Track 22 Delilah
Delilah
The byway ends at Alliance, Nebraska, where it transitions back to the interstate that will take them the rest of the way to Denver.
A bright pink sticky note attached to Delilah’s generously annotated travel itinerary reminds her to “take a cute honeymoon pic by the town sign! :).” Delilah shoves the note into the bottom of her bag before Emmett can see it.
Emmett drives most of the way. They seem to be back to normal this morning, all graceful movement and gentle energy, yesterday’s shakiness gone as if it had never been there at all.
Delilah, her nerves still raw from yesterday’s heart-stopping moment of terror, had attempted to convince them to let her drive.
Emmett, in response, had wrapped an arm around her waist, scooped her up onto the front of the van, and kissed her until she was breathless.
“Okay,” she’d gasped, when they finally let her breathe. “You’ve convinced me. You’re the picture of health.”
Emmett had dropped a kiss to her cheek, then her jaw, and then the sensitive spot behind her ear. Delilah squeaked. “Thank you,” they’d said, and plucked the keys from her unprotesting fingers.
Emmett follows the directions Delilah had scribbled down on another note and stuck to the dashboard. As they turn onto I-70, Delilah says, “So, full disclosure, I should probably give you a heads-up about tonight’s hotel.”
“Oh?” Emmett glances at her, one cocked eyebrow barely visible over the rim of Delilah’s sunglasses. “What about it?”
Delilah considers the number of ways she could phrase this, then decides on, “It was Sam’s pick.”
“Ah.” They say it dryly, but with an inflection so nearly identical to Iris’s that Delilah almost cackles.
She doesn’t think Emmett has ever actually had a truly unkind thought toward another human being, but if they were going to start, Delilah suspects Sam would be on the top of the list. “To be clear, that means expensive and fancy?”
“Correct.” She’s not opposed to expensive and fancy on principle these days, even though she still finds some of the elaborate luxuries ridiculous, but she feels weirdly embarrassed about it, like Emmett might judge her for looking forward to it.
“I think we’ve earned it, though. We’ve been doing a lot of camping. ”
“We stayed at a hotel last night,” Emmett points out.
“Yes, but this hotel has a spa.” Delilah wiggles her fingers, then studies them. “And a salon, which is great. I really need to get these fixed before I just chew them off.”
“Is that your plan for the day?”
Delilah hums, considering. “Sam had booked a couple’s massage and hydrotherapy session, but I already canceled that.
” She hadn’t, actually, but she also can’t imagine Emmett being comfortable with a complete stranger touching their naked skin—and selfishly, Delilah doesn’t want to watch someone else touch skin even she hasn’t gotten her hands on yet.
“I didn’t cancel the manicures, though. Want to get one with me? ”
Emmett doesn’t take their eyes off the road, but they tense slightly—startled, Delilah thinks after a moment, but not offended. “I’ve never gotten one before.”
“They don’t quiz you first, don’t worry.
” Delilah reaches over and takes one of their hands, studying their fingers, slender and knobby at the same time.
It’s just a hand, perfectly normal, nothing mystical about it.
No trace of the rough stone she knows she could feel if she dipped her own fingers beneath the cuff of their sleeve.
“We’ll have to get recommendations on color,” she says.
“Somehow you don’t strike me as a hot pink kind of gal. ”
Emmett gives a soft laugh, shaking their hand free. “What else?”
What Delilah should be doing is holing up in the hotel room, however fancy it might be, and spending as many hours as humanly possible finishing as many songs as she can, then maybe hiding in the bathroom and recording a few demos to send to Alex.
Delilah still hasn’t told her about the new direction, more afraid to try selling Alex on the concept than she’s willing to admit.
But her brain is starting to feel fuzzy around the edges, and her fingers are cramping from how much time she’s spent writing.
If she fucks up her hands and loses the ability to play for a day, she’s screwed.
She’s earned a night off. “Definitely dinner—there’s a sushi place a few blocks away with my name on it.
And then…” She hesitates, drumming her fingers on her knees. “We were going to go to a club.”
“Oh.”
Their tone is unreadable. Delilah winces. “Not that I’d blame you if you didn’t want to go to another club with me, considering what happened last time.”
“I’m not opposed,” Emmett says. “I liked the last place. It was unexpected, but I liked it.” They look thoughtful. “Would it be similar?”
“Mm, not exactly. The last place was a bar that sometimes does dance nights. This one is more…club-club.” She likes those—too many people and too much noise for her to be anything more than one more anonymous body, the sensory overload of sound and scent and light sending the spiraling mess of her brain into quiet submission. “Would you really want to?”
“If you’re sure it won’t ruin my nails.”
The smile is audible, but the softness is too.
Emmett’s own vulnerability and uncertainty hiding in plain sight within the opportunities they give Delilah to ask for what she wants, sometimes before she even knows what that is.
It’s disorienting, how smoothly they do it, how easily.
She doesn’t know if it makes her feel grateful or sad or both.
Delilah tips her head against the window.
She thinks, Both.
Emmett does get a manicure, choosing a deep, earthy brown polish that looks lovely against their pale skin.
Delilah doesn’t manage to convince them to get glitter, but she does manage to convince them to let her make them up again before they go out.
Nothing too startling, she promises them, nothing that won’t leave them still looking like themself, but she keeps thinking of the way Emmett had changed their face, just a little, that first day, softening their angles, looking just a bit more femme.
Delilah sits them down on the closed toilet seat in the (huge, luxurious, glamorously lit) en suite bathroom and opens her makeup bag, picking through tubes and pencils and brushes until she finds what she wants.
It feels so different from that evening in Chicago, when they’d still been feeling each other out and every bit of contact between them felt foreign and almost forbidden.
Now, when she cups Emmett’s chin in her hand to gently tilt their face up, her fingertips recognize the curve of their jaw, the single freckle under their right ear, the coolness of their skin.
She clears her throat before she can get too distracted. “I was definitely right last time,” she muses aloud. “Charcoals, not blacks.”
“Why?”
“Color theory.” Delilah plucks an eyeliner pencil from the bag.
In Chicago she’d just been throwing all of Iris’s lectures on sharing cosmetics out the window because she was too focused on the novelty of what she was doing to care.
Today, with a clearer head, she decides that germ theory probably doesn’t apply to people made out of clay.
“Look up?” Emmett tilts their head obediently, and Delilah starts carefully tracing their waterline, then pauses.
“Did you make your eyelashes even thicker?” Emmett blinks, all innocent.
Delilah clucks her tongue. “I’ve corrupted you. ”
“Maybe,” Emmett says.
Delilah smiles. “The first time I dated another femme, we used to do each other’s makeup before date nights,” she says.
“I was so confused because I was used to dating guys, and I thought you were supposed to show up already looking perfect. Not that I ever felt like I looked perfect, or anything close to it. I always wanted to look like celebrities, and that was never going to happen because I weighed forty pounds more than they did.”
She flips the pencil over, uses the soft end to gently smudge the line she’s just drawn, subtly smoking it out, daring to go a little heavier than she had last time.
“She said the point of dating was to spend time together, and if she had to choose between an extra half hour together or an extra half hour alone in her bathroom, she’d rather spend it with me.
She also said you could learn a lot about someone by the way they painted their face. ”
“Like what?”
Delilah straightens up, studies her work, and starts in on the other eye.
“What they like about their features. What they don’t.
How they want to be seen and what they want to hide.
What they think about color. How they express themselves.
Nothing you couldn’t learn about someone doing something else, but she liked makeup, so she turned it into a way she got to know people.
” She steps back to check her work for symmetry, shaking her head in amusement.
“God. I haven’t thought about that in years. ”
“She sounds nice.”
“She was,” Delilah says. “Gracie Xu. We didn’t even date that long—half a semester, maybe? It’s wild what stays with you.”
“It’s hard to forget the first person who teaches you something you never realized about yourself.”
Delilah smudges out the other side, trading the eyeliner pencil for a compact of glittered blush.
She opens it and powders the brush, then strokes it over Emmett’s cheekbones, up to their temples.
It goes on more thickly than she intended and makes them look almost ethereal, some kind of faerie creature ready to coax her away from the world.
“Is that your way of saying you’ll remember me forever? ”