“Gavin!” she screamed. “Oh my God, help me!”
She burst through a new door, falling forward onto her knees in the bathroom again, and crawled frantically into the shower, turning on the water, tearing at her clothes and hurling them across the room. Her jeans landed with a heavy splat, still crawling with roaches. Her top hit the blue wallpaper and slid into the sink, the pale yellow cotton turned black with insects. The spray was freezing, but she didn’t care. She stared in horror as the roaches fled the clothes and, like an army, began moving in a river along the floor to the tub. They scaled the porcelain wall and spilled in an oily black wave over the lip, onto her feet again, this time crawling up her body instead of down. She stood in only her underwear, frozen in horror as she screamed.
The stiff shower curtain slid up her legs, over the bugs, inching up the fingers of her left hand and curling around her wrist, trapping it at her side. Delilah clawed at the plastic sheet with her free hand, pulling and pulling as the pressure tightened in stiff, biting straps around her arm. She cried out at the pain as it dug into her skin.
Gavin burst into the room, eyes wild and wide at the scene in front of him. “What are you doing?” he yelled, reaching to turn off the water. He leaped into the shower, gripping her shoulders and staring at her with black, terrified eyes. “Delilah, what did you do?”
“Gavin! I. . . It. . .” Delilah pointed down to the shower curtain, but there was nothing there, only her own hand wrapped around her arm and covered in blood where it looked as if she’d torn away the skin.
“I came up when I heard you turn on the shower,” he said. “Why are you in the shower? Delilah, what happened to your arm?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head wildly. “No, Gavin, there were roaches. They came out of the wall. And my mom’s porcelain—” She stopped, staring wide-eyed up at the windowsill. There was no porcelain statue there. No bubble in the paint that had burst. No person or doors. No roaches scurrying back into the wall. But they had been there; she knew it. She knew it.
Now there was nothing but Delilah, in the shower in her underwear, with a handprint-shaped burn on her arm.
Chapter Twenty-One
Him
Delilah was in shock; that was it. Or maybe she was having some sort of episode. Gavin could hear her screaming down the hall, but he wasn’t prepared for the sight of her standing there, half naked and soaked, scratching at her skin like it was covered in acid.
She was saying something about roaches, but Gavin bent to look under the sink and behind the toilet and he didn’t see anything. Water swirled down the shower drain, and his shoes squelched against the porcelain surface. His socks were soaked clear through, the bottoms of his jeans, his T-shirt wet from trying to reach around her to turn off the shower and. . . wait, Delilah was practically naked. And shivering. And standing in his bathtub.
Gavin had hoped to maybe get Delilah in some stage of nakedness tonight, but in his imagination, it hadn’t looked anything like this.
And shit, she was. . . Delilah was bleeding?
Blood ran between her fingers where they gripped her arm. It plunked to the bottom of the tub, one drop after another, forming a pink rivulet that disappeared down the drain.
Gavin stuttered out the beginnings of a few sentences, finally giving up and reaching for a nearby towel.
“G-g-g—” she tried to say, shaking violently now.
“Can I see?” he asked, motioning to her arm.
She shook her head wildly and pointed toward the window. “It was there; it was.”
“I know. I know,” he said, in a soft, placating tone. He tried to see where she was hurt, but she jerked away, cringing and shaking like she might crawl out of her skin.