Claire shook her head, but her gaze kept drifting toward Astrid’s tent, concern creasing her brow. Iris told her over and over not to worry, that they’d talk to Astrid tomorrow when they all got back to Bright Falls. She nodded, but Delilah could almost feel her stress on her own shoulders, which was a preposterous idea.
Delilah didn’t care if Astrid was pissed about the pepper. And she certainly didn’t care if Spencer was sporting a rather large rash on his crotch. She didn’t care that Iris had sat next to her near the fire and leaned her cheek on Delilah’s shoulder, still hiccupping from laughing so hard, and just . . . stayed like that. Delilah kept expecting her to say something about the pepper, but she didn’t. Iris Kelly simply sat there for a good ten minutes, snuggling with the Ghoul of Wisteria House while she sipped her beer.
Delilah proceeded to chug her own drink, hoping the alcohol would calm her down and give her the courage to shrug Iris’s face away, but it didn’t. If anything, it made her more maudlin, and the word friends kept lighting up in her brain like June fireflies.
Once they all settled into their tents at the ungodly hour of nine thirty and Iris went to pee in the woods, Claire had curled toward her in her sleeping bag, stolen a kiss, and whispered in her ear about sneaking off to the soaking tubs once Iris was asleep.
“She’s impossible to wake up once she’s out,” Claire had said.
Delilah had agreed, eager for . . . something. She felt unsettled and anxious, so maybe an hour with Claire’s skin under her hands and mouth would do the trick. But Claire, exhausted after getting next to no sleep the night before, was completely unconscious within thirty minutes of announcing her midnight hookup plan.
So now here Delilah was, wide awake despite her own lack of sleep, staring at the tent’s roof and nearly suffocating with the heat of three bodies under a June sky. Claire mumbled something and then flopped an arm over Delilah’s stomach, pushing closer to her until her mouth was pressed right up against Delilah’s neck. She was still asleep, her limbs heavy, but Delilah couldn’t stop the slow spread of comfort that wound its way through her veins as she drifted her fingers over Claire’s soft arm.
Finally, she sat up, her heart pumping too fast to sleep now. She wiggled out from under Claire, shucking her sleeping bag off her bare legs, and unzipped the tent. Cool night air flowed in, and she sat there on her knees in the entrance for a second, waiting for her heart to go back to normal.
About twenty feet away, remnants from the fire still glowed. Delilah crawled from the tent, heading toward Josh’s coolers for another beer, but found them locked tight with a complicated mechanism she couldn’t half see in the darkness.
“What the fuck?” she said quietly, squatting down to squint at the lock.
“It’s so the bears don’t get into it.”
“Jesus Christ!” Delilah tumbled backward onto her ass, heart rate definitely pumping at full speed now.
“Nope, just me,” Astrid said languidly, tipping her own beer can at Delilah from where she sat on a log by the fire. “Though that was worth it to see you fall on your butt and screech like a little kid.”
“I did not screech like a little kid,” Delilah said, standing up and brushing the dirt off her sleep shorts.
“You did. It’s okay.” Astrid blinked at her, a blanket around her shoulders, hair slightly less coiffed than it usually was, and a definite intoxicated gleam to her eyes. Of course it could just be the firelight, but her voice was also a bit fuzzy. Delilah had never seen Astrid Parker drunk. Not once, even during their teenage years when she would watch from her window at one in the morning as her stepsister, Iris, and Claire sneaked out on sleepover nights, meeting boys at Bryony Park a half mile down the road from Wisteria House. Astrid always came back stone-cold sober. So did Claire for that matter. Iris, not so much.
“Just lift the bottom latch and then twist it to the left,” Astrid said, motioning toward the cooler.
Delilah watched her for a second before squatting back down and following her stepsister’s directions. Sure enough, the cooler popped open, revealing a few beer cans floating in a sea of watery ice. She grabbed one and locked the cooler again before walking toward the fire. She settled on a log across from Astrid, far enough away to indicate she was not here to talk. There was just nowhere else to go, not in the dark of night with black bears and god knew what else roaming the forest.
“Spencer okay?” she asked, cracking open the beer. The question popped out, untried and impulsive. She wasn’t sure what Astrid suspected about Spencer’s little, er, problem from earlier. The pepper was odorless and was hard to see against the black cotton of his boxers, especially in the fading sunlight. It would probably look like a little bit of dirt if one peered closely. Either way, Delilah expected at least some backlash, narrowed eyes and some snarky retort, because that’s how the two of them had always interacted, even if Delilah had simply asked about the weather. But Astrid didn’t do any of that. She just sighed, took another swallow of beer, and shrugged.
Delilah watched her, brain automatically calculating what to say next to get under Astrid’s skin, to piss her off, annoy her, passive-aggressively guilt her over one thing or another, all her usual mechanisms for interacting with her stepsister.
She came up with nothing. Astrid looked small, lost even, shoulders rounded and purple half-moons snuggled under her eyes. Nothing a little concealer wouldn’t fix, but still. Delilah couldn’t remember a time she’d seen Astrid look so disheveled.
Her fingers itched for her camera or her phone, the vision of Astrid looking like a character from a horror movie—at least by Astrid’s own standards—almost too heady to resist. She didn’t move though. After all these damned emotions from the last few days, she found she didn’t have the clarity of mind for wicked-stepsister games tonight.
So she didn’t play them. She drank her beer and let the cool summer breeze slide over her skin. She stared into the fire and tried to pretend Astrid wasn’t even there. This proved impossible, however, as in the absence of any bitchy banter, Delilah’s mind filled with all the things that led back to Astrid in one way or another—Claire, Iris, Ruby, the wedding and the money she’d be paid for it, even the show at the Whitney, which just reminded her how desperate she was to be something, someone in this world. Someone who mattered and who people remembered, who people wondered about and sought out, even if they were just strangers chasing the emotions her photographs evoked.
Usually, this line of thinking led to a steely resolve—produce mind-blowing pieces for the Whitney, work harder, think more creatively, forge more contacts with artists and gallery owners, be more, do more, don’t stop until that piece sells or her vision for another series comes to fruition. Now, though, Ruby’s wide-eyed wonder filled her thoughts. The girl’s awe, excitement over creating. Claire slid right in there too, the way she felt in Delilah’s arms, the sounds she made when Delilah touched her, the way she drifted toward Delilah even in her sleep.