“Do you, House? Do you watch me all the time?”
The room didn’t warm or cool. The blanket neither tightened nor loosened. No answer.
“That’s what I thought,” he said quietly.
Chapter Eleven
Her
Stop touching your lip, Delilah,” her mother said and then smiled stiffly, trying to take the bite off. “Your chin will break out just below. You have dirt and oils on your fingers and will give yourself pimples.”
“Okay,” Delilah mumbled into her plate. Flavorless vegetables, bland chicken, undercooked rice. She looked up at her ceiling and wished for a brief pulse that the lamp would sway in some happy dinnertime rhythm. The silence in her house was intimidating. She missed the chaos of mealtimes at her old school, with forks clanging and drinks spilling and hundreds of girls speaking in excited whispers. She wondered what dinners were like at Gavin’s house and whether she could kiss Gavin at his dinner table.
She wished she’d asked him for his phone number so she could call him after dinner from beneath her blankets and tell him that she had liked his kiss.
“Delilah Blue, I said stop touching your lip.”
? ? ?
Delilah’s dreams were twisted and wonderfully terrifying that night. Each time she woke with a start, she remembered a dream where she’d died from the most innocent household accident—she left the stove on all day and the house exploded—and she’d fall back asleep and have another one, this time about dropping the hair dryer in the full tub or falling down the stairs and landing on a knife in her hand.
Somehow, Delilah must have gone to bed with a butter knife clutched in her fist. She dropped it to the floor with a dull clang and felt her muscles shake and pull as she stretched herself fully awake. Delilah’s head hurt, a dull ache in her temples that echoed of fingers pressing into her skull. She found Tylenol in the cupboard in the bathroom and lay back down, falling asleep until the sun was barely starting to brighten the sky.
Getting up on such dark mornings allowed Delilah to pretend she’d never slept and had been out all night, dancing wildly. In the shower she pretended that it was three in the morning and she was washing off sweat accumulated from crashing into other soaked bodies on the dance floor, and not just the innocent layer of sleep and wild dreams.
She put on whatever clothes were folded at the top of each drawer, suspecting that Gavin didn’t even really notice what she wore. To be fair, though, if he showed up at school in khakis and a polo shirt she would have a heart attack. So maybe her clothes mattered too. Delilah smoothed her hands down over her crisp red skirt and white sweater. So plain. She had traded one uniform for another. Trying to fit her personality in her clothing had always just felt like so much work.
In the mirror, she let her hands run over her hips—narrow and girlish—and up over her chest—barely there. She felt stunted from private school, as if her body needed the added chemistry of boys to become a woman and was years behind everyone else. She liked the long, sinewy lines of Gavin’s body beneath his T-shirt. She liked the way the veins on his arms stood out when he heaved his backpack over his shoulder and how his biceps peeked out from his sleeves like thick ropes. He looked strong and scrappy and like he’d just as soon wrestle her onto the grass as he would slip his hand into hers.
Breakfast—more bland. Walk to school—too long. But the sight of Gavin waiting for her at the edge of the school property made something wiggle inside her chest and her stomach turn to fire.
“So did you?” he asked, before she was close, certainly before she was close enough to be sure of what he’d said.
“What?” she called.
“Did you like it?”
She answered by walking faster and then pressing against him, arms around his neck and pulling him down
down
down