Chapter 10 Kiss Like A
Match-strike
Bishop
She's standing.
I'm still sitting at the end of the dock with my feet over the water and she's standing and she just told me to stop wanting her from a distance and the lake is doing nothing useful about any of this.
I look up at her.
The morning light is behind her now. Her hair is still half down from last night, half the curls long gone, and she's in my shirt and her feet are bare on the old dock boards and she is looking at me like she's already decided something and she'd like me to catch up.
"Delilah."
"Don't." She says it quietly. Not angry. Just done. "Don't say my name like it's a reason to stop."
"It is a reason."
"Give me a better one."
I could. I have a list. Cole's best friend. A runaway bride. Twenty-four hours out of an engagement. A woman who just told me she's never done this before. A man with a past that has black SUVs in the driveway and worse things on the way.
I don't say any of it.
Because she's looking at me and I've been saying all of those things to myself for four years and I am so tired of being the only one in the room willing to hold the line. Tired of doing the right thing in the dark where nobody sees it and calling that a life.
She steps closer.
I should stand up. Put distance between us. Be the person I've been telling myself I am controlled, careful, someone who knows better than this.
She crouches down in front of me instead.
Eye level. Close enough that I can see the exact color of her eyes in the morning light and the way she's breathing and the precise moment she decides.
I watch it happen. The decision crossing her face like weather.
She kisses me.
Sweet for half a second. Tentative. The kind of kiss that asks a question with its eyes still open.
Then I answer it wrong.
My hand comes up before I tell it to fingers at her jaw, tilting and the kiss changes. She makes a sound low in her throat and presses forward and there is nothing tentative about her now. Nothing good-girl, nothing obedient, nothing saved-for-the-right-timeline. Just Delilah Hart kissing me like she's been waiting her whole life to do something reckless and she picked this.
She picked me.
Four years of keeping my distance. Four years of changing the subject when Cole brought up her name. Four years of being careful and deliberate and certain that what I wanted didn't matter because what I wanted wasn't mine to have.
She is kissing me like none of that was real.
I should stop it.
I don't stop it.
I pull her closer instead one hand at her jaw, one finding her waist and she comes without hesitation. No flinch, no second-guessing, just her hands flat against my chest and her mouth open and warm and certain in a way I have no idea what to do with except pull her closer still.
The dock creaks under us as she shifts her weight. I register it distantly, the way you register background noise when something more important is happening directly in front of your face.
Something more important is happening.
I've kissed women. I know what a kiss is. I know the difference between one that's going somewhere and one that's already arrived.
This one arrived the second she put her hands on my chest.
She tastes like coffee and morning and the particular recklessness of someone who has been careful their whole life and decided, finally, to stop. Her fingers curl into my shirt. Not pulling me closer she's already as close as the geometry allows just holding on. Like she needs an anchor and decided I was it.
I am a terrible anchor.
I am the worst possible choice of anchor for a woman in her situation and I know this with the same clarity I know my own name.
I kiss her anyway. Because I am apparently the man who tells himself all the right things and does none of them the moment Delilah Hart looks at me like I'm the only solid thing in her radius. Because four years of discipline evaporates in thirty seconds on a dock and I don't have it in me to be sorry about it yet.
She pulls back first.
Just far enough to breathe.
Her forehead drops to mine. Her eyes are closed. Her hands are still fisted in my shirt.
We stay there for a moment that has no good name not quite kissing, not quite stopped, breathing the same air on a dock at the edge of a lake while the town wakes up around us and neither of us says what just happened out loud.
We don't have to.
"Bishop," she says.
"Yeah."
"I'm not sorry."
I pull back enough to look at her. Her eyes open. She looks undone in the best possible way lips soft, color in her cheeks, hair more wrecked than it was five minutes ago.
She also looks completely certain.
Not reckless. Not confused. Not twenty-four hours out of someone else's life and reaching for the nearest available thing. Certain in the specific way of someone who just did the thing they'd been talking themselves out of and found out it was exactly right.
The certainty is harder to hold against than the kiss was.
"Delilah"
"I know." She eases back. Sits beside me on the dock instead of in front of me. Our shoulders almost touching. "I know what you're going to say."
"Then I don't have to say it."
"Cole." She says it for me. "The timing. Your list."
"It's a good list."
"It's a real list," she agrees. "It doesn't change what just happened."
No. It doesn't.
I look out at the water. The heron is gone moved on at some point while we weren't watching, which feels apt. The lake is bright now, the mist fully burned off, the kind of clear morning that looks like nothing happened and is wrong about that.
"I need you to understand something," I say.
"Okay."
"That can't be the beginning of something. Not right now." I stop. Find the words that are true without being cruel. "You ran from your wedding yesterday. You don't know what you want yet. You think you do, but you're twenty-four hours out and everything feels urgent and real and I don't want to be the thing you chose because it was available and it wasn't him."
She's quiet for long enough that I think I've landed it right.
"Do you actually believe that?" she asks. "Or are you saying it because it's the responsible thing to say?"
The question has the precision of someone who's been listening very carefully for a very long time.
"Both," I say.
She nods. Files it somewhere.
"Okay. I'll accept both." She pulls her knees up, wraps her arms around them. "You're not wrong about the timing. The situation is complicated. I'm a mess by most reasonable definitions." A pause. "But I've been doing the responsible thing my whole life and it got me to the back of a chapel in a dress I didn't pick, about to marry a man I didn't choose, because that was the next step on a timeline someone else drew for me."
She turns her head and looks at me sideways.
"So, I'll let you be responsible for both of us right now if that's what you need. But I want you to know I'm not confused. I know exactly what I want."
I sit with that.
I sit with her saying I know exactly what I want in the same voice she used to tell me she's a virgin, the same voice she used when she said stop wanting me from a distance steady and sure and with no performance in it at all.
The honest thing, the thing I don't say, is that I know what I want too.
Have known for four years.
The problem has never been knowing. The problem has always been the part after knowing the part where wanting something doesn't mean you get to have it, where the right answer and the true answer live in separate rooms and you spend your life standing in the hallway between them.
I don't say any of that.
I sit with her on the dock instead. Shoulders almost touching. Lake bright in front of us. The marina sounds drifting over the water an engine, voices, the ordinary noise of a world that doesn't know what happened out here this morning.
It should feel like a standoff.
It feels like the quietest I've been in years.
Then the sky cracks open.
A single firework leftover from last night, someone on the far shore burning through their last cartridge booms out over the lake. Big and gold and completely unreasonable for nine in the morning.
Delilah startles.
Then she laughs.
Not the laugh I imagine she's been producing for years at the right moments, the polite one, the one that says I'm enjoying this appropriately. This is something else entirely. Bright and sudden and completely unguarded, her face tipped up toward the water-reflected gold of it, her whole self in it for three full seconds.
Then it fades and she presses her fingers to her mouth like she surprised herself.
Looks at me sideways.
There's something in her eyes that wasn't there when she ran off that shuttle. Something lighter. Something that's been finding its way to the surface since last night and just broke through.
"Sorry," she says.
"Don't be."
She drops her hand. Let’s the last of it go.
And I think not for the first time, but more clearly than before that whoever she was before yesterday is becoming something else. Right here on this dock. And the version of her that's becoming is going to be something I have even less defense against than the one that showed up in a wedding dress.
That should scare me.
It does scare me.
I'm looking at her anyway when the headlights sweep across the waterline.
Twin beams cutting through the tree line at the far end of the access road. Moving with a deliberateness I've spent four months learning to read.
Not fast. Not lost. Not a marina customer.
Deliberate.
I'm on my feet before Delilah registers what I'm looking at.
"Bishop"
"Inside," I say. "Now."