“How. . . ?” she started and then stopped. “How is that even possible?”
With a smile, he explained. “It’s all I’ve really known, you know, so it doesn’t seem that impossible to me. I have some friends here at school. I have friends online. Things in the house move.. . . They take care of me. They always have. They would never leave.” He took a moment to look around the school yard. “It’s a bit like having a really big family, but no one speaks.”
Her jaw set, determined, when she said, “Then show me.”
The wind blew around them, picking up leaves and spinning them in the air.
“Okay.” He grinned because he suddenly loved everything about this conversation. It felt like he was exhaling a burning lungful of air after holding it in his entire life. And this girl, this gorgeous, crazy girl wasn’t running away screaming.
She caught his smile, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. “You’re really not messing with me?”
“I swear I’m not.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because, Delilah,” he said, running an index finger along his eyebrow, “I never expected the pretty girl who wrote me a note in the sixth grade to ask to be my girlfriend six years later, hear all this, and not run screaming.”
“Did you want to be my boyfriend?” she asked, eyebrows pulled close together. She looked preemptively mad, as if she were preparing for a fight.
For a war.
As if he could have said no. He nodded slowly. It seemed predestined, he realized, that this girl would walk back into this dirty, rumbling school with an unending tangle of words and innocence trailing behind her. And that the first thing she would want was him.
Chapter Seven
Her
So he was hers. She grinned so fiercely she felt like she might growl. That crazy hair, the dark, playful eyes. The lips—she couldn’t even imagine. That neck and those shoulders, ropy arms and torso that went on forever.
She’d consider the rest later.
“I think you might be a little unbalanced,” he said, watching her reaction with a smile.
Delilah shrugged. “Probably.” She moved closer, closer than she’d ever been to him, and reached up to put her hands flat on his chest.
Gavin sucked in a giant breath, startling her, and squeezed his eyes shut so tight his face contorted as if she’d hurt him. But when she tried to pull away, he stopped her with his palms covering the backs of her hands.
Had he been touched before? “Haven’t you had girlfriends?”
He opened his eyes. “A couple. But I didn’t want them for long, and none of them made me feel this way.”
“What way?”
“Relieved. Maybe a little terrified.”
She dropped her hands this time before he could stop her. “I terrify you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s. . . not good, is it?”
“For me it is,” he said, and followed it with a little one-shouldered shrug. “I’m just overwhelmed by you. I finally have you. I don’t want to mess this up.”
She considered his expression. He looked almost desperately hopeful.
? ? ?
Gavin walked her home, away from the scrabbly bushes surrounding school to the neat lawns of her neighborhood. Tiny pastel houses were set back an equal distance from the street and only an arm’s length away from each neighbor.
Delilah didn’t think these houses would look very interesting to Gavin, having grown up in a sprawling, living mansion, but even so, he looked around her neighborhood with barely concealed hunger. “What time do your parents get home?”
“My mom gets home around four. She does hair down at the Supercuts. My dad used to be a manager at the plant.”