Their shoes crunched on the dried leaves as they walked across the lawn to their favorite tree.
Gavin looked at her profile and, as always, wondered what she was thinking. “Why do you talk in class so much?”
As soon as the words were out, he heard how critical they sounded. It was the kind of thing he would have said to another girl like Cornelia, or Tabitha, and she would have said, Gavin, that’s super-rude. He would mumble an apology and wonder why they didn’t just give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s not like they were dealing with Dhaval Reddy—Mr. Social—or Tanner Jones—Mr. Jock. They had chosen the weird guy for a reason and then expected him to act typical.
But apparently Delilah didn’t expect this. She shrugged, completely unfazed by his tone. “My school—my old school—was pretty strict about participation. It just became part of the routine. This school just lets you sit there and not say anything.”
And thank God for that, he thought. “Do you miss Saint Benedict’s?”
She chewed her lip while she considered this. “Yes and no.”
Briefly he pondered which part was yes and which was no, but he put himself in her situation and figured if she was comparing this mess of a school to a fancy East Coast academy, she probably missed most things. Hopefully, the one thing she didn’t miss was that he wouldn’t have been at Saint Ben’s.
She sat on the grass and opened her lunch bag, popping a grape in her mouth. She chewed, thinking, and Gavin sat beside her, slanting his body toward hers, kissing the side of her head before opening his own lunch.
“There are a lot more students here,” she said. “People care more about what they’re wearing, but in a really silly way. Like, they want to look messy and take a lot of time to do it. We didn’t care as much about that, and when given the option of free dress, we all just wore whatever we slept in.”
Gavin’s thoughts slipped away to something dark and silky and very, very tiny. He ran his hand up her arm, to her neck, to pull her in for a kiss.
“Not like that,” she said, smiling against his lips.
? ? ?
He tried to see House the way she might have the day before. It had stayed so still for her initially—almost as if it were holding its collective breath—but he’d been so absorbed in Delilah’s reaction he hadn’t given it much thought. And her reaction had been completely unexpected. He’d been sincere when he said he’d never had a girl over before, but he had to imagine that if he had, they would have kept their arms tucked closer to their bodies than Delilah. She’d reached out, touched Walls and Couch, even Stiff Chair.
As always, Delilah was fearless. Maybe even foolhardy.
Gavin pulled up short, staring at the soft pastel wallpaper of Hallway and wondering where that thought had come from. If he trusted House, why shouldn’t she? Why should she come in with trepidation? Was there something about House to fear?
With this burst of thoughts, he walked faster down the hall to the upstairs bathroom—the only functional bathroom in House and also the only room Gavin had never thought was alive. It was his sanctuary, and the one place in House he realized he felt safe thinking whatever he wanted.
See? That bothered him too. His thoughts were his own everywhere, weren’t they? In any room he entered he could think about anything he wanted, whether it was Delilah naked and waiting for him on his bed, or any number of flittering images that entered his mind—seeing himself in college, laughing with a family, sailing in the middle of the ocean—and were gone as quickly as they’d appeared, and no person or object would even know. His thoughts were his and had always been. Hadn’t they?