Page 186

I understand what’s happening. Viv’s victory isn’t complete without a loser on the other end. If I don’t play along, the ring doesn’t count. The engagement doesn’t count. She could marry him on the courthouse steps in a white dress and it would be nothing at all if I don’t stand there and watch her do it.

She needs an audience of one.

Too bad I’ve resigned from the position.

I turn to Kane and tell him, “I want five minutes.”

“Here?”

“Not here. Alone. With you.”

He’s up before I finish the sentence. He pulls my chair out and offers me his hand. I take it without either one of us saying anything to the table. He puts his palm flat between my shoulder blades and walks me out of the dining room past my mother, past the sterling silver platter on the sideboard that I was supposed to fill, past the wall of photographs where I am half-hidden behind Uncle Bub’s shoulder.

We leave my family behind and slip down the hall.

33

DELILAH

The hall is dark because my mother keeps the hall light off to save on the bill, even with twenty-four people in the house.

I don’t stop at the powder room off the kitchen. Aunt Sherry’s purse is sitting outside the door and I can hear the fan going, and she’d probably try to join if she knew what I was about to do with Kane.

(To Kane? For Kane? That’s TBD.)

So I go up the stairs instead.

Kane follows me without speaking a word.

The upstairs bathroom is the one nobody’s allowed to use. A basket of seashell soaps sits on the back of the toilet. It’s been there since I was in high school, solid as rocks, still smelling faintly of cucumber. There’s a hand towel folded into a triangle that has never touched a hand.

I flip the light on. Kane steps in behind me and shuts the door.

Then he turns the lock.

The noise from downstairs still drifts up through the floor. Somebody laughing. A chair leg dragging. My mother raising her voice at the end of a sentence.

Kane stands with his back against the door and looks at me. “You did well down there,” he says.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Alright. Then what do you want?”

I turn around. He’s still against the door with his hands at his sides. Big and dark in my mother’s tiny beige bathroom. The man I shouldn’t touch next to the towel that nobody’s allowed to touch.

“I want you to kiss me,” I say.

Kane doesn’t move, blink, or otherwise respond in any way, shape, or form. It’s like he didn’t hear me. Or he did, and he’s choosing—for the sake of sparing me some really nasty embarrassment—to pretend that I hadn’t spoken.

I feel the burn come up my neck. “Okay, actually, on second thought, forget it.”

“Not a fucking chance.” He bends close. “I want you to say it again.”

I refuse to look at him, even though his warmth and scent are blanketing me in this teeny little room. “I’m good, thanks. One humiliation is enough. This was a stupid idea anyway.”

Kane touches my chin and forces me to raise my eyes. “Why do you think that?”

“Because,” I say with a swallow, “I obviously massively misinterpreted everything that’s going on between us and stepped way over the line.”