Then his lips are on mine, warm as anything, and I forget the cold. I forget art school and London and I forget all the rules and I kiss him back as hard as I can.
He opens his mouth against mine, teases my lip with his tongue. Pulls back, his mouth millimeters from mine. Pauses. Kisses me again and this time it’s urgent, needy, his other hand underneath my coat and pressing against my back and I find his tongue with mine and God, I want to drown in him.
This is why I keep coming back, again and again. This is what makes me cast everything else aside and throw judgment to the wolves, the reason I’ve never been able to stop myself.
Nothing else makes me feel like I’m a match, held to sandpaper. Like I’m a firework with a lit fuse, counting down the moments. With Seth, I always feel one second away from igniting.
It’s a long time before we finally pull apart. We’re both breathing hard, both wanted the other more than we needed air, and he rests his forehead against mine, thumb on my jaw.
“I missed you too, Bird,” he finally says.
I don’t answer. Just kiss him again, softly.
We kiss until the lights on the mural go out and we’re plunged into moonlit darkness. We kiss as someone closes the barn door, gets into a pickup truck, leaves. We kiss until we can see perfectly in the dark, until we’re both shivering, until we finally stop and I tuck myself against him, eyes closed, his chin atop my head.
Maybe this will work, I think, his arms around me.
Please.
Then, we walk to his car and leave.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Seth
We go out again Sunday night: dinner and milkshakes at a cheesy diner, one of those ones with a jukebox at the table. I play her I Want to Hold Your Hand and she rolls her eyes at me, but she’s smiling.
Then she plays me the Beach Boys song Wouldn’t It Be Nice, because she’s making fun of me, so I play Season of the Witch.
Black Magic Woman. I Put A Spell on You. Delilah runs out of quarters, so she has to borrow one from me to play me Hound Dog.
Afterward, we walk along the river path hand in hand and talk about whether a boat could make it all the way here from the sea, and what kind of boat, whether anyone would want to. We walk for two hours without meaning to, down the river and back through town, until we’re at the diner again and it’s nearly ten o’clock at night.
Two nights later, we meet after work at the new gastropub downtown, and we drink beer and eat burgers and don’t realize the time until the staff tells us they close in fifteen minutes. I kiss her by her car, out on the sidewalk, and I kiss her so long and hard that a pedestrian clears her throat at us.
We see movies together and share popcorn. We go wine tasting in the hills. Visit historical sites we’ve never heard of before and take audio tours. One beautiful Saturday we wake up early and hike to the top of Bareback Peak, have a picnic, and manage not to bring up the name until we’re in the car, heading back to town.
We hold hands. I open doors for her and she rests her head on my shoulder when it gets late. We casually kiss hello and less-casually kiss goodbye. We text each other goodnight and good morning like total dipshits, but I smile every time.
And we make out like teenagers, sometimes in public: in movie theaters, in parks, in the front seat of my car or hers. I try to abide by the rules we set ourselves but it’s impossible not to slip past them sometimes, like when she straddles me on her couch and I grind her hips against mine until I’m on the brink. When I reach for her waist and brush a nipple instead and before I know it I’m pinching them both as she moans into my mouth and God I want her right there, right then, up against the wall but somehow I stop.
We never spend the night.
After a few weeks, she brings me to dinner with Lainey and Beau. They’re suspicious at first but by the end of the meal I’m telling Beau about the time we had to throw out an entire batch of beer because a chipmunk somehow got in and drowned, and he’s giving me a rundown of the top ten kinds of squirrel trap. We agree that they’re all varmints.
Daniel and Charlie have us over for dinner, where Delilah agrees to design Rusty’s first tattoo for her and then Thomas has a blowout while she’s holding him, but she washes the poop off her arm and laughs.
We tour a distillery with Eli and Violet. I can tell Eli is skeptical. I would be, too, but by the end of our double date Delilah and Violet have sampled the whiskey and Delilah is telling Violet that I once called stemmed wine glasses an ‘inefficient use of space,’ and Violet is laughing and telling Delilah that Eli has such an exacting system for his spice organization that she’s not allowed to touch it.
“It is inefficient,” I mutter to Eli.
“It once took me ten minutes to find the paprika,” he mutters back. “I like her, though.”
Levi and June take us on a hike one day, and Levi’s harder to read — is it skepticism or just his quiet, steady personality? —but by the time we’ve hiked two miles he and Delilah are deep in discussion about how the sky isn’t really blue, then about how red pigment comes from beetles, and by the time I hear her drop the bomb that the color magenta is a figment of our imaginations, I’m pretty sure she’s won him over.
When we say goodbye that evening, he looks at her, then looks at me and nods.
Caleb is the holdout. Whenever I mention her, he changes the subject. If I invite him and Thalia somewhere with us, he’s always got plans. He never comes out and says it, but I know what he’s thinking.
I text Delilah all day, every day, about absolutely nothing. I send her pictures of bobcats that I think she’d like and she sends me back videos of turtles humping shoes. Before long, she knows all the gossip about the brewery employees, and I know what tattoos are popular this month.
It’s working. Starting over and erasing the past is working. Keeping our clothes on is working, even though I feel like my skin might melt off in frustration.
It feels like a miracle.
I still hate that her cocktail shaker has another man’s initials on it, or that a picture of the dog they briefly shared is hanging on her wall with a hundred other pictures, or that her copy of Wuthering Heights says To Delilah, my wild-haired darling, Love Nolan inside the front over. I hate that she still sometimes wears a pair of earrings from him, and I’ve never once seen the necklace I gave her for her twenty-first birthday.
But those things don’t matter. They’re a cocktail shaker, a photograph, a book, earrings. Just objects from a time that’s over and gone, and if I keep pretending they don’t exist then sooner or later, I’ll stop noticing them.
The past is gone. Right here, right now is what matters, and it’s all that matters.
Delilah aims her keys over her shoulder, and I hear her car lock behind us.
“Shut up,” she says, when she sees me looking at her, and I laugh.
“You know you don’t have to point —”
“Yes, you do,” she says, putting her keys in her coat pocket, then taking my arm. “If the key isn’t pointing at the car it won’t lock, and that’s all, end of discussion, aren’t the hedges lovely this time of year?”
“I can’t believe the butler hasn’t shown up to give us piggyback rides into the house yet,” I say. “Really slacking there.”