One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

Then she plays me the Beach Boys song Wouldn’t It Be Nice, because she’s making fun of me, so I play Season of the Witch.

Black Magic Woman. I Put A Spell on You. Delilah runs out of quarters, so she has to borrow one from me to play me Hound Dog.

Afterward, we walk along the river path hand in hand and talk about whether a boat could make it all the way here from the sea, and what kind of boat, whether anyone would want to. We walk for two hours without meaning to, down the river and back through town, until we’re at the diner again and it’s nearly ten o’clock at night.

Two nights later, we meet after work at the new gastropub downtown, and we drink beer and eat burgers and don’t realize the time until the staff tells us they close in fifteen minutes. I kiss her by her car, out on the sidewalk, and I kiss her so long and hard that a pedestrian clears her throat at us.

We see movies together and share popcorn. We go wine tasting in the hills. Visit historical sites we’ve never heard of before and take audio tours. One beautiful Saturday we wake up early and hike to the top of Bareback Peak, have a picnic, and manage not to bring up the name until we’re in the car, heading back to town.

We hold hands. I open doors for her and she rests her head on my shoulder when it gets late. We casually kiss hello and less-casually kiss goodbye. We text each other goodnight and good morning like total dipshits, but I smile every time.

And we make out like teenagers, sometimes in public: in movie theaters, in parks, in the front seat of my car or hers. I try to abide by the rules we set ourselves but it’s impossible not to slip past them sometimes, like when she straddles me on her couch and I grind her hips against mine until I’m on the brink. When I reach for her waist and brush a nipple instead and before I know it I’m pinching them both as she moans into my mouth and God I want her right there, right then, up against the wall but somehow I stop.

We never spend the night.

After a few weeks, she brings me to dinner with Lainey and Beau. They’re suspicious at first but by the end of the meal I’m telling Beau about the time we had to throw out an entire batch of beer because a chipmunk somehow got in and drowned, and he’s giving me a rundown of the top ten kinds of squirrel trap. We agree that they’re all varmints.

Daniel and Charlie have us over for dinner, where Delilah agrees to design Rusty’s first tattoo for her and then Thomas has a blowout while she’s holding him, but she washes the poop off her arm and laughs.

We tour a distillery with Eli and Violet. I can tell Eli is skeptical. I would be, too, but by the end of our double date Delilah and Violet have sampled the whiskey and Delilah is telling Violet that I once called stemmed wine glasses an ‘inefficient use of space,’ and Violet is laughing and telling Delilah that Eli has such an exacting system for his spice organization that she’s not allowed to touch it.

“It is inefficient,” I mutter to Eli.

“It once took me ten minutes to find the paprika,” he mutters back. “I like her, though.”

Levi and June take us on a hike one day, and Levi’s harder to read — is it skepticism or just his quiet, steady personality? —but by the time we’ve hiked two miles he and Delilah are deep in discussion about how the sky isn’t really blue, then about how red pigment comes from beetles, and by the time I hear her drop the bomb that the color magenta is a figment of our imaginations, I’m pretty sure she’s won him over.

When we say goodbye that evening, he looks at her, then looks at me and nods.

Caleb is the holdout. Whenever I mention her, he changes the subject. If I invite him and Thalia somewhere with us, he’s always got plans. He never comes out and says it, but I know what he’s thinking.

I text Delilah all day, every day, about absolutely nothing. I send her pictures of bobcats that I think she’d like and she sends me back videos of turtles humping shoes. Before long, she knows all the gossip about the brewery employees, and I know what tattoos are popular this month.

It’s working. Starting over and erasing the past is working. Keeping our clothes on is working, even though I feel like my skin might melt off in frustration.

It feels like a miracle.

I still hate that her cocktail shaker has another man’s initials on it, or that a picture of the dog they briefly shared is hanging on her wall with a hundred other pictures, or that her copy of Wuthering Heights says To Delilah, my wild-haired darling, Love Nolan inside the front over. I hate that she still sometimes wears a pair of earrings from him, and I’ve never once seen the necklace I gave her for her twenty-first birthday.