“Claire,” he said, stepping closer, his voice like butter. This was why she’d desperately needed to get someone’s number at Stella’s tonight. She squeezed her eyes closed, Delilah Green flashing in her mind. That had certainly backfired.
“Look, I’m sorry about tonight,” he went on. “I didn’t mean to make it worse.”
“Didn’t you?”
Hurt filled his eyes. “No. Come on.”
She sighed and fiddled with her keys. “I know. It’s just . . .”
“I get it. I’m unreliable. But not this time. I swear it.”
She looked up at him, all their history growing thick between them like life-choking vines. He reached out and tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. She almost leaned into him. It would’ve been so easy.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, backing away and then slipping out the door before she could do something stupid like kiss him. She knew it wouldn’t go further than that, not with Ruby in the apartment, but still. She didn’t need the complication. She didn’t want it either. She was just horny. That was all. She knew she didn’t love Josh, not like that. But her skin was hungry. Iris’s phone number quest had sufficiently riled her up.
Or maybe it wasn’t only the quest.
When she got back to the small Craftsman she’d scrimped and saved for years to make her own, her body still felt electric, plugged in. Once in bed, she slipped a hand between her legs, desperate to get rid of the ache so she could sleep. But when her fingers started moving, it wasn’t Josh she envisioned. It wasn’t even some nameless fantasy woman she made up in her head for times like these. No, this person had a riot of dark curls and sapphire-blue eyes, tattoos vining up her arms like snakes.
Chapter Five
WHEN DELILAH FIRST opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was.
Chintz.
Lots of chintz.
Huge pink flowers swallowing her whole in a sea of quilts and pillows. Even the wallpaper bloomed like a spring garden. It wasn’t an altogether rare occurrence for her to wake up in someone else’s bed, but it’s not like it happened every day either. And the women she usually spent the night with were not the type to drench their homes in floral patterns.
A headache swelled behind her eyes, her stomach roiling as she sat up. She vaguely remembered mixing bourbon and wine last night, which was how her mind wrapped back around to Stella’s Tavern and the Kaleidoscope Inn in Bright Falls.
Jesus.
She fell back on the pillows—which smelled faintly of gardenias or some other cloying flower—and rubbed her temples before checking her phone. Just after nine a.m. She still had plenty of time to get ready and be on time to snap banal black and whites of heteros nibbling petits fours at Astrid’s brunch.
God, Astrid’s brunch.
She squeezed her eyes closed, breathed in through her nose nice and slow. For a second, she considered staying in bed and skipping out on the whole thing. Astrid was bad enough, but Isabel was sure to be there, and Delilah never knew how to act around her perfectly-put-together stepmother. It was like talking to a smooth marble statue—beautiful, cold, perpetually constipated expression locked into place. There was a time she remembered Isabel smiling, even laughing, looking at Delilah’s father like he not only hung the moon, but made it sparkle and shine just for her. Isabel had truly loved Andrew Green; Delilah knew that full well.
It was Delilah Green sans Andrew that the woman never understood, nor did Delilah understand Isabel. And Isabel always seemed more than fine with their mutual misunderstanding, which was what hurt more than anything.
Delilah pulled the covers over her head and opened up her email, hoping for something from the Fitz about a sale, or perhaps a response from one of the photography agents she’d contacted with her portfolio in the last few months.
Nothing.
She clicked on her sent mail tab, opening the latest email to an agent she wanted to represent her so badly, she’d give up sex for a decade. She read through her message again, feeling a bit calmer at her professionalism, her clear knowledge of the industry. Then she clicked on the included link to her online portfolio, scrolling through the images of her best work.
They were all black-and-white, all queer women or nonbinary people, all featuring wedding dresses or suits and water and some sort of chaos. Her favorite was of a Black woman and a white woman, both in tattered lace gowns, sticks and leaves tangled in their hair, holding hands and wading into Lake Champlain in the middle of a thunderstorm. Not the safest shoot she’d ever done, but goddamn, it had been worth it. The light was perfect, the rain droplets like silver bullets shining in the air, the desperation evident in the way she’d had the models—Eve and Michaela, two women she knew from waitressing at the River Café—cling to each other. The effect was lovely and terrifying all at once, trauma and hope. It was beautiful.
It was good.
And yet, her inbox continued to accumulate cobwebs.
She switched over to her Instagram account, where she tried posting a photo a day. Weird shit she snapped on the sidewalks. Unique shots she got at queer weddings. Anything that matched the brand she was trying to build for herself—queer, feminist, angry, and beautiful.
Niche.
Her stuff didn’t appear to work for most stick-up-their-ass NYC agents, but it sure worked for the Internet. She had close to two hundred thousand Instagram followers and couldn’t keep track of the comments anymore. Her queer stuff got the most attention, and lately people had been asking whether or not she sold her pieces in an Etsy shop. It was affirming, but the idea of running her own e-commerce business—shipping, taxes, invoices—it all made her head spin.
She pulled up one of the pictures in her photos app she’d taken at JFK yesterday, a tripod-selfie in Terminal Four in front of the word Queens printed on the wall in huge blue and black mod letters against the white background, her in all black and gazing off to the side with one booted foot on the wall and looking . . . well, really queer and angry.
And sort of beautiful, if she was being honest.
She worked on the photo in Lightroom for a few minutes, adjusting the contrast, the tone, then uploaded it with no caption because she never wrote a caption. She was just about to click her phone’s screen dark when a new email notification popped up. It wasn’t from an agent or anyone at the Fitz gallery, but the subject line grabbed her attention like a yank on her hair.
Possible showing at the Whitney
Delilah sat up straight, floral comforter sliding to her lap, her fingertips tingling as she stared at the impossible words. They were real, though, sent from an official Whitney email address no less. Her hand shook as she tapped on the message.
To: