8. Kane #2
“That’s the only reason?” I scoff. “I’ll lend you some of my nerve, then. You—”
“No!”
She snatches my wrist again and clings on hard.
“I like that you like my voice,” she mumbles. “I don’t want to know what happens when you see that my face doesn’t match.”
I turn to stone.
Some part of me wants to be angry at her for what she just said. Well, no, not at her, exactly.
But at whoever installed that sentence in her brain and made her so sure it was true.
Her husband, probably. Her sister. That whole braying room out there.
“Say that again,” I order her.
“No.”
“Say it again.”
“I said what I said.” Her hand is still tight around my wrist. “Don’t make me repeat it. It’s humiliating enough the first time.”
“It’s not humiliating.” I let my voice drop. “It’s just fucking wrong.”
“You haven’t seen me. You don’t know.”
“I know more than you might suspect.”
“Look, it’s just… I just… I’m asking you to please leave the light off, okay? I know that’s stupid, but I’m in a really fragile state right now and I just… I need that.”
Slowly, I start to peel her fingers off of my wrist one by one. It feels like plucking petals off a delicate flower.
“If the people in this house make you feel lesser-than, then they’re stupider than I ever thought possible,” I snarl at her. “I hear the fire in your voice. That’s all that matters to me.”
She laughs quietly, shamefully. “That’s a hell of a line.”
“It’s not a line.” I pull my wrist free of the last of her fingers. Slowly, so she knows I could have done it whenever I wanted. “A line would be me telling you you’re beautiful. I don’t do favors and I don’t hand out compliments to make women feel better.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Simply correcting the record.”
She breathes out. She’s been doing that this whole time, using her own breath to talk herself down off a ledge. It’s working, more or less. I can hear her getting ready to leave.
“Oh. Well, okay. Thanks, I guess.” Her feet shuffle on the tile floor. “Anyway… I should get out there before somebody sends a search party.” Then, faster, the way people say a line they’ve said a thousand times: “Not that I’m hard to find. Big girl, you know?”
She waits for the laugh.
But I’m not going to fucking laugh.
I let the joke wither and die, even as I feel her cringing in the silence.
I don’t pity her. I’m enraged on her behalf. Connor Boyd let a woman this powerful come to hate him? He left her behind for, what—some vapid fool of a sister?
I loathe him even more than I did before I arrived here tonight.
But that’s a problem to deal with later. Right now, there’s something else I’d like to address.
I look at the shimmering shape of this woman in the darkness. She’s still waiting for me to respond to her horrible joke.
All I say is…
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
She blinks. “Sorry?”
“That.” I gesture at her. “Whatever the fuck that was.”
“It was a joke,” she mutters defensively.
“Then it was a fucking terrible one. Don’t ever do that again.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend your—”
“Offend me?” I interrupt. “You don’t have to give a damn about me, sladkaya. To you, I’m nothing but a mass in the darkness. And I don’t need or want or give a shit about your apologies. No—apologize to yourself.”
“For what? It’s true.”
“Wrong.”
Her chin rises up. “How the hell would you know?”
“Have we not been a foot apart for the last ten minutes?”
“It’s dark. You don’t even know what I—”
“Do you think I don’t know what’s standing in front of me?”
She’s a fucking marvel. She’s an absolutely miraculous fucking marvel and yet she has no idea. Somebody in that living room has worked very hard to keep it that way.
Not many women would dare to do what she’s about to do.
I refuse to let the ghosts of her past talk her out of it.
“I…” But she doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Yes?”
“You… Nobody does that,” she says. “Nobody gives speeches to a stranger in the dark like that.”
“I do,” I tell her. “I just fucking did.”
She doesn’t have an answer for that. I can’t really blame her.
She’s never met a man like me before.
Then the hallway gets loud.
“Where is she? Where’s my sister? Somebody go find her.”
Somebody answers her, too far off to make out.
“Well, she’s the one who moved it up,” the voice snaps back. “So she can be the one to start it. This stupid slideshow is taking forever and my feet are killing me.”
In the dark in front of me, the woman goes still.
“That’s her,” she whispers. “That’s Vivian.”
In an instant, I know exactly what kind of woman she is. Even if I hadn’t heard what she’d done, the adultery, the disdain, I would’ve known from the second she spoke that she’s a fucking snake.
“She sounds like a delight,” I drawl. “Pity that her evening is about to take such a twist.”
She laughs. Then she straightens up. “I have to go.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean—” She hesitates. “I have to go do it.”
Her hand finds the doorknob, but she doesn’t turn it. I look at the sliver of light beneath the door and ponder my next move.
I came here to take this family’s evening apart myself.
But I just decided something:
I’m not going to.
I want to watch her do it instead.
It isn’t mercy and it isn’t patience stopping me. It’s just pure fucking greed.
What she’s about to walk out there and do to her husband will be worse than anything I had planned.
Also… I want to hear her voice just a little bit more.
“Go on, then,” I tell her. “I’ll be right here, watching. Give them hell.”
“Jesus,” she says, half-laughing and half in disbelief. “You’re a strange guy, you know that?”
“Like recognizes like.”
She nods. Then she opens the door.
The party comes in all at once—light across the tile, forty conversations, a kid shrieking, ice in glasses. The bright yellow of the kitchen falls on her back and her hair and the shoulder of a black cardigan.
I get a half-second of the shape of her before I retreat back into the bend of the wall, out of the light.
And in that half-second, a man’s voice comes over the top of everything else.
“Hey—there she is! Dee! Delilah. Babe, your mother’s been hunting you for ten minutes.”
The door swings shut.
The party dwindles back down to a hum.
I stand in the dark with the whiskey bottle by my foot and my cup up on the shelf, waiting for the show to begin.
As I do, I say her name, just to see what it does in my mouth.
“Delilah.”
Oh, that tastes good.
“De-li-lah. Delilah.”
Yes. Sweet. Demure. Pure. Perfect.
I pick up my cup and take a sip.
I’m going to enjoy this.