“Something you don’t want polite society to see,” I say. “Just how raunchy is this tattoo, Delilah?”
“It’s a huge, photorealistic dick,” she says, and I turn back before I can stop myself.
Delilah bursts into laughter when she sees my face.
“Veins and ball hairs and everything,” she says, still laughing, poking at her chest through the neck of her shirt. “It’s just, like, the dick-est dick that ever did dick.”
I don’t have a comeback for that, so I just watch her as she smooths the lace back over her chest, looking down.
“Better?” she asks, grinning.
I take a good, long moment to stare at her.
“Better,” I confirm and hand the bottle back. “You gonna tell me what it really is and why you don’t want anyone to see it?”
“I don’t want Vera to see it,” she says, drinking.
“I’ve never been more curious in my life.”
She takes one more drink.
“It’s a clockwork heart,” she says. “Vera still doesn’t know because it’s a giant tattoo right on my chest, and I think it might give her a stroke.”
A memory taps at me, floats into my brain: Delilah, holding a fruit basket at my front door, pulling her shirt to cover gauze.
“Seems like she’s about to know if I figured it out,” I say, taking the bottle back.
“She’s got better things to do right now,” Delilah says, shrugging.
I take a drink.
“Than stare at your tits?” I ask. “Like what?”
Right here, right now, I cannot think of a better pastime to save my life.
“I thought we were friends, Seth.”
“It’s a friendly stare,” I say, but I lift my eyes to her face. “Friends can’t look at tattoos?”
Suddenly the lights in the hall dip low, until they’re almost out, then slowly brighten. When they stop, they’re dimmer than they were before.
“How long have you had it?” I ask.
It’s so quiet in this hallway that I think I can hear the old house settling, each individual wooden slat shifting a millimeter down.
“Two years and change,” she says quietly, her eyes meeting mine.
My hand drifts to her waist, and she moves into me. A tiny, almost imperceptible movement, amplified until her warmth under my hand is all I can feel.
I can feel her breathing under my fingers. I can feel her heart beat, thumping away, and I force myself not to read into the timeline or into the tattoo.
Instead I lean into her, again. My face against hers, again, the feeling that my bones are dissolving at her nearness, the feeling that I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
“Do you have anything new?” she asks, her voice nearly a whisper.
“No tattoos,” I say, and I keep tracing the flowers on the lace with my fingertips, pressing into her soft flesh, and she puts her hand on my chest, her thumb sliding between the buttons on my shirt. I don’t know if it’s an accident or not, but either way, she doesn’t move it back.
“I did something stupid and got a new scar. It’s on my shoulder, I’ll show you if you want.”
Delilah gasps, the tiniest, slightest gasp.
“Right now?” she murmurs.
“Unless you’d rather see it later.”
Now her hand is on the tie that she loosened earlier, the lightest pressure pulling against the back of my neck.
“What else?” she asks.
“That’s all.”
“Two years and nothing else has changed?”
I haven’t been with anyone else. I haven’t even kissed anyone else, not since the last time we were together, not since she moved back to town.
Before, when she was hundreds of miles away, I could push her from my mind. I could forget about her for hours at a time.
Now, that’s impossible.
“Two years, three months, and sixteen days,” I say, my voice rough and raw with the truth, and there’s a pull at the back of my neck as she pulls at my tie and finally, finally, I kiss her.
I feel like a stadium when the lights go out. Like a concert hall when the orchestra stops tuning and suddenly plays the first note of a symphony. The background noise stops and the note swells, shifts, breaks into harmony.
This is all there is.
Delilah is all softness, but never pliant. Nothing about her yields even as I feel like I’m sinking into her, lips already parting under mine. She makes the softest noise and it explodes across me like a shock of hot water as she pulls me in harder and I bend to her.
I snake my hand up her neck, her pulse hot under my fingertips, find her cheekbone with my thumb as she pulls back slightly, my lower lip between her teeth before she comes in again, her softness defiant, pushing, needy.
I push back. I press myself against her. There’s a rumble coming from somewhere deep in my chest that I can’t locate and can’t control, but now her hand is on my neck, her fingers twisting in my hair and I skim my other palm past her breasts, her stomach, along the outside of her thigh as she makes another noise and stands on tiptoe and pushes her hips against me.
I’m hard as a rock. She knows. Our tongues curl together and she rises against me and I close my hand around her thigh, trying to pull her into me, and she knows where this is going and I know where it’s going.
I don’t want to wait to go somewhere private. I want to kneel right here, duck under her long skirt, and make her come in this hallway outside her sister’s wedding. I want to push her against the wall and fuck her without caring who finds us.
I feel like a time bomb with the counter started: tick, tock. I feel like Delilah reroutes the wiring in my brain, like she bypasses the synapses for reason and logic and self-control and connects lust to impulse to sheer madness.
I grab her a little harder, growl a little louder, catch her lip between my teeth and curl my fingers in her hair. She rewards me with a breath that hitches in her throat.
Delilah pulls back, just so our lips are almost touching, clenches my hair in her fist, a cascade of sparks shooting down my spine. She’s breathing hard and I think she’s laughing, so I find her ass and squeeze it as hard and I can, pressing her body against mine.
The door to the ballroom opens.
Delilah yelps into my mouth and jolts backward, but my fingers tangle and catch in her hair, her hand going to my wrist.
“Shit,” she hisses, as the open door hesitates, its blankness facing us. “Fuck, that’s my hair. Ow. Ow.”
“Hold still,” I whisper, flexing my fingers, relaxing them, pulling back slowly and steadily, her curls sticky with heat and sweat and whatever women put in their hair at weddings.
Fifty feet away, the door wavers, and then finally, my fingers come out and Delilah exhales.
“Yeah,” a male voice says, calling back into the ballroom. “One sec.”
He steps out, sees us, hesitates a moment.
“Delilah?” he calls.
Chapter Eighteen
Delilah
“Yes?” I call back, and to my relief my voice comes out steady strong and normal.
I stand up straight, shoulders back, hands clasped in front of me. Like I’m getting ready to sing in the church choir or something, because even though I’m pretty sure it’s either Wyatt or his father, my uncle Doug, it’s hard to tell from that single word this far away.