“What do you mean the artist thing?”
“Photographic art, pieces I can sell, series, getting an agent to help navigate the art world. It’s hard to break into though. Really hard.”
Then her show at the Whitney fluttered into her mind, the relief and excitement associated with it. She told Claire about it, how it could be her big break.
“That’s great,” Claire said. “I wish . . .” But the other woman trailed off, brows lowering as she swallowed. Delilah didn’t press her, and soon Claire was moving on.
“How did you know you wanted to make art?” she asked.
Delilah hesitated. The truth was . . . sensitive. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there with Claire tonight or ever. There was no reason for her to know. None at all, other than the simple fact that Delilah wanted her to. Still, she wasn’t sure how Claire would react.
But as she hesitated, Claire scooted a little closer and said, “Come on, I want to know.”
So she told her.
“I got my heart broken,” she said.
Claire’s brows popped into her bangs. “You did?”
Delilah nodded, her throat thickening, but the words just kept coming. “I’ve only had one girlfriend. Her name was Jacqueline—Jax—and we met at a wedding I was working. She . . . she was the maid of honor.”
Claire’s mouth parted, and the irony here wasn’t lost on Delilah, the fact that she was spilling her guts to another maid of honor she couldn’t seem to shut up around.
“We moved in together, dated exclusively for two years.”
“What happened?” Claire asked.
Delilah took a breath, wrapped her mind around the words she’d never said to anyone. After she and Jax broke up, there was no one else in her life to tell. Plus it was just embarrassing as hell, the fact that she hadn’t been enough.
The words rushed out anyway.
“I caught her cheating on me.”
“Oh god.”
“With her ex. Whom, apparently, she’d never gotten over.”
Claire covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh god.”
Delilah nodded. “I was out of town for another wedding I was shooting. But the wedding got canceled—groom’s cold feet—so I came home early and found her . . . well, she was in our bed and she wasn’t alone.”
The memory was still fresh and bright, like a high-res photograph. Jax—the only woman she’d ever loved and actually thought about marrying someday, creating the kind of family Delilah always dreamed about but never had—in the apartment they shared with her head between Mallory Prescott’s legs. Delilah still remembered the vision of Mallory’s blond head tossed back, her mouth open, and her aqua-painted nails curling around Delilah’s own fucking pillow as she came.
“Apparently, it wasn’t the first time,” Delilah said. “She’d been cheating for months, trying to figure out how to dump me, and I just couldn’t see it.”
“Jesus,” Claire said.
“Anyway,” Delilah said, desperately wanting to get the conversation back on track. “I needed to get out of the city for a while, so I came back to Bright Falls. I thought . . . I don’t know.” She hadn’t felt like being alone. That’s what it had been, and she stupidly imagined the familiarity of Bright Falls, the family she had there, however odd and distant, might soothe some need in her she couldn’t articulate. It hadn’t. Astrid had been busy with her own life, and Isabel . . . well, Isabel was obviously very put out about finding Delilah on her doorstep, blaming some Junior League event she was hosting for why Delilah just couldn’t possibly stay at her own house. It was the first time Delilah had had to check into a hotel in her hometown.
Turns out, it wasn’t the last.
“I just needed a change of scenery,” she said. “Brought my camera, walked around town hoping for some . . . I don’t know. Inspiration, I guess.”
“Did you find it?”
Delilah smiled and paused, because honestly, this was the part she was worried about. Not her heartbreak, though that was humiliating enough. But this, her art’s origin story. Delilah hadn’t done anything wrong, but still . . . it could come off as weird, and Delilah was already weird enough in Claire’s eyes. But again, some gut instinct, some need, pushed her forward.
“I did,” she said. “I found you.”
Claire visibly flinched, head jerking back a little. “Me?”
Delilah nodded and told her how she’d been in town for about a week and she was walking along the riverbank, trying to work up the courage to go back to New York. And then suddenly, there was Claire, wading into Bright River up to her knees, fully clothed in a dove-gray dress with a lace overlay, shivering in the cold March wind. She’d started screaming. At the sky, the water, the evergreens on the other bank. Delilah lifted her camera and began snapping. She got at least a hundred shots, and Claire never saw her, never noticed her shifting behind her, lying on the sandy bank to get different angles.
Back in New York, she worked for hours editing the photos. Days. And it was from these images, Claire, beautiful and in pain in the river, that Delilah got the idea for a series that would define her style, her whole career.
Queer women, turmoil, and water.
She watched Claire take all of this in, looking for subtle shifts in her expression—shock, disgust, horror—but in the silver light, all she saw was . . . awe. A little sadness. Claire’s brown eyes like bottomless depths as they stayed locked on Delilah in silence. She stayed silent for so long, in fact, Delilah began to panic—her heart, which had already crept into her throat, now felt like a tiny, trapped hummingbird, wings whirring.
“Are you . . . Is that . . . I mean, does that freak you out?” Delilah asked. “I never used the photos. I wouldn’t do that.” And she hadn’t. She’d wanted to. Claire was gorgeous in them—sad and despairing and just fucking angry, something Delilah could relate to. But no way was Delilah going to have her sign a waiver, no way she was ever going to admit to Claire five years ago that she’d fascinated Delilah that much, that Delilah had captured what might have been one of the most painful moments in her life, immortalizing it forever.
And now, she’d admitted it all to her secret subject. The woman who, for all intents and purposes, had been Delilah’s muse.
Claire just kept watching her, brows dipping a little in thought, for what felt like forever.
“Claire, I’m—”
“I remember that day,” she said. Then she took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Josh had just left again. I’d just slept with him again. And my six-year-old daughter was at home with my mother, crying her eyes out for her dad. Again. The one thing I’ve never been able to fix for her, just like my mom could never fix it for me.”