And Now, Back to You — Chapter no 10

CHAPTER 10

JACKSON

“I’ll have the turkey sandwich on whole wheat, not white. And fries instead of mashed potatoes, but not if they’re breaded. If they’re breaded, I’ll do the mashed potatoes. Oh, and the salad with the Caesar dressing. But not if it’s dressing from the bottle. Homemade only, please.”

I hand over the menu to the unimpressed waitress. She smacks her gum and stares at me. “Of course the dressing is homemade. This is a diner, sweetheart, not a McDonald’s.”

I fold my hands together, not exactly inspired by how her pen hasn’t taken a single note. This place is exactly as expected. Chipped vinyl flooring. An octogenarian with bright blue hair and ten thousand pounds of mascara manning the cash register. Leather booth seats that squeak when you move and miniature jukeboxes at the end of every table.

“We make everything in-house,” our waitress continues. “Including the

Caesar.”

“Excellent, thank you.”

“Mashed potatoes got skins,” she adds, like she expects me to change my mind and list out another five to ten contingencies. But I’ve exhausted the lot of them, and I don’t like French fries that much anyway.

“That’s fine,” I say.

Our waitress turns wordlessly to Delilah, arching one penciled-on eyebrow. “Well,” she says. Another snap of her gum. “What about you?”

Delilah hands over her menu without looking away from me. She’s been

doing that for most of this trip. Studying me like she wants to peel back my layers and poke around underneath.

“I’ll have the turkey sandwich with fries. No additions or modifications, thank you.” The waitress disappears back into the kitchen and Delilah scrunches her nose. She’s still wearing my jacket, draped over her shoulders like a cape. I know she’s been teasing me about my timetable, but if she reached into the left pocket, she’d find exactly that, folded into neat squares and highlighted to within an inch of its life.

“Really stepped outside your comfort zone with that order, huh.”

I reach for the sugar packets, slowly arranging them by height and color.

“I know what I like.”

“You order food like a serial killer.”

I swap a Sweet’N Low with a Sugar in the Raw, then change my mind and switch them back.

“I’m particular,” I explain. “I like things done a certain way. And the sign said the turkey sandwich was famous.”

I’m particularly particular when it feels like I’m losing control of everything else. I am currently hurtling toward a massive winter storm in the mountains with my polar opposite as company. I’m supposed to go on live television and explain—in clear and concise terms—what’s happening.

I left my sisters behind for the first time since I assumed custody, and my mother won’t stop sending me text messages from random, unknown numbers, asking the most asinine questions.

My head is in shambles, and so I ordered the mashed potatoes.

With skins.

Delilah drops her chin into her hand. “I’ll accept that answer.” She takes a noisy slurp of her chocolate milkshake. The one she politely inquired about as soon as we walked through the front door (“You don’t happen to have chocolate milkshakes, do you?”) and was somehow waiting for her at our table, like a foreign dignitary sitting down to a state dinner. I’ll never understand how she draws people in and makes them love her, all with a sunny smile and a flick of her long hair.

She smacks her lips. “For now,” she adds, a thin undercurrent of warning

in her voice.

“Noted,” I answer.

So far, this trip is both exactly what I expected and nothing like I planned. I thought Delilah would babble incessantly for the duration of our

time in the car, some vapid, sugary-sweet commentary on the passing pine trees or gas station snacks. And while she did deliver a fifteen-minute monologue about the underrated power of a good peach ring, she’s otherwise largely kept to herself.

“Tell me about your sisters,” she demands from the other side of the table, reaching up to toy with the button at the base of her throat.

“Um,” I say, distracted. She’s wearing a soft-looking V-neck sweater that clings to all her curves, so different from her structured broadcast dresses.

My eyes dipped once when she was climbing into the van and I pinched myself so hard, I still have the mark on my wrist. The last thing I need is to start looking at Delilah Stewart.

But holding that line is borderline impossible with the way she keeps dancing her fingers along the top of her chest. She closes the snap then

undoes it again. Open. Closed.

My jaw clenches tight.

“How old are they?” she asks.

I have to forcibly drag my brain back into the conversation. “What?”

“Your sisters,” Delilah says, amused. “How old are they?”

“Oh, they’re fifteen.” I push the sugar container away. “Twins,” I explain.

“That’s quite the age gap.”

I shrug. I thought the same thing when my mom came back to our tiny apartment after being gone on a two-week bender, clutching a sonogram with tears in her eyes.

Our family just got bigger, Jack, she had said with a tremulous smile.

How lucky are we?

I didn’t feel lucky at all. I felt horrified that she’d bring two more children into the world when she was already doing such a shit job raising the first one.

“My mother is . . .” I try to think of a word that fully encompasses Camille Clark. “Unconventional,” I finally settle on. “It’s why I have full custody of the girls now.”

I know what to expect at this point in the conversation. Pity will soften her features and she’ll struggle to find something to say. She won’t bring it up again, and she’ll make her own assumptions about me, the girls, and the family we’ve stitched together. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. The discomfort that people distort themselves into, just so they don’t need to feel the edges of mine.

I brace myself for it, but when I lift my eyes, Delilah is toying with the cherry from the top of her milkshake, chewing on the stem thoughtfully.

“That’s cool,” she says, without a trace of . . . anything. “You must be

close.”

I blink, stupefied. “Yeah. We are.”

“Are they excited to see you on TV?”

I think about the family text thread and how it’s filled to the brim with a string of incomprehensible emojis and requests for updates. Penelope’s last message of, Should I get a life-sized cardboard cutout of you for our viewing party? And Adeline’s immediate response of, YES, WE ARE DOING IT I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU SAY.

A picture twenty-five minutes later of Aiden standing next to a cobbled- together cardboard cutout of me, his arm slung over its shoulders.

“Yeah, they’re excited.” I pick at a tiny chip in the side of the sugar container. “They’re big fans of yours.”

Her face lights up and she sits straighter in the cracked leather booth seat, the jacket slipping off one shoulder, taking the collar of her sweater with it.

I get a glimpse of pale, creamy skin. The delicate line of her throat. She has a thin gold necklace on, anchored with some sort of rabbit charm.

Do not look below her chin, you asshole. Do not.

I’m acting like a Regency era viscount. Two inches of collarbone, and I’m gripping the edge of the table so hard it’s biting into my palms.

“That’s so nice,” Delilah exclaims, like all of Baltimore isn’t already in love with her and the loyalty of two teenagers is something awe-inspiring. It would be annoying if it wasn’t also completely genuine. She pops the cherry into her mouth. “Honestly, the only reason I started doing broadcasts is because my grandpa was obsessed with seeing me on television. He said it was my destiny. Big horoscope guy, Gus Stewart.”

“Yeah?”

She nods with a little hum. “Yeah. He’s always believed in me best. I think if he could rewrite the stars for me, he would.” She takes another long slurp of milkshake. “He raised me, you know. My mom was also . . . unconventional.”

My breath backs up in my lungs. “Oh,” is all I can think to say.

“She was a violin prodigy,” Delilah continues, undeterred. “I’ve seen some videos of when she was little and she was incredible, even then, when the bow was bigger than her. My grandpa took her to the Peabody three

times a week. Worked multiple jobs so she could have the very best of the best when it came to lessons, equipment. Eventually, she won a chair with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Coincidentally around that time, she also got pregnant with me.” Delilah shoots me a small, tight- lipped smile. “I guess she thought she could have both, but I was . . . too much, and she chose what she’d invested the most time in. She was going to put me up for adoption, but my grandpa begged her to reconsider. She signed over custody to him instead.” She takes a noisy slurp of her drink.

“He gets a kick out of seeing me on TV, and I like showing him he didn’t make all those sacrifices for nothing.” She frowns at her milkshake glass.

“Hey, hand me that extra straw. This one is zapped.”

I hand her my straw without looking away from her face. How can she do that? Open a vein and let all her barbed truths spill free without stumbling over a single word. Without being broken or burdened by it.

She taps the straw on the table to clear the wrapper, then drops it into her milkshake. “So. We have more in common than you think. Or, me and your sisters, I guess.” She hits an empty spot with her straw and shifts it around, trying to find another pocket of chocolate while I navigate the brand-new, tipsy-topsy feeling tightening like a band around my chest.

“What do they think of your unmitigated hatred for me?”

I shift in the squeaky booth seat and decide I’m not going to dignify that with an answer. “They’re excited for a weeklong sleepover with their friend.”

“Probably longer if the snow does what we say it’s going to do,” Delilah muses. She wiggles her fingers and does something ridiculous with her face. “We hold all the power.”

She adjusts the collar of the jacket so it’s back at the base of her throat.

Like the world’s stupidest moth to the world’s prettiest flame, my eyes follow. I wonder if my jacket will smell like her when she gives it back.

Something fruity and light with a sharp bite. Dark cherries. Summer peaches dipped in wine.

I drag my eyes up to the ceiling of the diner. I don’t know when this burgeoning attraction to Delilah went from a passing awareness to a fire poker in my side, but it couldn’t have worse timing. It’s the last thing I want when we’re going to be more or less handcuffed together for the duration of this storm.

I’m so goddamned irritated. With myself. With the situation. With how

easy some of this feels when I thought it would be anything but.

“I think we should talk about work now,” I choke out, about as subtle as a kick to the face. Delilah stops trying to noisily suck up the remnants of her chocolate shake and flicks her gaze up to mine, bemused.

“Okay,” she says slowly. She catches her straw between her teeth. “What work thing would you like to discuss?”

“We have a call with the radio station in an hour. I think they’ve got us coming on during the afternoon news block.”

Delilah nods. I wait for her to say something. She doesn’t.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask.

Delilah’s smile edges wider, that damned red straw still caught between her teeth. “Well, Jackson. We should probably talk about the weather.”

“I thought maybe we could write a script during lunch. Something for us

to stick to so we don’t get side—”

“No,” Delilah interrupts.

The rest of my planned speech crumbles to dust. “No? Why not?”

“Because then we’ll sound wooden and weird. It’s—what? A twenty- second spot? Thirty? Let’s just do it and see how it goes.”

“See how it goes,” I repeat.

“Yup!” She slurps the very last of her milkshake noisily. “I know that’s outside your normal operating sphere, but as we’ve discussed, it might be

nice to try something new.”

“I’m not great at that.”

Her face softens. “I know. But you can talk to me and I’ll talk to you and everything will be fine. Just . . . pretend it’s the two of us. Having a conversation. We’re pretty good at that, aren’t we?”

Two turkey sandwiches appear on the table between us. One with French fries, the other with mashed potatoes. I stare blankly down at them, an uncomfortable pulling sensation in the middle of my chest. A thread unspooled. A crack in a stone-hewn wall, formed long ago.

“Everything the way you wanted it?” our waitress asks, still snapping

that gum.

No. Nothing is the way I wanted it.

“Yeah,” I answer instead, my tongue thick in my mouth. I clear my throat and manage a smile. “Everything looks great.”

“Should I pull over?”

“I don’t know,” Delilah answers, her voice muffled. “Do you feel like you need to pull over?”

I reach over and curl one hand around her ankle, holding her steady while she does . . . whatever the hell it is she’s doing in the back seat. Bent over the center console, she rummages around in her backpack, the curve of her ass a distracting six inches from my face while we hurtle down the highway at seventy miles per hour.

“Delilah,” I grind out, tightening my grip on her when she wobbles precariously to the left. “Get up here and put your seat belt on.”

“One second. I want to get the Wi-Fi connector thing for the call. I thought it was here, but I— Oh!” She shimmies back to the front seat, her hair in her face. She holds up a small black box the size of her fist. “Found it.”

“Great.” I let go of her ankle. “Put your seat belt on.”

She chatters happily about spotty phone connections in the middle of the mountains, pulling the seat belt over her lap while balancing her phone on her knee. She taps at the screen and connects everything that needs to be connected while I keep my eyes on the road and try to deep breathe through the worst of my showtime jitters.

It was Delilah’s idea to do this while driving. At first I balked, but it’s turned out to be a good idea, back-seat traversing notwithstanding. It helps, I think, to have something to do. With my focus on the road while Delilah dials into the station, I have less mental space to catastrophize.

That is until a familiar voice fills the cab of the van. One I wasn’t expecting to hear. “Hey, you two. How’s the road trip?”

“Aiden?” I ask, glancing quickly at the phone like it’ll summon his corporeal form into the middle seat of the news van. “What are you doing at the station? Are the girls okay? Did something happen?”

Delilah pats my knee lightly.

“Everything’s fine. I came into the station because I thought you could use a friend on the other end. Relax.” Someone murmurs something in the background and Aiden snorts. “Benny is none too pleased to be sharing his airtime, though.”

“This is a serious segment, pretty boy,” a rough voice crackles over the line. Benny, the host of the afternoon news hour program, must have just gotten into the booth. “I don’t like you trying to commandeer my ship.”

“No one is commandeering anything,” Aiden says easily. “I’m here for moral support.”

“I don’t need moral support,” Benny grouches back.

“Not for you, Ben.”

A heavy burst of static explodes over the line and both Delilah and I wince. She lowers the volume, then cradles the phone in her hands.

“Thanks for giving us some of your time, Benny. We’ll keep it short and sweet for you.”

There’s a long pause. “Is that Delilah?” he finally asks.

Delilah grins. “Sure is!”

“I suppose that will be fine, then.”

Aiden snickers into the phone. “I’ve never seen someone over seventy blush before.”

“You’re about to see someone over seventy kick your ass,” Benny snaps, sharp as a whip. Delilah covers her mouth with her palm, her eyes squinting at the corners as she tries not to laugh. I grin at her.

“Watch yourself, Aiden,” I warn.

“Yeah, no kidding,” he mutters. “Okay, are you guys ready? I kind of want to get out of this booth as soon as possible.”

I look at Delilah’s smiling face. Flushed cheeks. Red lips. She’s looking at me like she believes I can do this, and it makes me think that maybe I can. Maybe I can flatten the curled-up edges of myself. Maybe old wounds don’t have to hurt so bad. Maybe I can move past them into something new,

better, different.

“Yeah,” I say. “We’re ready.”

BENNY BARLOW: I’m told there is an update?

DELILAH STEWART: Yes, Benny. Thank you for having us. Jackson and I are currently heading out to Garrett County where the storm is set to arrive within the next forty-eight hours. We’re expecting high winds, plummeting temperatures, and snowfall upwards of several feet. Baltimore should expect a milder version of the same storm, but we’ll know more once we get up in the mountains.

DELILAH STEWART: Also, we stopped for turkey sandwiches.

BENNY BARLOW: Jackson. You’re quiet. Anything to add?

JACKSON CLARK: Delilah has it covered.

[pause]

[indistinct arguing]

JACKSON CLARK: Uh, the turkey sandwiches were good?

BENNY BARLOW: Is that a question or a statement?

JACKSON CLARK: Statement. The turkey sandwiches were good.

BENNY BARLOW: So glad I made time for this riveting update.

DELILAH STEWART: [laughter] And now, back to you, Benny.