The House

  It was one of the few times they’d been alone like this, without the threat of a bell ringing or having to be home for curfew. Gavin knew there was so much more going on—the need for a plan, the reality that tomorrow they would be running for their lives, for God’s sake—but right now, with her breath on his neck and her hands making fists around the hem of his shirt, the alone part was the only thing he could focus on.

  He could kiss her where no one could see them; he could touch her in places he’d never seen before. He wanted to care about the bigger things—the terrifying things—but at that moment, the reality of Delilah beside him was all he could think about: her lips, her hands, her body stretched out on the mat.

  As if Delilah was thinking the exact same thing, her grip on his shirt tightened. He bent to kiss her, slow at first. Always some teeth, always some growl, and then he would suck her lips and tongue and her tiny, gasping sounds.

  She pulled his shirt up and off, and with a little smile, he returned the favor.

  He could kiss her all day, he thought, his eyes closed as her teeth dragged along his jaw. He could get drunk on the taste of chocolate still on her tongue and the heat of her skin along his entire body.

  Gavin exhaled against her neck, his brain slanting at the soft smell of her skin. “Where do we stop?” he asked, moving to kiss her slightly swollen bottom lip. His hand slid beneath her, and with only a few fumbling attempts, he managed to unclasp her bra.

  It took nearly a minute before she answered—because she arched into him and made a quiet, pleading sound when he pulled the straps down and off her arms—and in that time he continued his gentle assault: lips to neck, to collarbone, fingers spread across her chest.

  Finally she asked, voice tight, “You want to stop?”

  “No. It’s why I’m asking you to tell me when we do.” He swiped his tongue over her ribs, slid a hand up under the hem of her skirt, over her soft thighs.

  “We don’t.”

  “I’m not exactly sure what to do,” he whispered, hovering above her. “With you, I mean.”

  “With me specifically?” she said, smiling.

  Gavin felt himself blush to the tips of his ears, but he refused to look away. “A little. I’ve never done this before.”

  “Me either. But. . . I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  Gavin groaned and let his head fall to her shoulder. “Delilah.”

  “What? Am I not supposed to say that?”

  “You’re not if you want me to last at all.”

  “I think. . . ,” she said, running her hands down his bare back. “I think it’s okay if you don’t? Like, maybe. . . I like the idea of you losing yourself for a few minutes.”

  “Let’s hope it’s longer than a few minutes,” he said, laughing into her skin. It felt so right to laugh with her about something like this, when everything else was so big and dark and looming over them. Delilah was his sun, and he’d smiled more because of her in the last few months than he had in his entire life.

  He pushed himself up and looked down at her again as she worked his jeans down his hips. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive. You have. . . something?”

  He gulped. He knew she meant a condom, and the question made this seem more real than anything else could have. “I do.”

  Sex was and wasn’t what he expected. Of course he expected it would hurt her, and he expected it to feel unlike anything he’d ever known. But he didn’t expect the calm confidence that took root in his thoughts when he felt her relax beneath him, heard her gasp, “I’m okay; I’m okay,” and beg him to start, to move, to do something because, she said, she felt like she was losing her mind.

  He didn’t expect them to move together so easily, as if they shared a heartbeat.

  He didn’t expect to be able to slow and stop in the middle of everything just to kiss her and feel her laugh when she said, “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” And then she stretched to kiss him, adding, “Do you like it?”

  “Like” was such a strange word. Gavin liked peaches and the color black. This was a bliss he didn’t think he could go a day without now.

  Afterward, it felt like he had no bones, like every bit of strength in his nearly eighteen-year-old body had been drained from him.

  The room was too hot for them to stay pressed together like this, but Gavin didn’t care. With his head resting on her stomach, Delilah played with his hair and his eyes grew heavier and heavier. He wished they could stay here forever.

  “So we’ll go to the bank tomorrow.” It was the first thing she’d said since she made those broken little sounds of relief, and goose bumps broke out along his arms at the memory, only a few minutes old.

  Gavin pressed a kiss next to her navel, another just above it. “I’ll go get everything from the safe-deposit box and meet you outside at eleven,” he said. “Get what you need from your house and then walk there, using a route where people can see you.” He pulled away to look up at her.

  “I don’t have much left to take with me,” she reminded him.

  “Just get whatever you can. And, Lilah, if I’m not at the bank, leave town without me. I’ll find you.”

  Delilah balked. “Why wouldn’t you be there? You’re not going back to the house, are you?” she asked.

  “I want to get the car, but I don’t think. . .” He hated to say what came next: “I don’t think House would let me out. I’ll go to the safe-deposit box. You’re just going to have to get whatever money you can from your house and meet me at the bank.”

  “That sounds way too easy,” Delilah said.

  Gavin pulled her on top of him, ignoring the sick dread he felt when she said this. Instead, he slid her legs to either side of his hips and closed his eyes at the warmth of her skin. “It doesn’t matter. We just have to make it through tomorrow and that’s it. The rest will figure itself out.”

  • • •

  Gavin had kissed Delilah good-bye before the sun was even up. They’d cleaned the music room, stacked the mats back in the gym office, and tied the trash into a tiny bag to take with them. He’d watched her dress, surrendering his casual glances for outright staring as she’d pulled on her skirt and then her bra. He wasn’t embarrassed when she caught him, and he hadn’t looked away when she’d laughed and thrown his shirt in his direction. She’d told him he was hers and she was his; he was allowed to look, encouraged even.

  And that’s how they ended up here, Delilah pressed to the wall while he kissed her long and slow, while he tried to make it last. Gavin knew he’d never be the same after what happened in this room, that his life would forever be divided into two separate halves: everything before last night and everything after.

  When he finally pulled away to breathe, Gavin pressed a kiss to her nose and the corner of her mouth before resting his forehead against hers. “You remember what I said?” he asked her.

  Delilah nodded but kept her eyes closed. “Meet you at eleven.”

  “And?” he pressed, lifting her chin gently so she would look at him.

  She blew out a shaky breath. “And. . . if you’re not there. . . I’m to leave town by myself.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “But—”

  Her phone chimed in her pocket. “Dhaval,” she said. “That’s his alert.”

  Where are you? No idea what’s happening, but Gavin’s mom called. HIS MOM.

  Delilah blinked up to Gavin with eyes so wide he thought they might burst.

  “What?” he asked. She started typing so fast she almost dropped the phone twice. “Lilah? Did that say. . . ?”

  WHAT DO YOU MEAN HIS MOM? she typed back.

  His reply came only a moment later. JUST WHAT I SAID. She called and told my mom he didn’t come home last night. That she was worried.

  “Your mom called,” she mumbled. “Your. . . momandIdon’tknowhow!”

  Gavin felt like his legs might give out from under him. He reached for her phone, not bothering with text, and
just pushed Dhaval’s contact picture, closing his eyes while it rang.

  “Dee!”

  “Dhaval, what happened?” Gavin asked, his voice hoarse and trembling. “She called? Where did she call from?”

  Gavin listened as Dhaval explained, his arm slowly falling to his side until the phone fell to the floor. He could still hear Dhaval’s voice shouting through the line, but he didn’t care.

  “Gav?” Delilah said. “What did he say?”

  “He said she called from my home phone. She’s inside House.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Her

  I’m coming with you,” she said. She could feel the stubborn set of her jaw. If anyone asked her right at this second, Delilah would swear she was eight feet tall and four feet wide. Nothing was getting between her and Gavin.

  Gavin shook his head emphatically, and Delilah felt a rough growl escape her throat. “Lilah, no. I need to go back there, and you need to go to the bank.”

  “Don’t you see that’s what House wants? It’s pretending to be your mother!”

  “Look,” he said, his long fingers gripping her shoulders. “House has never mimicked a voice before, okay? If my mother. . .” He let the words trail off, closing his eyes. “I can’t leave town without knowing who called Dhaval.”

  “It will hurt you. Remember what you said? This, today, is the nuclear option. House just declared war.”

  “I know House hurt you. I will never forgive it for that. But House has never hurt me. Ever. All I need to do is get in there.. . .” The rest of the plan seemed to be still out of his mental reach, and Delilah felt a scream build deep in her belly and fill her entire chest as he thought it through. She clenched her jaw to keep it from erupting and frazzling Gavin even more. “I just need to see. Don’t you understand? I never thought she was there, so I never looked.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “It’s not even six in the morning. Go home. Get on the couch. Pretend you’ve been there all night. Pack up a few things when your parents leave for the day, and then head to the bank. I’ll meet you there at eleven, just like we planned. I may even get there in time to go with you, but if not, you need to get into the safe-deposit box.”

  “It might have nothing,” she reminded him. “Maybe it has some of her hippie books and crystals.”

  He took a deep breath, staring her down. “It might have my birth certificate, with the names of both of my parents. It might have money.”

  “I really, really don’t like this.”

  “I can’t do this if I’m worrying about you,” he told her. “If House was tricking me, I’ll know right away and I’ll get out. I’ve never broken a window out of respect, but that doesn’t mean I won’t throw a table through one if it means the difference between being with you or not. I have to do this.”

  • • •

  Delilah was beneath the covers on the couch when her father came downstairs to make coffee just after seven. She tried to feign sleep, but her heart was beating so fast it seemed to nearly choke her airway. She felt every minute ticking by, etching like a razor slice into her skin.

  Gavin is almost home by now.

  Maybe he’s walked inside.

  Maybe he’s already trapped.

  When her father came in and woke her, she stretched and looked around the room, trying to figure out what she could possibly take with her. There were the clothes that had been in the washer or dryer when the fire happened. There was some cash from her mother’s antique vase on top of the fridge. She would pack a knife. Some food. She would leave her parents a note, telling them she was leaving for college early. In the time it would take them to find her—even if they jumped into action and found her in only two days—she would be eighteen.

  They had exactly seventy-three dollars between the two of them. Most of it in fives and ones, rolled into a log and shoved in Delilah’s jacket pocket. She added another two hundred from her mother’s vase. If the house was going to take anything from her now, it would have to light her on fire too.

  By eight fifty, Delilah was standing on Mercer and Main, duffel bag slung over her shoulder as she paced, waiting for the bank to open. She felt every shift in the breeze, heard every rustle in the trees overhead. The safe-deposit-box key was clenched so tightly in her fist it might leave an impression in her flesh forever. And if it did, every time she would look at the imprint, it would remind her of this biting, freezing terror: How on earth am I meant to walk in there and open this box without the building crumbling down on me? How does Gavin expect to escape today and meet me out front?

  It was the perfect trap. His faith in the house had left him blind.

  She couldn’t believe she’d let him go. What if the contents of the box told them nothing? What if instead of money or important papers, it held a few dusty trinkets or old photographs. What then? She was here, wasting time when she could have been with him, fighting.

  The stress was too big for her, physically. It seemed to spread past her skin, in a haze of panic she couldn’t seem to shake. Delilah resisted the urge to glance at her phone again. She knew it hadn’t been more than a couple of minutes since she last looked, when she’d calculated the bank would open in ten minutes.

  How long do I stand here, she thought, before I decide something has happened and I go to the house? How can he possibly expect me to move forward without him?

  She thought back to the night before, in the music room, with Gavin’s hands and body all over her in a fever. She still felt tender from what they’d done, and she let herself remember every bit of it for just a moment, only a heartbeat: his breath warm and fast on her neck, teeth dragging to her collarbone, the sight of his smooth, muscled shoulders moving over her first slowly and then with abandon. How he’d started so carefully but listened to her when she told him she wanted none of that.

  And then later: his warm, satisfied mouth pressed to her bare stomach and his promise that he would be here today. But that was before he knew his mother had called.

  “Take everything worth anything,” he’d said as he’d backed away toward the door leading out of the music room, “and if I’m not there by eleven, get out of town. I’ll find you.”

  Delilah swallowed, looking down at her phone just as the doors to the bank clicked open.

  She’d held on to the hope that Gavin would be here now, that he would have gone in and escaped easily, or changed his mind at the gate and managed to dodge all of the trees swiping at him as he ran back to her here, in the middle of town.

  It was only nine.

  He wasn’t late.

  She shouldn’t worry yet.

  But her panic was a cold, slithering thing, as if the house had crawled into her this time, finally possessing her. But she knew it hadn’t. She was completely alone on the sidewalk outside the bank, because if Gavin was trapped there, House had everything it needed already.

  • • •

  The bank was empty but for a few tellers, a manager speaking on the phone in a glass-enclosed office, and a smiling, clean-cut, fair-haired man behind a desk. Taking a deep breath, Delilah walked over to him and sat down with shaking legs.

  “I need to access a safe-deposit box.”

  The man, whose desk had a name plate with KENNETH engraved into brass, smiled again and turned to his computer. “Well, great. I can help you there. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Delilah Blue.” He began to type her name into his computer, but she quickly added, “But it’s not my box.”

  Kenneth’s smile faltered as he looked back at her. “Whose box is it?”

  “Hilary Timothy.”

  He typed in the name and then shook his head, eyes genuinely apologetic when he looked back to her. “You’re not listed as a user on this account.”

  “I have a key, though,” she said, hope causing her voice to crack halfway through.

  “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. You need to be an approved user.”

  Was it
something in Delilah’s expression that made him so sincerely concerned for her? Something in the way her voice shook and she looked like she’d seen a ghost, maybe a thousand of them? She could see it in Kenneth’s face that if this rule could be bent, he might just do it.

  “What if. . . ?” She paused, taking a deep breath before saying, “What if Hilary died?”

  Kenneth blinked, surprised. He collected himself quickly enough. “Well, she does have someone else on the access form. Maybe you can contact them?”

  Delilah shook her head, not understanding. A key was a key, after all. She only needed to open the box, not take anything with her. “I just need to see what’s in there. There are answers in that box, sir.”

  “There are standard security features set up with a safe-deposit box,” Kenneth explained patiently. “You can’t access the box with only the key. Whoever requires access to the box needs to be present with their identification when the box is created, because they have to sign the signature card. Only the individuals that have signed the signature card have access to the safe-deposit box. Everyone who signs is given a key to the box. Does this make sense?”

  “Yes,” Delilah said, closing her eyes to think, think, think.

  “Although you have a key, you are not on the list of registered users, so I know that key is not yours.”

  “Is Gavin Timothy on the list?” she asked, ignoring the gentle admonishment in his words.

  Kenneth glanced at the computer screen in front of him. “Sorry, no. It may help to remind you that a signature is required when the account was first established. If Gavin is Ms. Timothy’s son, he likely would have been—”

  “Right,” she said, cutting him off. He would have been only a toddler when she opened the box. Delilah bent over, pressing her hands to her face. She could feel tears rising, making her throat feel thick and her face grow tight. Gavin had gone back to the house and she had no way of knowing if he was okay, but she couldn’t imagine a scenario where House welcomed him home with cookies and warmth. She couldn’t get into the box to find out what, if anything, his mother knew, and all of their money was burned to ashes. Her parents were as warm as glaciers; Nonna was lost to dementia. The risk of coming here had been a waste, and Delilah had never felt more defeated in her entire life. “Sorry. I’m leaving. I just need a minute.”