Delilah Green Doesn't Care(Bright Falls #1)(9)

The woman turned too, their eyes locking.

Delilah sucked in a quiet breath.

The woman was gorgeous, yeah. Deep brown eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones, and a fire-engine-red mouth with a full bottom lip Delilah immediately wanted to tug between her teeth. She remembered fantasizing about doing that very thing back in high school, every time Claire Sutherland would come to Wisteria House to do whatever the hell Astrid and her coven got up to while Delilah sat alone in her room. Claire was one of the girls who, unbeknownst to her, helped Delilah figure out she was queer. Claire had been curvy and nerdy-sexy, and Delilah could see she still was, her hips and ass a little wider than they were back then. She looked amazing.

And now, twelve years later, judging from the friendly smile gracing Claire’s pretty mouth, she one hundred percent did not recognize Delilah.

At all.

This wasn’t that surprising. Growing up, Delilah had watched Claire and that loud redhead, Iris, hang out with Astrid mostly from afar. After Delilah’s father had died when they were ten, Isabel was completely shut down in her own grief for a while, so Astrid and Delilah had been mostly on their own for that first year. Astrid latched on to her new friends for comfort, and Delilah retreated into the books her father had given her, the fantastical worlds where orphans were heroes and the awkward kid always came out on top. She was curious about Astrid’s friends, particularly as Delilah had never had any. She’d lost her mother at age three, and her father’s own quiet nature meant the two of them fell all too easily into their own world. Delilah was observant, watchful, and her father had always celebrated that. But after he died, everything about Delilah suddenly became strange and unwelcome. She heard the whispers when Iris and Claire came over—Why is your sister so weird? Is that her peeking around the corner? Oh my god, you can’t even see her face she has so much hair. Astrid would shush them, Isabel would say benign things like, Oh, Delilah, don’t you want to watch the movie too? but then the three other girls would go silent, obviously frozen in fear that Delilah would say yes, and Isabel would do nothing to actually enforce her suggestion.

So Delilah kept her distance, only answering questions when asked, which wasn’t all that often. Eventually, the loneliness got so heavy it felt like she might suffocate just sitting in her room by herself. She had nightmares about it, dying and no one realizing it for weeks and weeks.

By the time she and Astrid got to high school, they’d all fallen into a routine. Delilah kept to herself as much as possible, drifting through her own internal world and only interacting with a few kids in her art classes. Isabel enforced family dinners every night and did her charity work and obsessed over Astrid’s success and beauty and status. And Astrid, despite the times Delilah saw her buck up against her increasingly controlling mother, blossomed into the town’s sweetheart, always smiling and surrounded by adoring fans.

Including Claire Sutherland. So of course she didn’t recognize Delilah now. Plus, Delilah’s late twenties had been kind to her. She finally figured out what to do with her curly hair, how to make it look more like, well, hair, as opposed to a bird’s nest, and every tattoo that now spiraled up and down her arms she’d gotten in the last five years. She knew she looked different than she had as a teenager, as a twenty-five-year-old the last time she was here. Less makeup, better-fitting clothes.

Still, the blankness in Claire’s eyes stung like a slap.

“Hi,” Claire said, then lowered her eyes, lashes fanning her cheeks, lips curving into the tiniest of smiles. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and took a deep breath.

Delilah lifted a brow. Was she . . . ? Yeah, she was. Claire Sutherland was blushing, pink blooming on her round cheeks as though she’d been out in the wind. She took in the way Claire was standing—one knee bent, her hip popped out slightly, her forearms resting on the bar just close enough to Delilah’s that she could almost feel the little hairs along Claire’s skin. She glanced up at Delilah, smiled and turned even pinker, and glanced back down.

Claire Sutherland was hitting on her.

Her. Delilah Green, the Ghoul of Wisteria House. That’s what Astrid and Claire and Iris had said about her one time. They were all fourteen or so and were in the kitchen—the kitchen Delilah’s father had designed—and Delilah slipped in to grab an apple. The three girls had been talking, laughing, making a total mess while they baked snickerdoodles or oatmeal butterscotch-chip cookies or some shit. But the conversation, the motion, it all stopped dead when Delilah entered the room. Her cheeks burned—she remembered that, the fire that felt like it would consume her anytime Astrid’s friends were over. She could never tell if it was from embarrassment or anger or desperation to belong.

“Hi, Delilah,” Claire had said then.

Delilah remembered that too. Claire often said hello, but again, she could never figure out why. Delilah lifted her hand in greeting, the stiff, awkward gesture of a lonely fourteen-year-old girl, grabbed one of the six-dollar organic Honeycrisp apples Isabel insisted on buying from the bowl on the kitchen’s island, and fled.

“God,” she heard Iris say as she left. “Why does she always skulk around like that?”

“Iris,” Claire had said, but laughter edged her voice.

“What? She’s like a ghost, haunting the hallways of Wisteria House. No, wait, she’s like a ghoul.”

“What’s the difference?” Astrid asked.