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“It’s not much, I know, but I hope it will tide you over,” Lyle says.
It’s nice. Really nice, and would no doubt cost somewhere around five thousand a month back in New York.
“It’s great,” I tell him, admiring the queen-sized bed, the massive closet I’ll never fill, the flatscreen and the many windows to admire the foliage. “Seriously.”
“Bathroom’s in here.” He points. “There’s no fancy Japanese toilet to heat and clean your butt, but there is a nice shower with a bathtub I installed myself.”
I can’t help but giggle. “That’s okay. I can keep my own butt clean—”
The sound of tires scrunching outside causes Lyle to freeze. He raises a hand for silence and instantly looks out the window and then back to me.
“Delilah…” he mutters. “Okay, I need you to stay here and stay quiet for me. Cool?”
“Yeah,” I reply, confused. “Cool. But what—?”
“Seriously,” he says, his voice firm. “Stay here, stayquiet,and stay out of sight. My…girlfriend’s home.”
With that, he quickly leaves back out the door, leaving me standing there stunned. I have no right, but I feel lied to…cheated and blindsided as I hear him going down the stairs.
Is every guy in Tangerine some kind of dickhead?
“Girlfriend…?”
2
Lyle
I graba wrench off the workbench before stepping out of the garage so I can have something in my hands when I wave to Delilah as she pulls her car into the driveway. She knows that I wouldn’t have been upstairs working on the apartment after coming home from the shop, but I could have been working on the John Deere.
She’s smiling as she gets out, having just got back from Melissa’s baby shower, and immediately starts spewing off all the details to me at a speed I can barely even process. Of course, the fact that there’s a strange, gorgeous female upstairs in the apartment isn’t doing much for my focus.
“Melissa wassohappy, Lyle, and her husband, John, you know the one you met at the lake? He was justsosupportive and amazing. He’s just right there for her with whatever she needs. All the girls there were just talking about how perfect he is.”
I try to ignore every instinct I have to look behind me and glance up at the studio windows to see if Yara is looking out at us. I warned her to stay out of sight, and she seems like the kind of girl who listens, but you never know.
I finished all the work on the studio four months ago, and one of the reasons we haven’t been able to find someone to rent it out to yet is because Delilah is so specific about tenants; shewill notrent to a female who could be considered even remotely good-looking or a threat to her and my “relationship.”
“That’s great,” I nod, circling over to the steps so her line of sight will be on the house and not on the garage.
“Yeah, it is.” She says, excitedly. “She told us all about how John proposed to her out at the docks where they went on their first date.”
Delilah isn’t the most subtle girl in the world. It doesn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out wherethisconversation is headed.
“Did you guys eat there?” I ask, trying to change the topic. “Are you hungry? Cause I’m hungry—”
“It must be nice,” she sighs dramatically, tilting her head up to the sky. “Don’t you think? Having that kind of bond with the person you love? Knowing that you’ll love them and they’ll love youforever?”
Delilah has been bringing this up for about two months now, which is crazy considering we’ve only been going out for five.
The first time she did it, she slipped it into the conversation with a bit more stealth and a little more tact. But now it’s almost weekly I get some kind of reminder that she’s waiting for me to propose. Not exactly the most romantic relationship in the world, but then again the relationship between Delilah and I has never been what I’d define as romantic. Can an arranged relationship be romantic?
Her father, Clint, is a hard ass drug dealer that controls Tangerine Forks as well as all the towns within a ten mile radius. Everyone knows him and I’ve seen what happens to men who go up against him, so when he came to me at the shop one day and told me that his daughter had a crush on me and wanted me to be her boyfriend, there really wasn’t any saying no on my end.
“Now, you make her happy,” he told me. “Or you won’t be happy with what I do to you.”
So, knowing I had no choice in the matter, I asked Delilah out and put on as much charm as I could muster. To this day I’m still not sure if she even knows how just how much of a hand her father had in getting us together. Part of me suspects she does, but as long as she gets what she wants, she just doesn’t care.
Our relationship has always been dull and grey for me, like flavorless food or music played through headphones sitting on a table far away.
