, and I sigh at the reminder I see there. Three days until the full moon peak.
I swallow hard, sudden tears prickling at my eyes. “Don’t panic,” I tell myself out loud. It’s going to be fine. It’s not the end of the world. I’ve endured worse, haven’t I ?
My phone starts vibrating with an incoming call, and I quickly dab my eyes before picking it up.
“I had a thought,” Cedric’s voice says on the other side of the phone.
“Yes, I am allergic to mustard, so that’s a–”
“What’s wrong?”
I hesitate for a second because–how did he catch that? “Nothing’s wrong,” I say as Blaine starts lapping at his water.
“It seems we’re both terrible liars.”
“I’m starving,” I add, changing the subject. “That’s not to say you need to hurry! You’re already being kind enough.”
“Delilah, I’ll figure it out whether you tell me or not. Though I was calling because I was thinking I might make a stop at the hotel.”
Not commenting on the first part of the sentence I ask, “That’s fine, but why?”
“Would you like me to stay over tonight?”
“Of course,” I reply easily.
“Good. I’ll be back soon.” And with that, the call ends. I stare at the now-black screen of my phone. Mostly, I’m confused at how Cedric can make everything feel so simple–and worried about how hard it will be to give that up.
Barely fifteen minutes later, a knock comes to the door, and unlike I would have done a few weeks ago, I don’t bother looking in the mirror before opening it.
“Hey,” I say, ushering Cedric and the huge bag of delicious-smelling food inside .
“I met the twins again,” Cedric sighs by way of hello. “They were all too curious about wherever I might be taking their alleged favorite food.”
I giggle at the image of Esther and Elaine interrogating Cedric, their blue eyes and spiky features on him like hunters with their prey.
“What did you say?”
“That I have a big appetite,” he says, leaning in to kiss my cheek. He sets the food and his bag down, then places a finger under my chin, stormy eyes roaming across my face. “Yeah, something’s still wrong.”
I know better than to deny it, though I already feel immensely better now that he’s here again.
“Fine,” I relent, though I can’t give him the honest answer he deserves. “I was thinking about you leaving. It made me a little sad.”
His brows furrow, and in the next second his arms are around me, warm and steady.
“Does it matter nothing, that I’m here now?”
I close my eyes and breathe him in. “It matters a lot,” I say into his chest.
We stay cocooned like that for a while, though I’m not sure how long. Time tends to stop when I’m around Cedric Campbell.
“The food’s going to get cold,” I say with a smile, extricating myself from the safety of his arms. “Or Blaine’s going to steal it.”
“Equally upsetting thoughts,” he says before we walk to the kitchen, and though it’s a few short steps, Cedric’s fingers still tangle with mine .
Cedric
When Marcus and I were children, and it would take him forever to fall asleep, I used to read to him. I’ve never seen my father holding a book, perhaps never even seen him in proximity of one–but our mother loves the classics. From Robinson Crusoe to The Secret Garden , her small but mighty collection was like a treasure chest to me while she still lived with us, and even more so after she was forced to leave. At one point, though, Marcus and I both knew those books inside out. Though the one flaw Joe didn’t possess was stinginess–as long as you were the fully human son, at least–and I’d had a fat bank account in my name, buying books was a sure way to make him angry, so we’d had to get creative. The school library had dictionaries for more or less any language you could think about, and I started taking some of those to Joe’s house with the excuse they were school project materials. Naturally, the English dictionary was the first I went through, which allowed me to learn many apt adjectives for Joe–and though I could never use them to his face, it was a sure path to amusement.
You could in fact say I have memorized close to the entirety of that dictionary.
But now, as I’m sitting on Delilah’s sofa, her gentle weight and one arm draped across my chest, the soft snoring of her dog at our feet as the TV drones on about couples stranded on some tropical island, I can’t help but think of one, four-lettered, simple word.
“Alyssa and Deacon should have never broken up,” Delilah says, her cheek squished against my shoulder.
“Is Alyssa the one with the dragon tattoo?”
“That’s Jenny,” she corrects me. “Alyssa is the one with the green streaks in her hair, and Deacon is– ”
“The one always carrying the fidget spinner.”
Delilah leans away to look me in the eyes, though her hands stay on my arm. “You know what a fidget spinner is?”
“I am three years older than–” Her open mouth turns into a mischievous grin.
“And you’re twiddling with me,” I add with a sigh.
“It’s hard to believe you’re the age you say you are when you use words like twiddling –”
“Shall I show you my ID?” I say, quickly shifting so I can pin her wrists to the cushions.
“No, no, I believe you,” she laughs, the sound clear and bright. Her hair haloes her lovely face, the light from the TV casting her skin pale blue. She reminds me of the sun and the moon, all at once.
“Delilah,” I say, deadly serious.
“Yeah?”
“Are you ticklish, by any chance?”
Her hazel eyes round comically at the words, and I know I have my answer. I grasp both of her wrists with one hand, the other coming to brush my fingertips against her stomach, and Delilah spasms involuntarily. “ Please, Ced –”
“Please what?” I ask, tapping my fingers just below her belly button, a strangled laugh escaping her.
“S–stop–” she laughs, tears welling at the corners of her eyes. “I will never imply you’re an old man agai–”
“Is that surrender?” I ask, placing my palm flat against the side of her ribcage.
She swallows, her breathing slowing, though the curve of her mouth still betrays her. “Yes, I surrender.”
Unable to help myself, I lean in and kiss her, my hand still pinning her arms above her head. I swipe my tongue across her bottom lip, and her lips part for me eagerly, a blossoming flower in the flesh. The sound she makes in her throat has my mind drifting to dangerous places. I move to kiss her jaw, then her neck, and though I slowly release her hands from my grasp, she doesn’t take advantage of the freedom. She keeps them above her.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” I whisper against her pulse.
She chuckles quietly, but when I look back at her, her expression is serious–so much so that it hardly looks like Delilah.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for real handcuffs,” she whispers, as if confessing.
I shake my head, my hand coming to rest on her cheek. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“I know,” she says. “But I wanted to show you–to say, that regardless, I trust you. With, without, in the dark, in the light. I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”
It’s like a blow to my solar plexus, but I cannot even begin to examine how these words make me feel, otherwise I won’t be able to speak another word all night. If I saw myself with an ounce of the gentleness Delilah does, I think I might be a different person altogether.
Out of some unspoken agreement, I back off on the sofa so that I’m not caging her anymore, and Delilah comes to rest on her elbows. She tilts her head, a small smile on her lips.
“Are you tired?” she asks, and I can see Blaine’s ears moving from the corner of my eye.
“Very,” I say honestly.
She wordlessly turns the TV off and caresses my shoulder before getting up to retrieve my bag of toiletries, taking it to the bathroom for me.
As I brush my teeth, it occurs to me that the very act of getting ready for bed in someone else’s home, somewhere I’m wanted for reasons beyond pleasure, somewhere I don’t need to look behind my shoulder all the time, is an overwhelmingly joyous experience.
When I get to the bedroom, Delilah’s already under the thin covers, smiling softly at me as she pushes them aside to make space. I pad to the bed, and when I get in, careful not to disturb a precariously perched Blaine, she turns to face me fully.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she says.
“I am wearing my most expensive pajamas.”
She grins at that, then bites her lower lip, inevitably dragging my attention to it.
“Is it weird, having me here?” I ask, willing my brain to drift to a different brand of thoughts.
She shakes her head on the pillow. “Though I think everyone has a different definition of weird.”
“What’s yours, then?”
“Hmm, let’s see. I could swear a fish winked at me once. That was pretty weird.”
“A fish?”
“Don’t sound so skeptical!”
“Skeptical is one of my favorite things to be,” I say as I close my eyes in the semi-darkness.
“I’ve been working on that, thank you for not noticing,” she says, humor in her voice. “Were you skeptical about me?”
At that, I open my eyes, turning my head toward her again. “That you could not possibly be as kind, funny, and warm as you are beautiful? Sure, I was skeptical.”
Her cheekbones darken visibly, even in the feeble yellow light coming from a lamp on her nightstand .
“I’m not sure you’d have the same opinion if you knew everything about me,” she says quietly, like a secret spoken aloud for the first time.
“Well, then, it’s a good thing I am. Sure, that is.”
She presses her lips together in a smile that’s sadder than I’d like. I can tell there is this one thing she wants to let out so bad it’s killing her, and while I know that it’s not a matter of trust in me, I wish there was anything I could do to make it easier for her to be honest with me. Which is bold, given I have secrets of my own that might make her question everything.
“I’m told I make a mean job as the big spoon, would that be alright?” she says.
I gently grab her arm in response, turning to the side so that she can sling it around my waist, her front pressed to my back. My hand envelopes her small one, and she sighs contentedly against me.
“Goodnight, Cedric,” she says, her voice muffled by my shirt.
“Goodnight, Delilah.”
As I hold her, her heartbeat a steady reassurance against the current of my thoughts, I think that perhaps telling her the truth might not be as disastrous as I fear. Delilah’s soft breathing makes me drift into the most peaceful sleep I’ve ever known.