Hell, he was the match. He wanted to make her explode.
He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a frustrated sigh, saying, “You’re too small,” to Bed.
Almost as soon as the words were out, a great metallic groan rang through the room. Bed trembled, springs creaked, and the scraping of metal against metal rattled all around him.
Gavin waited calmly as Bed stretched beneath him, growing more than a foot beyond its original length and several feet wider. Sometimes he wondered if House realized he’d grown at all, or if everything inside still imagined him as the tiny boy they’d raised.
“Better,” he said. “Thanks.”
Gavin looked around then, eyeing the sky-colored paper, the childish clouds on the ceiling. He couldn’t let Delilah see this.
“I think maybe a redecoration is in order.” He paused, wondering what would be an acceptable substitute. How did seventeen-year-old boys decorate their rooms, anyway? “More black,” he finished, satisfied that this would at least be a step in the right direction.
The room cooled, and House rumbled deep within its foundation, a gentle admonishment.
But Gavin ignored this, heaving himself off Bed and crossing the room. He peered out to where the sun hung low in the sky, its golden fingers just visible behind the rooftops of houses in the distance.
The yard sprawled out beneath him, a kaleidoscope of blossoms still visible beneath the thin layer of frost. Delilah had known about the apples, but Gavin wondered what she would think when she saw roses blooming in January or a garden full of vegetables still thriving in the throes of winter.
She’d seemed completely unruffled by his secret earlier, at school, but it was one thing to accept the idea of a house living and breathing and growing all around you and quite another to actually see it. How would she react to Ferns that picked themselves up, settling beneath whichever Window had the best view of the sun? Or Lamp, who followed him from room to room because there weren’t actual light switches on any of the walls? Or Hall Table, who was one of the few pieces of furniture that never moved during the day but creaked as it prowled through the halls in the middle of the night?
She wanted to come here to see the sideshow that was his life. A part of him worried she’d see the fire burning that nobody ever tended, or Grandfather Clock that told him exactly what he was late for, and she would run out the gate and never speak to him again.
But another, darker part of him worried that she wouldn’t. That perhaps Delilah Blue was every bit as brave as she appeared, and would stay. And it was this possibility that frightened him more than all the others combined, because Gavin was fairly certain that once Delilah walked through the front door, he’d never want her to leave.
? ? ?
Gavin took the long way to school, still not sure what he would say the next time Delilah asked to go home with him. He trudged through the slush as he considered this. She would, he knew. It was just a question of whether he’d even get one word out before she asked again.
She was waiting near the front entrance, her bag in a forgotten heap at her feet. Gavin spotted her long before she spotted him, his gaze moving from her braided hair down to legs that peeked from beneath the bloom of her pleated skirt.
Gavin didn’t know a lot about girls, but he knew enough. He knew that when most girls wore things like that, they hoped to drive boys crazy. But it didn’t take a genius to know that by wearing what she considered to be a boring uniform, Delilah was completely clueless about what she was doing to him, or to any other boy for that matter. She just didn’t think much about clothes. But the innocent slip of leg below the knee, all wrapped in knitted tights and boots, was enough to make him wonder about the parts of her he couldn’t see.