Track 14 Delilah
Delilah
Delilah’s hangover the next morning rivals the one she woke up with the day after she was supposed to get married.
The whole world is bleary and itchy and terrible as she follows Emmett to the checkout desk at the hotel and then out to Roscoe, clutching the takeout cup of coffee they brought her in both hands like a lifeline.
Emmett is being lovely, because of course they are.
They woke her up an hour before checkout with a bottle of Tylenol and a glass of water, gently but firmly ushered her into a shower, and packed up Delilah’s bag as well as their own.
By the time Delilah got out of the bathroom, dressed in clean clothes and feeling marginally less like she was on the brink of death, they’d had a cup of coffee waiting.
“You’re being very nice about all of this,” she mumbles, climbing into the passenger seat. Emmett had held out a hand for the keys, a pointed request, and Delilah had handed them over without protest. “Considering, you know. Everything.”
“You weren’t so bad.” Emmett flips through the maps and itineraries Delilah left on the dashboard the day before, finds the correct one, and studies it for a few moments before giving a self-satisfied little nod that Delilah doesn’t think she was meant to see and turning the key in the ignition.
Delilah snorts. She has vague memories of a failed kiss and a decisive rejection, but everything gets blurry after that, which is probably what she deserves.
She pushes her sunglasses up so she can rub at her eyes, then winces at the flare of sunlight and shoves them back onto her nose. “What happened after we left the club?”
“You were fine,” Emmett promises. They look more masculine today, she can’t help but notice.
The lines of their face are sharper and stronger, the shadow along their jaw is more pronounced, and their shoulders even look broader somehow, though maybe just because of the slightly boxy cut of their shirt.
“That is not reassuring.”
Emmett shakes their head, but they don’t quite meet her eyes as a slight flush darkens their cheeks.
“No, really. You piled all the pillows into a nest, cried a lot, wrote a bunch of stuff in your journal you wouldn’t let me see, bullied me into calling room service for, and I quote, ‘the biggest ice cream sundae they could legally bring you,’ and then fell asleep halfway into eating it. ”
“Jesus,” Delilah says, mortified. “Next time please just leave me to die.”
Emmett laughs, backing Roscoe out of the parking lot. “It’s a two-hour drive to the park. You should get some more sleep.”
Delilah shakes her head, snuggles down into her seat, and props her feet on the dash the way her mom always told her would someday get her legs broken into teeny tiny splinters.
Delilah always secretly hoped it would actually happen, so that she’d have an excuse to be as miserable as she always felt.
“I’ll throw up if I close my eyes and put my head back,” she says, pulling out her phone.
She puts on Iris’s next episode, one she only vaguely remembers listening to before—it was one of the first episodes Iris put out after Delilah had to give it up, and it had felt too raw at the time.
It’s experimental, straddling the lines between essay and fiction and historical analysis—the kind of thing you get to play with when your art is a passion project, not something tied up in contracts and charts and producers and studio fees.
Delilah loves her career, but sometimes she misses when it was just about the music, the magic of turning poetry into song. She can’t remember the last time it felt like that.
She doesn’t mean to doze off, but the next thing she knows she’s opening her eyes to the sound of wind rushing through Emmett’s open window, bringing with it the scent of clean air, trees, and—she sniffs—fresh coffee.
Delilah opens her eyes and straightens up in her seat to look around, and Emmett lets out a laugh beside her.
“Hi, sleeping beauty,” they say, glancing at her with a quick grin. “You slept right through the drive-through a little while ago, but that coffee’s new.”
“I would die for you,” she says, with perfect truth, picking up the fresh cup from between their seats. It’s still hot to the touch, and she inhales the steam with greedy delight. “Oh my God. Thank you.”
Emmett waves her off. “We should be hitting the park in twenty minutes or so, but according to your notes there’s a supermarket pretty close by. Did you want to stop and pick up something for dinner?”
Delilah takes a sip, scalds the shit out of her mouth, and spends a few seconds fanning her tongue before managing, “Yeah, we should. It’s a state park, so it’s not a get food there kind of thing.”
“Going to try and see how Roscoe’s kitchen handles?”
She snorts. “I was thinking more along the lines of picnic food,” she says. “Though I appreciate the optimism.”
In the store, they end up with a mix of sensible provisions and a pile of junk food so large that Delilah’s teeth start hurting just looking at it.
Emmett eyes their shopping basket a bit skeptically before briefly disappearing, leaving Delilah to contemplate the selection of Little Debbie snacks.
They reappear a few minutes later with an armful of Gatorade and a box of mixed-flavor electrolyte powder packets.
“I feel like you’re implying something about my hydration levels,” Delilah says, grunting slightly at the added weight as Emmett drops the lot into the basket.
“Who’s implying?” Emmett takes the basket from her easily, settling it into the crook of their elbow, then twisting the cap off one of the bottles of Gatorade. “You’re dehydrated. Here.”
Delilah makes a face at them but takes it. “We didn’t pay for it yet.”
“We’re going to, and you’re stalling,” they say. “Drink up, or next time I won’t stop for coffee while you’re sleeping, and you’ll have to drink whatever’s cold and leftover in your original cup.”
“Yikes,” Delilah says, and chugs half the bottle. Emmett laughs, turning her gently by the shoulder and guiding her out of the aisle, one hand at her back, just enough contact for her to feel like she won’t get lost.
Their campsite at Starved Rock State Park is simpler than the one outside of Philadelphia—enough so that Emmett raises their eyebrows at Delilah as they climb out of Roscoe to get set up.
The layouts of the sites aren’t too different from the ones at the campgrounds they’ve stayed at so far, firepits and picnic tables and roughly evened ground where a camper can be hooked up to electricity, but the sites are more rustic, a little less refined.
This campground is definitely intended for real campers more than for casual vacationers, but hey, they can pretend to be real campers for a night.
Delilah sets her latest coffee on the ground between her feet so that she can stretch, trying to twist the last of last night’s kinks out of her hips and shoulders and rolling her neck until it cracks.
“Ow.” She cracks one eye open to find Emmett watching her, and points a finger at them. “Say nothing.”
Emmett raises their hands, a wry smile tilting their mouth up at the corners and the slightest twinkle in their eyes. “I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking it,” Delilah says, but she gives herself another full-body shake and straightens up, putting her sunglasses back on and turning to pick up her coffee.
“I need to walk a bit. I think there’s a visitor center with a little museum and stuff—do you want to go check it out?
” She looks back at Emmett and finds them rubbing at their left arm through their sleeve.
There’s a furrow between their brows she’s never seen before. “Emmett? You okay?”
“What?” They glance up at her, dropping their hand like they’ve been burned. “I’m—it’s all right. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Okay,” she says slowly, trying to figure out if they’re being cagey or not.
“Well, come on. Oh wait, I want my jacket.” She eyes them for a moment, studying their face.
There’s more of a chill in the air at this altitude, and Emmett looks a bit paler than they had before getting out of the van. “You should get yours too.”
They spend the rest of the afternoon in relative silence, wandering from the visitor center to some of the easier walking trails and then back to their own little campsite, where they fiddle with Roscoe’s induction stove until they manage to boil water for a pot of hot chocolate and put together a scrappy dinner of sourdough bread and cheese and fruit and an assortment of differently flavored chips that Delilah found in a novelty section of the grocery store.
Delilah tells Emmett about growing up reading fantasy novels and how she’s always sort of believed that this was the world’s perfect combination of foods—not counting the chips—and Emmett tells her about taking Jacob’s younger children on Sunday picnics in Prospect Park to give Jacob and his wife some quiet afternoons together, until Noah got too old to want to spend time with his sort-of sibling instead of hanging out with his friends.
“Sounds like a little shit, honestly,” Delilah says, making herself a miniature sandwich of bread and cheese and sliced apple. “If I had an older sibling, I’d want to spend all my time with them.”
Emmett’s smile is small, sad, and a little wistful. “Maybe,” they say. “Or maybe you’d get too old and cool for them too.”
“It sounds like Ruth still likes you, though,” Delilah points out. “Isn’t she the one who’s been blowing up your phone?”
Their smile fades. Emmett looks down at their plate, one hand drifting to the side of their chest, above their heart—not in shock, or mock despair, but as if something hurts. They rub almost absently at the spot, shaking their head. “She cares, very much. But it’s complicated.”
“Because her dad was an asshole?”
That gets her a startled, almost horrified look. “Delilah.”