Chapter 54 Deli
Deli
She knew she recognized those eyes.
It was Lachlan all along.
“It was you!”
“What was me?” he asked, camera still raised, shutter still clicking.
“That day I almost fell to my death off a cliff.”
The camera dropped, and Lachlan was thirteen again, too.
His words came out a wanting sound—like wind through a hollowed tree. “You remember?”
She walked toward him. “Have you known this whole time?”
His smile came slowly, like it didn’t want to scare a timid thing away. “Aye.”
Deli laughed as she ran and threw her arms around Lachlan’s neck, thinking back to the feeling of freedom the day she ran to the cliffs, then the feeling of familiarity the day she got off the train.
He held her with his arms around her waist. “I never could forget the way your mum yelled and you didn’t cower. When I got home that night and my dad hurt my mom, I got scared. So I’d think of you sometimes. The memory of you was this phantom of courage, like a guardian angel, in a way.”
Lachlan had met a version of her that she’d forgotten herself, and he’d kept her alive.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem so impossible—the way she’d gravitated toward him the whole time she’d been in Scotland, despite the ups and downs.
Lachlan, just like Aunt Mo, saw Deli in a way she hadn’t in a very long time.
“Wait,” she said as his words caught up with her. “The day we met was the day your dad hit your mom?”
He nodded.
Deli remembered him now, using his own jacket to wipe the blood from her hands, spending his own time to walk her home.
“God, Lachlan, I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing for you to apologize for, Deli. Nothing.”
“You’ve . . . you’ve taken care of me. But I’ve been messing your life up since the day we met.”
“Listen to me.” He reached under her chin and tilted it up toward him.
“I’m not a courageous man, Deli. I have a small life, and I’ve made my peace. But being with you, no matter the circumstance, makes me believe that maybe it could change. That I could change.” The last rays of sun found them. “You breathe life into everyone you meet.”
Though her heart was pounding, Deli felt a sort of supernatural calm. There was a reason she’d come here. Trey’s confusion, Chloe’s absence, her mother’s critiques—they’d all sent her running to Scotland.
Back to the place and the girl she’d forgotten, and to the boy who never had.
“Lachlan, you don’t have to be what someone wants you to be, you know that, right? You’re not a little boy anymore.” She touched his cheek. “You’re allowed to change.”
Tears transformed Lachlan’s golden eyes to beveled glass, like amber windows scattering sunlight high above consecrated ground.
Deli felt like she was hovering over her own body, watching the girl below like it was on-screen, as she leaned toward him.
He stilled for a long moment, then moved so slowly the waiting ached.
His breath was shallow as warmth touched her ears, her cheeks, her lips.
In the fraction of space before the kiss, when she could feel electricity passing between them like they were gods playing with lightning, a raindrop landed on her nose.
Another landed on Lachlan’s cheek. The last of the sunlight was swallowed as clouds sealed the sky above them.
They held their breath with an impossibly small space between them. Drops began plinking against the camera equipment he needed for Blair and Andrew’s wedding.
She whispered, “Out of time?”
Lachlan pressed his forehead against hers and closed his eyes, winding one hand into her hair at the nape of her neck. He let them breathe together for one breath, two.
“Yes.” Lachlan tilted his face slightly and brushed the tip of his nose against hers, and for a second, she thought he might kiss her anyway. Then he looked up, his jaw cutting a rigid line against the sky. “Out of time.”