Chapter 10 Deli
Deli
Deli sat alone in her car, choking through the sort of crying that would leave a hangover. She hadn’t anticipated the way seeing a missed call from her mom would make her chest lurch, and it set another rogue sob free.
Her finger hovered over the call button. For a second, she wanted nothing more in the world than to call back, wait for her mom’s voice, and fall to pieces. But right beside the raw, Trey-shaped injury, her Lorraine-shaped scar twinged in an old, warning way.
Deli needed her best friend. Her call log showed Chloe’s name beside all the calls she hadn’t answered. The texts remained ignored. Deli couldn’t stop herself from opening social media to Chloe’s page, hoping to find a sign of life and put the quiet fear that something awful was happening to rest.
A new post showed Chloe, shining sheet of caramel hair and hazel eyes, glued to a guy tagged in the photo as Jared as they toasted drinks on a sunny pier somewhere.
The next photo was of Chloe in a hotel bathrobe, holding up a peace sign while sitting crisscross on a bed covered in red rose petals.
In the next, they held hands at an expensive dinner.
Chloe was stunning in the satin dress she’d sent Deli a picture of the day before—the day she was too sick to make it to Deli’s birthday.
The caption read “Last-minute getaway in Santa Barbara with my Valentine.”
Deli stared at the screen.
Get up, go inside, and cope, Delilah, she thought after a very long moment. Stupid girl.
Deli could still feel the shard of glass as she limped her way through her dingy, pastel apartment complex with her small pile of things cradled in her arms. She stood in the doorway of her home feeling like a voyeur of a life that belonged to someone else—like she was waiting to be invited in.
The silence boomed in her aching head. She dropped her bag and grabbed the remote, desperate to drown out the roar of her thoughts, the silent howl of her pain.
She flipped through episodes of multiple shows, but each one felt like a different grain of sandpaper on her skin.
The box set of The Highlander lay abandoned where it had fallen out of the bag by the door.
Mindless. Predictable. Completely void of reality. Exactly what was needed by a heart just blindsided and mangled by things all too real.
Deli popped in a disc. As the piercing voice of The Highlander’s theme song welled in her quiet apartment, she felt a single screw in the too-small grip of her heart give way.
She thought of a slanting cottage far away, nestled on a cliffside dotted with knots of purple heather.
The final note echoed, and suddenly Deli’s apartment was full of grunting, ripping fabric, and the high, feminine keening of “Hamish! Oh, Hamish, yes!”
The man on screen responsible for the squealing had a mane of dirty-blond hair just past his shoulders that met the lone tartan sash adorning his oiled chest. His muscles looked earned, not chiseled out of a suburbanite by a professional nutritionist and trainer.
And his jade eyes belied a man who had plenty of source material to pull from while filming his most oily moments on the show.
Deli went to Google.
Hamish was played by a man named Billy S.
Burns—born in an actual small town in Scotland.
She clicked through photos of him smiling on red carpets, posing on the covers of magazines, and laughing as some reporter or another blushed at his side.
She privately admitted—with great embarrassment—that perhaps her mother and grandmother did have a point about the appeal.
The cries of “Hamish, Yes, My God!” continued as she closed her laptop and pulled her knees to her chest—her carefully chosen heels still cutting painfully into tender, swollen feet.
As she was lulled to sleep with a whirl of kilts, clashing swords, and accusations of witchcraft in a world that was nothing like the life she’d just blown to pieces, she tried not to think about how different things would be now that she wouldn’t hear from Trey in the morning.
She tried not to think about how she had one best friend who had felt the need to lie and ditch her after months of off-and-on tension, and another whom she’d admitted to being in love with while he was in love with someone else.
She tried not to think about her favorite flowers in his only vase.
Deli tried not to think about Trey Evans at all.
She dreamed of being fourteen years old on the beach, squinting against the afternoon light as a boy with sandy hair and sandy skin tugged her by the wrist toward the water. They laughed as he looked back with a sly, crinkled grin—his eyes the same color as the last wisp of cloud in the sky.
Deli woke to the sound of her own labored breathing against the booming laughter that poured from her television. A tear cut across the bridge of her nose and sank into the cushion as a ragged breath tore out of her, followed by another, and another, until the sun began to rise.
Then she got up, got ready, and put on her sneakers for work.