He shrugged. “We spent most of our last conversation pondering how to break me into your old school. We hadn’t covered my employment status yet.”
“True.” Delilah thought there might be a swarm of sparrows in her chest. Why did he have to look at her so intensely? If he wanted to know her every thought, she would just tell him. “I didn’t realize movie theaters were still using those.” Delilah pointed to the roller vacuum. And then she smiled because he’d smiled, and it was slow and kind of flirtatious.
“Yes. Theaters are still using them.” His smile turned a little secretive, and it added a tiny bite to his words.
“Right. Obviously.” The next words flew from her mouth. “Can you put the vacuum broom away and come watch the movie with us?”
Something clouded his eyes, but it didn’t feel wholly unfriendly. Conflict, maybe, or confusion. “Sorry, I need to stay out here.” He stood straight up and nodded to where Dhaval waited a ways behind her. “But you two enjoy the show.”
“I’m sure we will,” Dhaval drawled, moving to Delilah as soon as Gavin had turned around a corner and hissing, “Girl, you have it bad.”
She groaned, feeling defeated, but it came out sounding a little breathless. “I know. I act so abnormal around him.”
“I’ll admit, he’s not that bad-looking. I guess I just never noticed before,” he said. “There’s something about him.”
“‘Not bad-looking’? Dhaval, that boy is sex on a stick.”
Two nicely groomed dark eyebrows inched upward. “Delilah Blue, what do you know about sex on a stick?”
“Nothing,” she said, grinning. “I don’t need to have ridden a roller coaster to know what one is, do I?”
A laugh burst from Dhaval and filled the nearly empty theater. “That school back East did something to you.”
? ? ?
Delilah and Dhaval sat in the fourth row, with their feet up on the seats in front of them. Every time someone got stabbed, Dhaval shrieked and Delilah groaned. The gore was overdone. The fake blood too thick, too scarlet. Real blood, in such quantity, was deep and rich, like the heart of a rose.
A dark figure appeared in Delilah’s peripheral vision just before Gavin moved into view. Even though he tried to make himself as small as possible as he made the rounds with a tiny flashlight—presumably checking to ensure that no one was causing trouble or having sex in the theater—he cut a long, crooked silhouette when he passed in front of the screen.
Dhaval immediately dropped his feet from where they rested on the seat in front of him, but Delilah kept hers in place. She hoped Gavin would stop, tell her to put her feet down and give her a playfully stern look. Maybe he would even lean over and touch her leg. Maybe he would sit down with them after all.
“Delilah, please put your feet down,” he said, but he didn’t give her a second glance before he moved on.
She watched him walk back up the aisle on the other side. “Well. That was anticlimactic.”
Dhaval laughed and put his feet back up. “You can only be a flirt if he notices you.”
“He notices me,” she insisted. On-screen the killer was breaking another man’s fingers one by one, and for a moment Delilah was distracted.
But then she broke her attention away and looked at Dhaval. “Have you ever seen Gavin with his parents?”
Dhaval closed one eye, thinking. “Mom used to know his mom. She says she’s kind of a hermit now, never comes out of the house. There was something freshman year, about Social Services coming to the school to talk to him and his teachers. Some random teacher said his parents didn’t come in for a mandatory meeting or something, that they’d never seen them. It was all anyone could talk about—that Gavin Timothy didn’t have parents, that Gavin Timothy had killed his parents and was living alone in that crazy house.” Dhaval shook his head and reached for another handful of popcorn. “Ridiculous. Anyway, after a few days it just went away. I guess she showed up eventually.”