And Now, Back to You — Chapter no 28

CHAPTER 28

JACKSON

“I just don’t think you can discredit seven seasons of excellent television,”

Delilah says as she smears more jelly onto her biscuit. She woke up this morning and seamlessly picked up the threads of an argument we were having while we got ready for bed, like there wasn’t bare skin, panting breaths, and a pair of incredible orgasms in between.

Meanwhile I’m caught somewhere between What did last night mean to you and When can we do it again, tongue-tied and stupefied. More than usual.

Delilah sets her knife to the side, pushes up the sleeves of the navy blue sweater I forced her into, and continues, “It’s practically a crime that Buffy never won any major awards, you know? Like, I feel like it should have won at least one Emmy. One.”

I can’t stop staring at her mouth. At the slight divot under her bottom lip.

It’s the same exact spot I fixated on while I worked myself to orgasm against her belly last night. That tiny half inch and her teeth clamped against it while she wiggled beneath me.

I clear my throat and continue stirring my coffee. Lottie got one of the generators working late last night. Enough to power the common rooms and the small café where the coffee lives. Dustin and his portable pour-over are no longer needed, thank you very much. “I thought we established that entertainment industry awards are meaningless when defining objects of taste.”

Delilah narrows her eyes, brandishing her butter knife like a weapon. “I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or not.”

“I’ll neither confirm nor deny.”

I love arguing with Delilah, almost as much as I love everything we did last night.

I keep waiting for the existential dread to rise like acid. Fear that I’ve made a misstep, or anxiety that I’ve reached for something that should not belong to me. But all I feel is bone-deep satisfaction, especially when Delilah’s collar slips and I catch a glimpse of the mark I bit into her neck.

I guess that’s what happens when you have the most intense sexual experience of your life without ever removing your pants.

Delilah’s eyes soften. “You look happy,” she says quietly.

“I am happy,” I answer. I poke at the feeling and examine it, turning it over and looking for cracks. I’ve always had trouble trusting my own happiness, but Delilah makes it easy to lean into the feeling.

Especially when she’s wearing my sweater with pastry crumbs at the corner of her mouth, looking at me like maybe I could make her happy too.

“Good,” she says, nodding to herself, glancing down at her plate and then peeking up at me through her lashes. Shy, a little bit. Pleased too. “I liked what happened last night.”

Relief crushes my lungs, swift and sweet.

“Me too,” I answer, a little too quickly.

Her smile pulls wider. “How long were you going to wait for me to bring it up?”

“A respectable two to four business days.” I take a bite of cinnamon roll.

“Then, maybe I would have sent you a notarized letter to discuss it.”

A loud snap of laughter tumbles out of Delilah. “Well, I’m glad we discussed it before we made it to formal documentation.” She pauses. “It was good, wasn’t it?”

Smooth, creamy skin. The tumble of her hair over her bare shoulders.

The spill of her breasts over the material of her bra. How for once, she did exactly as I asked. How delicious that felt paired with her jagged exhales and sharp whines.

I press out a slow breath, feeling the heat of it against the back of my neck. “Yeah,” I rasp. “It was good.”

So good it defies logic, actually. So good it’s burned through at least eighty percent of my core memories and taken up the headliner role.

“I know we agreed that things could be casual while we’re here, but . . .”

Delilah pokes around at her pastry. “Maybe we can do that again?”

My wild flare of hope dims. I thought that sentence was going in a different direction. I thought she was going to say she wanted to do this

when we’re home too.

I think I wanted her to say that.

I clear my throat. “Yeah,” I manage, trying to consolidate my hopes and expectations and find the best-case scenario somewhere in between. “Yeah, of course.”

Her eyebrows pinch together. “Do you—is that something you want?

With me?”

I yank myself out of my own head and reach across the table for her hand. “Of course I want that.”

I want it again and again and again. I want to see how good we fit together. I want to see what other secrets she’s holding on to. I want to be the one to rattle them free. I want my teeth against her neck and her thighs spread wide. I want everything in between.

“Well, good,” Delilah says, relief in the curve of her body. She squeezes my hand.

“Yeah. Good,” I repeat. Our eyes catch and hold. Hers soften. “Good,” I say again.

It’s still blistering cold inside the lodge. The worst of it is chased away by the roaring fire in the lobby, but it lingers in the corner of the room we’re situated in. Our room this morning felt like stepping directly into a meat freezer, even the carpet cold beneath my socked feet.

Delilah shivers.

“I should have made you put on a hat,” I murmur.

“In addition to the two sweaters and scarf you manhandled me into?”

“Should have forced the gloves too.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m fine.”

“You’re cold.”

“It’s not so bad down here, and Lottie says they’re working on getting another generator from one of the boathouses down at the lake.” She finishes the rest of her pastry. She wiggles her eyebrows. “Maybe it can

inspire you to warm me up again later.”

A tempting thought.

“Does she know why the one here failed?”

I’m not particularly interested in the answer, but Delilah seems to be, because she already has a theory. She also, apparently, has already discussed it at length with Lottie, somewhere in between her two trips to the pastry table.

“Probably something to do with the sheer amount of snow, and the plunging temperatures. The cold wave is well below the averages for this region. It’s possible the fuel gelled, preventing it from flowing properly through the lines. Or, more likely, the cold just zapped the battery completely.” I make a winded sound. Her forehead wrinkles, a little line

right between her brows. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She stares at me.

I rub my hand across my jaw. “Something about you talking about fuel lines, I don’t know.”

What I do know is I’m hard as a rock beneath this little breakfast table, and I’m going to have to sit here and think about something—Aiden’s karaoke performance, the winter Penelope and Adeline got the stomach flu at the same time, the molting habits of geese—to get control of myself.

Another loud laugh bursts out of Delilah. One of the truck drivers bundled in a parka by the fire turns to give her a curious look. Delilah waves happily, then pushes her chair back from the table.

“Where are you going?”

“To get another one of these powdered doughnut things, and to get you a cronut, since you are seemingly bound to the table for the time being.” She grins at me, and another happy and completely foreign swoop twists beneath my sternum. She collects some of our plates, balancing them in her arms. “Lottie made fancy pastries as an apology and I’m not mad about it.”

“Wait.” I reach out and grip her arm. Rub my thumb along the inside of her wrist, just because I can. Words stick on my tongue. Promises I have no business making. Declarations that aren’t suited to half-deserted lodge lobbies. I swallow all of it down, and push it to a place to deal with later.

When we’re back home, maybe. “Can you get me two cronuts?”

If Delilah notices my deflection, she doesn’t comment on it, flitting off in the direction of the pastries but getting sidetracked by the same trucker at the fireplace. He looks flabbergasted by her sudden attention, blinking up at her from beneath his hood like she’s a particularly bright and shiny foreign object that’s dropped directly out of the sky.

“She making friends again?”

Mark appears at the end of the table with a bag of jerky, a scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that only the top half of his face is visible.

“Yeah,” I answer. “I think so.”

Mark drags a char from a nearby table to ours. He unwraps some of his scarf. “Once, when we were on assignment in North East, she convinced a bunch of duck farmers to let her hold the babies.” He shakes his head.

“Almost came back with thirty-two ducklings in the news van.”

“I believe it.”

On the other side of the lobby, Delilah resumes her quest for pastries, but stops by another table, seemingly greeting the two older men there by name. She points to the folded-up newspaper, plucks a pen out of one of their front shirt pockets, and quickly scribbles something on it. I’m tracking her like a weather system, watching as she drifts over to the tables.

“Have you heard anything from Keith?” I ask.

“Nope.” Mark takes a gargantuan bite of jerky. “I imagine he’s nursing his wounds. He doesn’t like being eclipsed in popularity, and Delilah has been doing that since she joined the station.”

“Is there a plan for when you get back?” I’m worried that when I’m not around to play buffer, Keith is going to become more antagonizing toward Delilah. “How are you going to—”

Glass shatters somewhere nearby. My head snaps up and Delilah is standing just a few steps from the table she just abandoned, her phone to her ear, the plate she was holding in pieces at her feet. But it’s the look on her face that has me pushing out of my chair and striding across the lobby, gripping her elbow as soon as I’m close enough to reach for her.

“What is it?” I ask. “What’s happened?”

Her face is pale, her big brown eyes filling with tears. She slips the phone away from her ear, holding it limply at her side.

“It’s my grandpa,” she manages, voice thick. “He had a fall. They said —” She wets her lips, chin trembling. “The nurse said they don’t know how bad it is. That he hit his head and there was a lot of blood and—”

Her breath hitches and she stops. Tries to collect herself. My grip slips up until my fingers are curled around her bicep, tugging her into me. “They’re taking him to the emergency room now,” she whispers into my chest, nose against the hollow of my throat. “They’re taking him to the hospital and I’m

here and the roads are—I don’t even know what the roads are like and, I don’t know when I can get there and—”

“Shh, it’s all right.” I smooth my hand over her hair. “I’m gonna get you back there.”

“How?” Her voice wobbles, clouded with tears.

“Trust me,” I whisper. “Let me take you home.”

It’s a relief to slip into problem-solving mode. Like this, my brain and my body work together. Get Delilah home pounds through my mind like a war drum. A clear set of stepping stones to walk across until I’m at the other side.

I send Delilah to the room to pack while I track down Lottie. A quick conversation confirms that the roads are still in no state to be driven on, and

my stomach sinks.

“How long, do you think?”

Lottie glances out the window. The parking lot is a sea of smooth white, the road beyond sparkling in the midafternoon sun.

“The road crews here work quickly and likely have already started on the main routes in and out of town, but I’m worried about the ice. It could complicate things.” Her kind eyes find mine. “The priority in storms are hospitals and other social services, not hotels. I’m sorry, Jackson. But I don’t know if I can get you out of here today. Or even tomorrow.”

I thread my hands together behind my head. I’m about to grab a shovel and start making a path myself. “What if—”

“Hello, uh. I might be of some assistance.”

Dustin, the truck driver with a crush on Delilah, shuffles his way forward, his hat in his hands. He bends the bill of the cap, then smooths it out again.

“I don’t mean to overstep, but I was listenin’ from the corner.”

I wave him off, unconcerned with the semantics of eavesdropping. “Can your truck handle the roads?”

“Lord, no,” Dustin laughs, big and booming. “I’m not gonna take an eighteen-wheeler for a joyride after a snow event. Specially not with precious cargo.” He gives me a watered-down glare, like I suggested we strap Delilah to the top of a rocket and launch her back to Baltimore.

“Drivers who pass through this area are a tight-knit group, though, and I know a few of the private clearing companies. Big business out here, you know, with all the snowfall. With the county folks as busy as they are, it leaves quite the gap for private industries to fill. If you ask me, more of the municipalities should—”

I stretch my neck to the side, impatient. “Dustin.”

“Ah, yep. Anyway. I know two guys—Brooks and Brent. Brothers, you know. They owe me a favor from the summer of ’82. They’ve got a real sweet grader that could get you out to the main roads.”

Hope blooms, fierce and quick. “Are they available? Can you give them a call? I’m happy to pay.”

Dustin waves me off. “Nah. You don’t have to pay. It would be my honor to help Miss Delilah.” He straightens, his chest puffed out. A loyal soldier, ready to slay any dragons standing in Delilah’s path. “I already gave them a call. They’ll be here in an hour or so.”

I blow out a heavy breath, relief making my head feel buzzy. “Dustin, I could kiss you.”

He slips his hat back over his head. “I’d really prefer it if you didn’t.”

“Noted.” I turn toward Lottie. “You think you could pack me up some of

those powdered doughnuts to go?”

She smiles. “Of course.”

When I finally make it upstairs after coordinating with Mark and Dustin and Brooks and Brent—who finish each other’s sentences and prefer to communicate by screaming directly into the phone—Delilah is sitting in the middle of the floor, her suitcase a small explosion around her. The only things she has packed are her emotional support bag of candy and one of my sweaters she must have pulled out of my bag. She looks up at me with big, tear-filled eyes, her mouth trying to twist its way into a smile.

“I’m having trouble,” she tells me, her voice thick.

“That’s okay,” I tell her. This is the Delilah no one else gets to see. The one who feels safe enough to let me see some of her cracks. I put down the bag of doughnuts. “I can help.”

She sighs and looks at her suitcase, her cheeks wet. “I’m really sad,” she whispers.

“That’s okay too.” I meet her on the floor and cup her face with my hands, tilting it toward mine, wiping away her tears with my thumbs. She keeps her eyes closed, her forehead scrunched. I press a kiss right there

until it eases. Until she’s looped her hands around my wrists and tucked her face into my neck. “I’m going to take you home now, okay?”

She doesn’t ask any questions. She just nods. Fully and wholly trusting

me to do what I said I would.

Take care of her.

WEATHER ADVISORY: ROADWAYS AND BRIDGES

MAY BE ICED OVER. USE CAUTION WHEN TRAVELING.