One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

I glance out the window to the dark garden, pools and squares of light beyond it, a few lit paths leading away from the manor house.

Don’t ask, I tell myself. Don’t ask, don’t ask.

I take another sip of whiskey.

“Did you play it?” I hear myself say.

Delilah goes perfectly still, one hand holding her drink, one hand on the windowsill. She watches me warily, like she thinks I might suddenly transform into some toothsome beast.

“No,” she says, after a long moment, her voice polite, neutral. “Vera pushed for it, but I stood my ground for once.”

I want to ask her a hundred more things. I want to ask if her wedding was like this. I want to ask if she glowed when she walked down the aisle, like Ava did; if they kissed every time someone clinked a glass; if her sisters decorated their getaway car.

I want to ask why him. Why then. What the hell he had that I didn’t.

Instead I drink more whiskey.

“I wouldn’t want to touch someone else’s dirty shoe either,” I admit.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t. We’d have lost pretty badly,” she says.

“I thought everyone lost.”

Delilah laughs again.

“True,” she says. “But it’s really bad when the shoe game makes it obvious that the two people who just got married barely know each other.”

I wonder, for a split second, how we’d have done at the shoe game, but I chase the thought away with another sip of whiskey. We promised not to fight, and asking Delilah about her wedding feels like standing next to a pool of lava and debating whether to step in.

“I can imagine,” I finally say.

She looks away. She takes a long drink from her cocktail, head turned to one side, pearl earrings bobbing at her neck.

I watch her, unabashedly. Openly. I start at her elbow and follow the colors and shapes upward, onto her shoulders, hard to see through the pink lace but I know most of it by heart anyway.

The tattoos are new, though they aren’t really. They’re new since we broke up, and every time I’ve seen her over the past eight years, during our very intermittent couplings, she’s had a new one. It’s part of the rush, part of the discovery, seeing how she’s changed.

Now I’m looking at her left arm: an ocean, a sailing ship, a tentacle wrapped around it. Another ship, a similar fate; a third being pulled upward by a flock of birds, and at the top, a purple-red Kraken, tentacles trailing across her shoulder blade, curling onto her chest.

Though today, the tentacle seems to end just past her shoulder in a blurry line, and I’m still studying it as she speaks.

“Bernadette,” she says, still looking away. I follow her gaze to where the other woman is standing across the room, talking to an older couple I don’t recognize. “Since we’re asking questions. Did you?”

She turns back, looks me square in the eyes.

“Yes,” I tell her, and make myself stop.

Delilah looks over at her, then back at me.

“Two and a half years ago,” I say. “Just a summer thing. It was nothing.”

“Don’t say it was nothing,” she tells me, softly, her glass up to her lips.

I push a hand through my hair, glance out the window into the darkness. I fight the urge to confess everything to Delilah, as if she’ll absolve me of my sins even though she’s made it clear she’s not interested in doing so.

“It was casual,” I amend myself. “That’s all.”

“She seems nice,” Delilah says.

“She is.”

I don’t say: she was almost last. I want to tell Delilah that it was Bernadette that summer and into autumn, then a one-night-stand with a woman named Susan, and then it was Fall Fest and the backseat of Delilah’s car and then it was nothing and no one.

Two years, three months, and sixteen days of no one.

“You got shorter while you were gone,” I say, changing the subject.

“Oh, I stopped by my chateau on the way to doing the car and changed into flats,” she says, sticking one foot out from under the dress that now falls all the way to the floor. “I think I’ve already got blisters, though.”

I glance over at her, frowning down.

“Your chateau?”

Delilah laughs, though she still doesn’t look at me.

“It’s a cabin,” she says. “But because this place costs a fortune, they insist on calling the rental cabins chateaus because if you name something a French word, they’re suddenly worth a thousand dollars a night.”

I just make a noise. It’s unintentional, but holy shit.

“I know,” she says, finally looking up at me. “And yes, I’ve suggested that they could probably end hunger in the state and still give Ava a very nice wedding, but my thoughts were not taken into consideration.”

“Please tell me that liquid gold comes out of the faucet,” I say.