“He was a little too weird for me,” Cornelia said, leaning back into position and sounding sharply bored. “I’m glad that’s over.”
Delilah understood the dismissively territorial behavior: By casting off Gavin, Cornelia was allowing Delilah to have him. Dhaval made a skeptical noise in his throat. “You had it bad for him, Corr.”
Cornelia smacked him. “I did not.”
“Liar,” Dhaval drawled.
“Well, he seems just weird enough for me.” Delilah stood, telling Dhaval she would see him later, and walked into the building.
Students pressed into her as they walked past, hot and heavy all around. Everyone seemed so carefully disheveled, as if their hair had been mussed into the perfect disarray, their clothes selected to be ideally mismatched. Delilah looked down at her skirt, her sweater, her plain brown shoes.
She leaned against her locker, feeling the press of bodies behind her like a riptide. She could join it, get pulled along to class. Or she could pretend to bury her feet in the sand and wait for her world to stop spinning.
Delilah wasn’t all that familiar with jealousy. She’d had what could only barely be considered a boyfriend for a few weeks last year. She’d kissed a couple others. But she’d always let them go with as friendly a smile as she could manage, and tried not to tell them they just didn’t have the right twist for her tastes.
Giant footsteps echoed toward her, and she didn’t even realize she’d been alone in the empty hall until the second, late bell rang and the toes of black sneakers moved into her line of vision.
“Why are you still out here? I thought you were the queen of time management.” Gavin bent to meet her eyes. There was a tightness in his face, something pulling the edges taut and worried. Where is the mystery? she wondered. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her sitting down next to Cornelia. It was exactly why he hadn’t joined her there, she realized.
“Did you kiss her?”
“Who?” He studied her for a beat before his eyes widened in understanding. “Cornelia?”
“Yes.”
Gavin nodded, and Delilah blinked down to the ink on his forearm. “Did you take her home?”
In her peripheral vision, she saw him smile, shake his head. “I told you, you were the first. Delilah, are you jealous?” He seemed to find the whole thing fascinating.
“A bit.”
“Of Cornelia?”
She looked away, fighting a smile. She liked the way he seemed unable to conceive of such a thing. “Yes.”
“Well, I promise you, I was only a tool used to completely freak out her parents.”
“But you dated her.”
“Of course I did. Why not?”
It wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear, but Delilah appreciated his honesty. “Did you bite her bottom lip?”
His smile faded as fast as a lit match put under water, but his eyes smoldered with a hunger that made Delilah’s fingertips tingle. “No. Never wanted to do that with her.”
She took his hand and pulled him toward Room 104, Mr. Harrington’s English class.
Chapter Twelve
Him
Her hand was almost constantly in the air during class. Gavin watched Delilah’s skinny arm wave back and forth, as she volunteered to answer her seventh question in forty minutes. She’ll speak enough for both of us, he thought. He imagined them in a quick montage of scenarios—at the grocery store, buying a car, walking through the park together—and wondered how that would work over time, if he would start to feel more a part of her world, or if she would always just grab his hand and pull him along in her determined, tiny wake.
For once he was thinking of a relationship in the abstract unit of time, not in a finite unit as small as classes or kisses. He’d never really thought about how to integrate a person into his life long-term, and Gavin’s thoughts immediately turned to her question yesterday: Do you think it will be weird to live somewhere else?
He’d never actually considered the alternative. He’d always assumed he’d be in the house forever.
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