Chapter 57 Deli
Deli
Lachlan plugged the camera into a laptop behind the bar while Deli shivered in wet clothes.
“Let’s get you something dry to change into while they load. I won’t take no for an answer. You get the behind-the-scenes tour.”
Their almost kiss in the Highlands had tipped the fragile plane between platonic and not, and Deli didn’t know what to think or feel or do. She followed Lachlan through the swinging door, up the stairs to the apartment he called home over The Wallflower’s Crown.
Lachlan moved easily through the cozy space. It was clean, straightforward, and intentional, just like him. He handed her a flannel button-down that was the sort of soft only a well-loved shirt could be.
“This should fit. Take whatever you want from the closet.” His clothes were still wet, his kilt suit weighed down. Lachlan held up a pile of folded clothing in his hand. “I’ll be downstairs whenever you’re ready.”
She waited to hear Lachlan’s footsteps retreat back to the pub before she stepped up to the mirror and began to peel away her wet clothing.
Trey had never left Deli entirely unattended in his apartment.
He watched her in his territory with those hawk eyes, tensing if she threatened his curated perfection with her messiness.
Lachlan’s shirt, black-and-green checks turned fuzzy, hung comfortably over her hips.
She snagged a pair of socks from his top drawer and slipped them on before padding down the stairs.
Then she took a running start and burst through the swinging door, sliding across the polished wooden floor with her arms out like she was riding an extra-gnarly wave.
“BoooYAAAHHHHH—”
Lachlan jumped, spun, and started to say “What the fu—” as she sock-surfed into the countertop.
“—AAHGHRF.”
He leaned against the counter with a grin. “Worth it?”
She rubbed her hip. “Totally.”
“I just sent the first batch of photos to you.”
Deli scrambled for her phone buried somewhere in her bag. She bounced on the balls of her feet while the photos loaded. “How do they look? Anything good?”
Lachlan took a moment to respond. “Yes,” he said as the photos appeared. She clicked on the first one. “They’re remarkable.”
She barely recognized herself—cast in lavender light, the best details of her brought forth.
It wasn’t the Deli who usually showed up in photos.
It was the Deli who occupied the quiet, unobserved moments of her life—who slipped bunches of flowers out of vases in her kitchen to change the water and trim the stems while singing the same songs she had for twenty years, who stuffed her face into fresh laundry from the dryer, who liked to sit in coffee shops and listen to the first dates at other tables. It was the truth of her. It was magic.
“Lachlan, how the hell did you do this?” She held the screen toward him with a disbelieving laugh. “Those social media filters have nothing on you. What did you change?”
“I didn’t change a thing about you.” His voice was resolute. “I wouldn’t.”
She stared at the Deli in the photo. A stranger she’d never seen, yet someone she’d spent so much time with—like a long-lost person you’ve always loved.
Aunt Mo had another photo of her as a little girl pinned to her refrigerator. Deli couldn’t imagine a world where her mother would pin that little girl on her fridge proudly. The thought cramped painfully in her body—scar tissue remembering a wound.
Deli swiped to the next photo.
She was kneeling to tighten her shoelace, and Lachlan was behind her, waiting. It was how he looked at her when she wasn’t watching—something in the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his body blocking her from the wind, the clench of his jaw and the soft fire of his eyes.
“Oh,” she said, and she risked a glance. There, behind the bar, in worn out jeans and a navy woolen sweater, his eyes burned. “You were right. You are a good actor.”
She flipped to the next close-up of them from the waist down, trying to ignore the hot drip of Lachlan’s attention lighting her from the inside out, pulling her away from her life as she knew it.
In the photo they were boot to boot, his hand resting on her lower back, pulling her into him.
Hers hung at her side with a small clutch of heather.
Another crop of Deli standing in front of him, laughing with her eyes squeezed shut. The smile on his face while he listened transformed him—the hard edges made soft with affection.
She gulped as quietly as one could. “A really good actor.”
“No, Deli. I’m not.”
She could hear the plea in his voice to look at him. But if she did, things might never be changed back. If she did, Fearnhall, the fever dream of her time there . . . Lachlan? They’d all be real. For better or worse, forever. Her heart pounded.
“Thank you for these, Lachlan.”
“I should be thanking you. I do actually feel better about the wedding this weekend.”
Deli opened her social media and selected the photo of her holding the heather to post, but thoughts of making Trey jealous or making Chloe curious or making her mother feel the sting of her absence were gone.
She simply wanted to proclaim her own life—because somehow, despite living twenty-nine years, Deli was realizing she might have done very little living.
“That’s good . . .” Deli said, distracted.
The photo posted, her feed reloaded, and suddenly she was looking at Trey and the breathtaking blonde Deli had met in the elevator, slightly blurred in the darkness of a late-night Los Angeles party.
Trey looked roguishly at the camera, his half grin like a baited hook, while Scarlett pressed against his chest and looked up at him with her thousand-watt smile.
Deli didn’t know if Trey really did love her, underneath it all. But she did know Trey would never post a photo like that of her. Not unless she carved herself away to, quite literally, fit into his expectations.
Lachlan sounded far away. “Deli?”
“Um”—Deli’s voice was hoarse—“sorry, can I have some water?”
Concern creased his brow. “Of course.”
There was something both bolstering and disorienting about being in a place, with people, doing things that no one she had known and loved her whole life would ever see.
It was resoundingly lonely in one way—to be writing chapters Chloe would never read, living small moments no one would remember—and entirely freeing in the other—to exist, for once, unobserved.
There were no judges in the audience, holding up a diagram of who she was supposed to be and pointing out where she’d fallen short.
Deli wasn’t sure who she was or who she was going to be, but the space and time had given her the seed of a new perspective. Whether or not she was forever falling a bit short of Trey’s or Chloe’s or her mom’s love was really, at the end of the day, up to them.
Deli was tired of trying.
She took a breath as she navigated to her texts as quickly as she could. She couldn’t lose her resolve.
Trey, I think I fell in love with you the day I met you, and I think you’ve known that all along. I need to find a way to get over you. It’s time. It’s been time. I’m sorry. I’ll miss you.
She hit send.
Deli could hear her heart from inside her body, shivering from the cold prickle of fear that comes when something unforgivable has been done. She tossed her phone onto the counter, her hands shaking as it skittered away.
“What did I do?” she whispered to herself. “What did I do? What did I do?”
Lachlan spun at the sound and was there in less time than Deli thought a human could move. He bent to her eye level. “What happened?”
She practiced the feel of the words in her mouth. “I just told Trey . . . everything.”
Lachlan’s eyes widened. “Everything?”
She nodded. “I told him . . .” Part of Deli wanted to stop talking, let it be unreal for a little longer.
But it was time to tear down the curtains and let the light in.
“I told him that I need to get over him. And that we shouldn’t be in each other’s lives right now.
” The air seemed to shift around Lachlan, though his face stayed inscrutable.
She ran her fingers into her hair as the supercut of nearly fifteen years of memories with the boy, then man, she’d always imagined loving burned up like film in her mind.
She was on the verge of tears. “Oh my god, Lachlan, what did I do?”
“What do you need, Deli?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
But then she wondered what it might be like to say something else. In a new place, with a new man, having just cut a thing out of her heart and let it float away down a river, Deli stood on the bank and thought she might try something new.
“I’m not fine,” she said.
“You don’t say.” His voice was soft.
“I don’t know what I need.”
He considered her a moment. “I do.”
Deli was so surprised by his hands on her waist that she threw her arms up like she was being arrested. He started walking backward, guiding her until she was standing with her back pressed against the bar.
“I’m unarmed.”
He smiled. “Jump on three.”
“Heh?”
“Three.”
Deli jumped as he sat her on the bar top she’d watched him meticulously polish and fuss over for a month. “Lachlan, the bar! The shiny, shiny bar!”
“Mmhmm,” he said as he headed back behind it.
“I’m not allowed to sit on the bar. I’m barely allowed to touch the bar.” She twisted around to look at him over her shoulder, switching from the left to right as he passed behind her. “The owner is very crotchety about it.”
Lachlan uncorked a bottle of warm looking liquid and reached for two short glasses. “I think he’ll give you a pass tonight.” He came back around to her. Deli took a glass from him as he set the other on the bar and scooted the stool next to her away, then lifted himself to sit beside her.
The glass wafted smoke from her hand. “I don’t like whisky.”
“Tonight, you need it.” He began a toast, and Deli thought it was a poem at first. “To the wild women. To the courageous women. To the caged bird finally free. To the hope that the fog of him, of them, will pass, and you’ll be able to see yourself clearly, Deli.”
Nobody had ever spoken to her that way. The world narrowed in until it was only the two of them. “How am I supposed to see myself?”
Lachlan’s voice was steady. “Like I do.”
“You barely know me,” she whispered.
He held her gaze. “I’m proud of you.”
Deli MacDonald had spent most of her life thinking.
Thinking about other people, thinking about their feelings, thinking about how to make them feel better.
She thought about good and evil, and if those hundred-year-old tortoises got sad when their bird or lizard companions were born and died and died again, and of all the ways she had fallen short.
So when Lachlan leaned toward her, his fingertips brushing her cheek in an unspoken question—she decided not to think about what the right thing or the smart thing or the considerate thing to do was. She decided not to think at all.
Which was how she found herself with her fist knotted in the front of Lachlan’s shirt, tasting the smoke on his lips.