Werewolf Wedding(10)

As I sat there in the non-running, black Cadillac, I imagined being wrapped up in a blanket with Jake, his naked body radiating heat through me, warming me down to the bones. I shivered, but not from the chill. The last of the remaining warmth drained out of me and into the leather seat, which convinced me that it was probably about time to get up and start the arcane, extensive process of getting Bertha – that’s what I named her when I got her partway through college – running.

Oh, that’s the thing about Bertha – there is no ignition. I bought her for five hundred bucks in 1998. Yeah, she’s that kind of car. The third time I turned the old boat on, the key turned way too easy, the entire mechanism rotated and then promptly fell out. Ever since, I got to hot wire my own car. Still, she worked like a charm, more or less, once she got going, so I hadn’t worked up the gumption to replace her yet.

And anyway, who needs a car payment they don’t need? With the bills from the studio piling up, even with the twenty five grand, which put us back in the black for probably a month or two, dealing with more financial bullshit was approximately the last thing in the universe I needed to deal with. That’s not to say that I didn’t worry about it every single time I started the car though.

Worry. Yeah, that’s a good word for my personality orientation. Worried, anxious, panicky.

It wasn’t usually obvious, because I learned when I was a little girl to bottle all that up and never let the world see me be weak. It sounds very stiff-upper-lip, but for me it was survival more than anything. I didn’t have the option of trusting people very often. Hell, it took me like five years to tell Jeannie when my period was.

I opened the door and Bertha sighed in hopeless resignation. God that sounds dramatic, but hell, when I’m as old as she is, being able to sigh in resignation will be a blessing, like taking a shower without my back wrenching, or being able to – I dunno, touch my toes without hearing fourteen different body parts pop.

I sighed, but with irritation. The packed dirt parking lot was uncomfortable a I knelt on my spread out towel, but at least there was no gravel biting into my knees. I reached underneath the dash and found the wires. As my trembling fingers wrapped around the exposed ignition wires, I started thinking how nice it would be to have someone else do this for me.

Not that I need anyone. Not really. I just... I don’t know, outside of Jeannie, I didn’t really have anyone to depend on, to trust. And laying all my bullshit on her wasn’t fair, so I was once again just bottling. Bottling it up until something, somewhere, popped. I knew it would happen, it was just a matter of time. And just like that, the cork began to slip.

Some road noise from behind pricked my ears, particularly because there was hardly ever any road noise out this far from the schools, especially in the middle of winter, and especially after dark.

I’m not normally a nervous person. I’m not normally insecure or afraid of the dark, but for some reason – probably my run in with Jake’s brother – I had become hyper aware of everything around me. I hated the twist in my stomach and the little tinge of fear in the back of my mind. “Get this car going, Dilly. Stop panicking and just do this.”

My awareness shifted from the harmless road noise back to the

The familiar thrum of nervous energy in the back of my skull struck up. That’s how my anxiety makes itself known. I get a little hum of tingling in the back of my head, and then I start with the heavy breathing and sometimes sweating. Although in this cold, if I started sweating, that’d be bad.

Gritting my teeth, I very consciously held tightly on the wires.

“Why does this have to happen right now?” I asked the universe. I bit down on my lip, trying to force myself to keep steady just long enough to get the damn car going. “Just get it started, Dilly, just get the damn thing started. You can sit in there and warm up, and forget about how unless you make some wild ass sales in the next couple of days, you’re gonna have to seriously think about Waffle House.”

The thing is, it wasn’t true. I had some socked up, I owned my building, owned my tools. There was nothing reasonable for me to be afraid of, but there I was, crouched down on the dirt, and my goddamn hands were shaking like I was detoxing.

The wires touched, just long enough for one spark to shoot through Bertha’s ignition. With a heave, the engine turned over once, and I let go of the wires, thinking I’d managed to get her going. After the one crank, the vigor in Bertha’s voice started to falter, her strength began to fade. I tried to catch the wires, but one of them had recoiled back under the dashboard.

I reached for it, but lost my balance – somehow I’d managed to trick gravity into letting me go. My chin popped against the leather bench seat, clacking my teeth together smartly Prickly cold in the back of my head began to swirl around and before I knew it, the little points of darkness poking through my vision were starting to take over. I forced myself back to my knees and got one foot underneath me before I felt the hand.

“Delilah?”

It was like buttery maple syrup on a piece of bacon. Those burning hot fingers wrapped around my arm, and then when I fell backwards, he caught me. “Are you okay? Talk to me,” Jake urged. “Say something.”

His voice was caressing me, lulling me into a weird sense of security. “Something,” I managed weakly, and smiled. I looked up at him, those burning, iron-colored eyes and his shaggy hair cascading along the sides of his face as he stood over me. He laughed a little, probably more out of wanting to calm me down than because it was actually funny. Which, thinking about it, given the context and the timing? Not too bad a one-liner really.