down to her mouth, where she could offer her lip again.
“I liked it too much,” she said, after he’d bitten her and she’d sucked on his lip and pulled his hair and heard the sound he made that set off fireworks in each of her toes.
“Too much how?”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Mom yelled at me for touching my lip.”
Gavin’s eyebrows inched toward his hairline. “Really? Yelled?”
“Well, no. She doesn’t yell. But she nagged me all through dinner in this voice that sounds pleasant but isn’t.”
“Because you touched your lip all through dinner?”
Delilah nodded. “So you’re obligated to do it over and over and over now.”
The school bell clanged in the background, and Gavin wrapped his arm around her shoulders, steering her toward the building. “Did you have bells at the other school?”
She gazed up at him, wondering if the topic of kissing was finished. “No. We were expected to be responsible for our time.” She heard how the words came out rote and programmed, straight from the Saint Benedict’s handbook.
“That’s it, then. Public-school kids aren’t trusted to be responsible.”
She stared at the pavement as it passed beneath their feet. She noticed that he had on new black shoes and watched them instead of wishing he would obsess about kissing as much as she did.
“Though I like to think that I’m not typical,” he said. She heard a twist in his voice, like he was smiling out the words. “I like to fulfill my obligations. Kissing or otherwise. But especially kissing.”
Delilah knew her grin was ridiculous, and ahead in the distance, Dhaval caught her eye. His reaction—raised brow, arms crossed—told her that he saw the wild smile and would keep at her the entire day until she spilled every detail about the boy at her side. Gavin slowed his steps and finally released her, kissing the side of her head and promising he would find her later. When he walked away, shoulders square and broad, hair as black as the shadows under the tree, she felt a little hollow, like maybe he’d taken one of her ribs with him when he left.
The grass spread brown and muddy, forming a dim smudge across the front of the school. Dhaval sat at the top of the steps beside Cornelia Stinton, a girl Delilah knew only from Dhaval’s lesson on social hierarchy Delilah’s first day back at school. Cornelia seemed nice enough. She’d moved from Wichita the year after Delilah left for private school, and therefore was one of few girls in school who didn’t seem personally offended that Delilah had ever left.
“Come here, girl.” Dhaval patted the concrete next to him. “Spill.”
Delilah sat beside him, waving politely to Cornelia, who seemed to sit a little too close to Dhaval and watch him with more interest than she maybe would have if she knew he was more interested in boys than girls.
“What’s today’s adventure?” he asked, bumping Delilah’s shoulder with his.
“Discussion of unreliable narrators in fiction, archery in phys ed, and—”
“And more kissing your new boy toy?”
Delilah gave him a meaningful glare and didn’t bother to answer.
“Girl, you work fast,” he said. “You always get what you want?”
She snorted. “Definitely not.”
“Are you dating Gavin?” Cornelia asked, leaning past Dhaval so she could give Delilah full view of her wide blue eyes. Cornelia was pretty in the way that girls often were at seventeen: prettier beneath all of the things she put on her face.
Maybe Cornelia was pretending she hadn’t seen Delilah and Gavin on the lawn just now. Maybe she really hadn’t seen them. So Delilah nodded and watched Gavin disappear inside the side door, wishing he didn’t sit behind her in English so she would be able to stare at his shoulder and remember how it felt to rest her head against it.