Track 14 Delilah #2
She shrugs. “Look, I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nothing you’ve said about that guy has made me like him, or think he deserved all the energy you put into making him happy.”
Emmett pulls their hand away from their chest, flexing their fingers like they’ve been caught doing something they shouldn’t, and shakes their head. “It’s…”
“Also complicated?” Delilah guesses. Emmett nods, looking so genuinely unhappy about it that Delilah feels almost guilty.
Not guilty enough to take it back, though. She knows when she’s right.
Delilah takes her guitar out after they’re finished with dinner.
Sliding open Roscoe’s side door, she perches on the edge of the van with her journal open and a steaming mug of hot chocolate with a generous pour of bourbon beside her, turning on Roscoe’s fairy lights even though the sun is only barely starting to drift toward the western horizon, the sky still more blue than pink or orange.
She tunes the guitar by ear with the ease of long practice, running her fingers over the strings and brushing her fingertips over the stylized flowers her mother painted on the body of the guitar that had been her father’s—both her parents with her in this one old, beautiful instrument.
The music comes more easily to her with a guitar in her hands, when she can put melody and lyrics together somewhere other than in her head.
She pulls her legs up to sit cross-legged and spends a blissful half hour or so just playing, old favorites and her own tweaks on the classics and, eventually, a few of the half-ready songs she’d started in the car, working out the kinks in real time as she edits a clumsy lyric here, tweaks a chord progression there.
It’s at once the most and least connected she ever feels in her body, playing like this.
She trusts her hands so much more than she has ever trusted her head, and sometimes she wonders if her hands could make music without her—just her fingers and her strings, without all the mess of her mind complicating everything that her body seems to know so instinctively how to make beautiful.
There’s probably a song there, but then, there’s probably a song in everything if she’s willing to sit down and get through the misery of looking at it.
It’s like healing a tattoo—getting through the messy discomfort of pus and blood and plasma until the itching skin peels away and leaves only vibrant color and clear lines, permanent and lovely.
Delilah plays until her fingers start cramping, getting maybe two and a half songs out of the session, which is two songs more than she had before.
She takes out her phone to record the two decently finished ones and sends them to Alex before she can talk herself out of it.
Then she shakes out her hands and puts the guitar away, lovingly tucking it into the velvet-lined case and sliding the case back into the van.
Her legs are wobbly when she hops down to the ground, one foot decidedly asleep and the other halfway there, and Delilah grimaces, shaking them out one after the other before picking up her mug of hot chocolate, which is now beyond cold, but still sweetly alcoholic.
Since she’s a waste not, want not sort of girl, she downs it and then pads across the campsite to where Emmett’s spent the last few hours at the picnic table, intently focused on a notebook.
“Hi,” she says, plopping down across from them and stretching her arms out over the table, twisting out her wrists. “I wrote a song. Two songs! I wrote two songs.”
“I heard,” Emmett says. They close the notebook and prop their chin in their hand to look at her. “They sounded good. Unless I wasn’t supposed to be listening, in which case I have no idea what they sounded like, but I’m sure they were good.”
“They were okay,” Delilah says. They were good, actually; she’s not confident about much, but she does know a good song when she comes up with one.
The question is whether the label thinks so, since they’re the ones who can gatekeep the shit out of her contract terms and production schedules, and also whether good is the same as right for this album.
She nods toward Emmett’s notebook. “What have you been up to? Am I a horrible travel buddy for not making sure you were entertained?”
Emmett shrugs. “It’s nothing much, just sketches. Something I do when I have the time. But I haven’t in a while, not since Jacob got sick, so it was nice just to be able to sit and play around for a little bit.”
Delilah raises her eyebrows and scoots forward on the bench, more eager than she probably should be, but she’s a sucker for anything even remotely resembling a secret hobby. “Can I see?”
“It’s not anything special,” Emmett says, but they slide the notebook across to her anyway.