Just tired. Didn’t sleep much.
Mr. Harrington turned his back to the class as he began writing that night’s homework on the board, and she slid the note back to Gavin. She didn’t have long to wait. The note, paper creased and folded haphazardly, landed in front of her again.
Come over after school. I want to draw you.
She nearly choked on her gum. Draw her? A quick glance over her shoulder and she was met with Gavin’s eyes, dark and serious. He motioned to the paper again.
Delilah bent down over her desk, face hot, the dream conveniently pushed to the back of her mind and obscured by a rush of heat. Gavin wanted to sketch her, like a real artist. The idea unleashed a cloud of butterflies in her stomach.
She swallowed, picking up her pencil with shaky hands, and wrote a single word:
Okay.
It was just a dream, after all.
? ? ?
The walk back to Gavin’s house seemed longer than usual. Gavin held her hand the whole way, his little finger drawing the simplest, yet most distracting, circles against her palm.
“I’m home,” Gavin called out as he stepped into the house, and when she followed him inside the door, Delilah pulled up short.
She felt as if the day before must have changed something in her. She was almost positive she’d never stepped foot in this house before.
The late-winter sun streamed in through the curtains just the same as it had before, and the trees gleamed emerald and green from the backyard. The fire stoked itself and burned brighter for Gavin, the room warming all around them. But the human eye is amazing at finding straight lines, and Delilah could tell at once that every angle was slightly skewed. Some were soft and sloped, others rigid but oblique. Nothing came together at right angles or with any standard metric. Doors tilted slightly or had one square corner, one rounded, much as Delilah knew her left foot had always been slightly longer than her right.
It was as if before the house had stood straight, paying attention, on its best behavior. Here she saw it as it was: an aberration, come together all wrong, with walls pushed together in wavy lines here, in sharp edges there.
The thunk of Gavin’s backpack hitting the floor pulled Delilah out of her thoughts, and she blinked hard, looking away from the crooked walls and up at Gavin’s relaxed smile. Behind him, the stems of a plant hanging near the front door began to sway gently, its leaves turning upward, leaning toward him.
“It’s happy to see you,” Delilah noted flatly, handing her jacket to Gavin with slightly shaking hands. She’d made the observation before, but somehow, this time, the house’s reactions to Gavin felt syrupy, and—Delilah hated to admit it—pointed. As if it were reminding her what it had said the day before: But he’s ours.
He looked around for a moment and shrugged. “Yeah.”
They walked through the living room and into the bright kitchen. Gavin reached into the refrigerator to grab a pitcher of milk, setting it down next to a plate of cookies on the table.
The chair next to Delilah slid back, its feet barely making a sound against the wood floor. She sat down gingerly, almost as if she expected it to be pulled from beneath her at any moment. “So this is just waiting for you every day?” she asked.
Gavin poured milk into the two waiting glasses. “Pretty much. Or a sandwich.”
Delilah took a cookie, finding it still warm. “Crazy,” she said.
Gavin laughed and took the seat next to her, tossing an entire cookie into his mouth, saying, “I guess so,” around it.
“And it’s just always been that way?”