Chapter 9 Dock Light
Confession
Delilah
He doesn't answer me right away.
He looks at me for a long moment long enough that I feel it move through me and then he picks up his keys from the counter.
"Come on," he says.
"Where?"
"Somewhere that isn't this kitchen."
I follow him through the back of the house, out a door I haven't used yet, down a narrow path between two overgrown hedges that opens onto a wooden dock stretching out over the lake. It's private back here. No road access, no sight lines from the marina lot, just the water and the morning and the particular quiet of a place that belongs to nobody but him.
The dock is old but solid. Dark wood, worn smooth at the edges, the kind of worn that comes from years of use rather than neglect. A single cleat at the far end, no boat attached. Just open water beyond it, the lake spreading out wide and silver and indifferent to everything happening on its shore.
He sits at the end. Feet hanging over the edge.
I sit beside him.
Not close. But closer than we've been all morning.
The lake is still doing what it was doing lapping softly, reflecting a sky that's gone from gray to pale blue while we were inside arguing. A heron stands in the shallows to the left, absolutely motionless, like it's been there since the beginning of time and plans to stay.
I take a breath.
Then another.
My shoulders drop about two inches. I hadn't realized how high I'd been holding them.
"Better?" Bishop asks.
"Getting there."
He nods. Looks out at the water. He's good at this at sitting in silence without filling it. Most people can't do that. Most people treat quiet like a problem to solve.
Bishop treats it like weather. Something you sit inside until it passes or changes.
I watch the heron for a while.
"I owe you an apology," I say.
He turns his head.
"In there." I nod back toward the house. "I was, I wasn't wrong, but I was harder about it than I needed to be. You made a call to protect me and I turned it into a referendum on every man who's ever tried to manage my life." I look at my hands. "That wasn't entirely fair."
"It was fair enough."
"Bishop"
"You weren't wrong." He says it simply. No cushion around it. "I told you that."
"You did." I pause. "I'm not used to that."
"To what?"
"Someone just agreeing. When I push back." I pick at a splinter on the dock edge. "Graham would explain. At length. Until I understood why he'd been right all along and I'd just been confused. My mother does the same thing. Softer. But the same architecture."
"That's not a disagreement," Bishop says. "That's a performance."
"Yes." The word comes out with more relief than I expect. "That's exactly what it is. And I've been performing back for so long I forgot there was another way to do it."
He doesn't say anything to that. Just lets it land where it needs to.
The heron hasn't moved. I respect that about it.
"Can I ask you something?" I speak.
"You're going to anyway."
"Probably." I turn to face him slightly. He's still looking at the water. The morning light does something to the line of his jaw, the ink climbing his neck, the careful stillness of him that I keep trying to read and keep finding more of than I expected. "How long have you actually known who I am? Not just, Cole's friend. Me. Delilah."
He's quiet for a beat.
"Four years," he says. "Give or take."
"Cole talked about me."
"Cole talked about you the way people talk about something they're proud of." A pause. "Every time we spoke. Which wasn't often. But when we did."
I think about that. About Cole mentioning me to his older brother who never came to family things. About Bishop filing it away somewhere and never doing anything about it. About how many times I must have come up in a phone call he took standing somewhere exactly like this alone, outside, one eye on the water.
"Did you ever want to?" I ask. "Meet me. Properly."
He looks at me then. Really looks.
"No," he says.
I blink.
"I made sure not to." His voice is even. Honest in the way that costs something to produce. "I'd heard enough to know I had no business wanting to."
The word wanting sits between us on the dock.
I leave it there for a moment. Let it breathe.
"I'm a virgin," I say.
He goes very still.
Not the controlled stillness. The other kind. The kind that happens when something lands in a place that wasn't braced for it.
"I don't know why I just said that." I look back at the water. My face is warm but I don't take it back. "Except that it feels relevant. To the conversation we're not quite having."
He doesn't speak.
I let the silence sit. The lake fills it small waves, the creak of the dock, a bird somewhere in the tree line doing something insistent and tuneless.
"I've dated," I say finally. "I was engaged, obviously. But there was always a reason to wait. The right time. The right moment. The right level of certainty that never quite arrived." I shake my head. "Graham and I were together for two years and I always found a reason. Looking back, I think my body knew something my brain was still arguing about."
"Delilah."
"I'm not telling you because I want something." I make myself look at him. The effort it takes him to hold still right now is visible, if you know where to look. "I'm telling you because I'm twenty-seven years old and I've spent my entire life doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons and I have nothing to show for it except a wedding dress on a chair and a phone full of missed calls I'm not ready to answer."
I stop. Breathe.
"I'm tired of saving myself for a timeline that was never mine to begin with."
Bishop is looking at me with an expression I can't fully name. It's not pity. It's not surprise exactly. It's something more careful than either of those things. Something that's working very hard to stay where it is and not become something else.
"You deserve to choose," he says quietly. "Whatever that looks like. Whenever that is. On your terms."
"I know that." I hold his gaze. "I'm just not sure I've ever actually believed it before now."
The water moves beneath us. Small, patient waves against the dock pilings. Somewhere down the shore a boat engine turns over, idles, cuts out. The heron finally moves one slow step to the left, then stillness again.
We sit with all of it for a while.
"Tell me," I say eventually. "What you said before that you made sure not to meet me properly. Because you'd heard enough to know you had no business wanting to." I keep my voice steady. "How long has that been true?"
He looks at the water.
"Bishop."
"Since the first time Cole mentioned your name." He says it to the lake, not to me. "Which was four years ago. Which was also the first time I told myself to leave it alone."
"And the second time?"
"Every time after."
Something moves through my chest. Warm and a little like grief and a little like recognition all at once.
"You've wanted me for four years," I say.
"I've been telling myself not to for four years." He finally looks at me. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
He holds my gaze. Doesn't answer. Which is its own kind of answer the space where a denial should be and isn't.
I wait, because I'm learning that Bishop Morgan will say the true thing if you give him enough room to get there.
"I hated it," he says finally. Low. Like he's pulling the words up from somewhere he doesn't usually reach. "Every time Cole mentioned you. Every time I almost asked how you were and stopped myself. I hated that I couldn't." He stops. Jaw tight. Starts again. "You were off limits for every reason I could name and I still had to work at it. Every single time."
The dock is very quiet.
I look at him. At the effort it cost him to say that. At the way he's already bracing for whatever comes next, already deciding this was too much, already reaching for the distance he keeps like a tool he knows how to use.
He's going to put the wall back up.
I can see him deciding to.
I stand before he can finish building it.
He looks up at me.
I take one step toward him. Close enough that he'd have to move deliberately to keep the distance between us.
"Then stop wanting me from a distance," I say.