Page 46 of And Now, Back to You

I’m so goddamned irritated. With myself. With the situation. With how easy some of this feels when I thought it would be anything but.

“I think we should talk about work now,” I choke out, about as subtle as a kick to the face. Delilah stops trying to noisily suck up the remnants of her chocolate shake and flicks her gaze up to mine, bemused.

“Okay,” she says slowly. She catches her straw between her teeth. “What work thing would you like to discuss?”

“We have a call with the radio station in an hour. I think they’ve got us coming on during the afternoon news block.”

Delilah nods. I wait for her to say something. She doesn’t.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask.

Delilah’s smile edges wider, that damned red straw still caught between her teeth. “Well, Jackson. We should probably talk about the weather.”

“I thought maybe we could write a script during lunch. Something for us to stick to so we don’t get side—”

“No,” Delilah interrupts.

The rest of my planned speech crumbles to dust. “No? Why not?”

“Because then we’ll sound wooden and weird. It’s—what? A twenty-second spot? Thirty? Let’s just do it and see how it goes.”

“See how it goes,” I repeat.

“Yup!” She slurps the very last of her milkshake noisily. “I know that’s outside your normal operating sphere, but as we’ve discussed, it might be nice to try something new.”

“I’m not great at that.”

Her face softens. “I know. But you can talk to me and I’ll talk to you and everything will be fine. Just . . . pretend it’s the two of us. Having a conversation. We’re pretty good at that, aren’t we?”

Two turkey sandwiches appear on the table between us. One with French fries, the other with mashed potatoes. I stare blankly down at them, an uncomfortable pulling sensation in the middle of my chest. A thread unspooled. A crack in a stone-hewn wall, formed long ago.

“Everything the way you wanted it?” our waitress asks, still snapping that gum.

No. Nothing is the way I wanted it.

“Yeah,” I answer instead, my tongue thick in my mouth. I clear my throat and manage a smile. “Everything looks great.”

“Should I pull over?”

“I don’t know,” Delilah answers, her voice muffled. “Do you feel like you need to pull over?”

I reach over and curl one hand around her ankle, holding her steady while she does . . . whatever the hell it is she’s doing in the back seat. Bent over the center console, she rummages around in her backpack, the curve of her ass a distracting six inches from my face while we hurtle down the highway at seventy miles per hour.

“Delilah,” I grind out, tightening my grip on her when she wobbles precariously to the left. “Get up here and put your seat belt on.”

“One second. I want to get the Wi-Fi connector thing for the call. I thought it was here, but I— Oh!” She shimmies back to the front seat, her hair in her face. She holds up a small black box the size of her fist. “Found it.”

“Great.” I let go of her ankle. “Put your seat belt on.”

She chatters happily about spotty phone connections in the middle of the mountains, pulling the seat belt over her lap while balancing her phone on her knee. She taps at the screen and connects everything that needs to be connected while I keep my eyes on the road and try to deep breathe through the worst of my showtime jitters.

It was Delilah’s idea to do this while driving. At first I balked, but it’s turned out to be a good idea, back-seat traversing notwithstanding. It helps, I think, to have something to do. With my focus on the road while Delilah dials into the station, I have less mental space to catastrophize.

That is until a familiar voice fills the cab of the van. One I wasn’t expecting to hear. “Hey, you two. How’s the road trip?”

“Aiden?” I ask, glancing quickly at the phone like it’ll summon his corporeal form into the middle seat of the news van. “What are you doing at the station? Are the girls okay? Did something happen?”

Delilah pats my knee lightly.