Chapter 4 Deli
Deli
“There’s my girl.”
Trey Evans held out his hand, and Deli felt the expected gravitational shift tug her feet faster—like she wasn’t bound to the earth’s core, but to his.
Trey wasn’t the small-town quarterback or the local-hero type.
He was cunning and sharp—the guy who taught you how to roll a cigarette or convinced you to skip class while he slipped through a back door.
He’d had mousy brown hair and pale skin when Deli met him as a teenage transplant to LA, but after years in California his colors had bled into each other in that sun-kissed surfer-boy way that begged for summer romance.
And when he spoke, his Georgia accent was almost imperceptible—unless he wanted to drip through a person like sweet tea and stick them to his purpose.
Deli limped across the parking lot as he stepped out of shadow.
His gaze left a trail of goosebumps in its wake as he scanned her from head to toe.
For the thousandth time in her life, Deli’s head lightened and her heart quickened at the sight of him, the sound of him, the way she didn’t feel real until he walked into a room.
“Wow,” Trey said as the icy touch of his attention flicked from her lips to her eyes to her lips again. While the rest of him was warm, his eyes were rounds of wild tundra. “Just . . . wow.”
It wasn’t convenient—her love for Trey Evans—but Deli had been quietly beholden to him since the day they’d met as kids. But she’d become an expert at forcing the blush from her face under his watching, hungry eyes. She knew to hide her hope over the promise of stolen moments.
She’d almost gotten over him once.
About six months before, Deli had finally started to believe she could move on.
Even though she’d loved him for so long, and even though there had been so many moments Trey touched her or looked at her or spoke to her the way only lovers did, it had started to hurt too much.
But if she told him how badly she wanted to be more than friends, she knew she might lose him entirely.
Every time she plucked up the nerve to say You see it, too, right?
You love me, too, right? she’d have a vision of their lives buckling under the weight of an anvil with love scrawled across it in messy letters that she’d dropped into the fragile arms of their friendship, and she’d chicken out.
She couldn’t live without Trey’s good-morning texts, or his calls from LA traffic, or his refrigerator he let her stock with her favorite gin.
She wouldn’t recognize herself in a universe where Trey Evans wasn’t the first person she wanted to tell things to.
She didn’t want to know what life would be like if she broke it all.
So Deli had decided it would be better to remind herself it wasn’t meant to be instead of entertaining hope when they watched movies on her couch or sang along to their favorite songs driving down the PCH.
It was better to cage her heart until it stopped struggling than let it run itself into the ground chasing a man who’d only admitted to loving her in her head.
Deli needed to move on. And she’d gotten so, so close.
Then Trey Evans had kissed her.
It was a Tuesday. Deli had been trying so hard to move on, so she hadn’t answered the phone when he called, just like the day before. She’d left every other text unanswered. And it was brutal, but it was working—she’d been trying for months.
She had just gotten into her pajamas. There was a knock on her door. And out of nowhere, there he was, holding his phone to his ear and holding Deli to his eyes like dry ice. Her phone rang in her robe pocket.
She could hear her own heartbeat as she answered. “Hello?”
Deli’s voice echoed small and tinny through Trey’s phone. He was breathing too fast.
“I called,” he said, voice low. “You didn’t answer.”
Her heart rattled its bars. “Is everything alright?”
“I just . . .” He stopped. Goosebumps rippled across her skin. “I needed to tell you something.”
They stood on either side of the threshold, unmoving mirrors of each other, like a fox and a mouse before one of them decides to run. She took a deep breath.
“Wha—”
Then he was kissing her. It was over before she knew what was happening, and she was still in shock as the door swung closed behind him. Deli stood there tracing her lips with her fingertips and listening to her jailbroken heart’s thudding joy for a long, long time.
Trey never brought it up again.
So neither had she. And since then, she had been waiting.
Six months later, he was so handsome it nearly hurt as he pulled her in for a hug and held her body against his for a significant moment longer than he usually did.
“You ready for this?” he asked into Deli’s hair, and she mentally prayed a thank you to the god of dry shampoo. She closed her eyes and tried to press the feeling of his breath on her neck into the pages of her memory, like the petals of a camellia pressed into the journal on her nightstand.
“I couldn’t do it without you.”
He looked down and grinned as his accent slipped into his voice. “It’s just your family. You’d survive.”
“Please, my family loves you more than me.”
A montage flashed through her mind—fourteen-year-old Trey laughing beside the barbecue with her dad, seventeen-year-old Trey bringing sunflowers for the Thanksgiving table, twenty-five-year-old Trey dancing to Frank Sinatra in the living room with Grandma Rosemary.
Trey laughed softly. “I love them, too.”
“Then you can sit by my mother. We’re—” Deli checked her phone—there was another text demanding to know where she was. She looked back to the moonglow of Trey’s watching eyes. “Um . . . three minutes late. And she’s already in a mood.”
“Oh God, a mood?” Trey swept her arm up. “We’ve gotta move!”
As Trey led her toward the restaurant, her hand around his arm in the olive coat he’d bought to match her dress, Deli MacDonald knew again that love was a strange thing.
It could be one person’s burning sun but live in another person’s shadow.
Love wasn’t a thing you could call on demand.
It decided when the time was right. It didn’t like to be rushed.
So, just like she had for so many years, Deli fell into step with the boy who’d slipped her heart into his pocket. She could be patient another day. Always another day.
Any minute now, he’ll be ready, she thought. Any second now, I’ll know.