I’m still afraid, although the longer he looks at me with desire burning in his eyes, the more relaxed I get. But as he reaches for the clasp of my bra, I panic.
“I’ve never done this before,” I sputter, crossing my arms across my chest.
His eyes slowly slide up from cl**vage to my eyes. “I sort of guessed that,” he says, placing a hand on my cheek and wetting his lips with his tongue.
I feel transparent, no longer special, like how I felt at the carnival. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he says, briefly searching my eyes. “The first time can be scary, but I promise it’ll be worth it.”
I swallow hard, because I’m not sure I want my first time to be right now. I try to figure out the best way to tell him that as he reaches around and unhooks my bra, but I’m conflicted between wanting him to keep touching me and looking at me like this and wanting him to stop.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he says as the bra falls from my body and my br**sts are exposed. He reaches out and brushes his finger across my nipple with this hunger in his eyes, and I gasp. The noise seems to turn him on more, the hunger darkening and taking over everything about him, from the way he moves to the ragged intake of his breath, and it makes me feel powerful for a moment. “I just want to kiss you all over.” He keeps touching my breast as he leans forward to kiss me, and my stomach spins with emotions. “I promise this will be good,” he says with his lips hovering over mine.
“But what if I can’t,” I whisper, hating myself at the moment for not being more confident, for not being able to be like my mother and own the moment.
“You can,” he says. “I’ll take care of you.”
I don’t want to make him mad, but at the same time I’m terrified out of my damn mind. “But I’m not sure I’m ready,” I say, feeling the slightest bit of weight lifted off my shoulders until he leans back a little and looks at me and that intense emotion in his eyes looks like it’s about to burst out.
He’s angry with me and is no longer looking at me like he wants me. I can feel myself disappearing, vanishing back into Delilah. Becoming Invisible Woman again.
“Maybe I should just take you home,” he says, leaning away and looking out the window, not at me.
My mind is racing, and I keep feeling myself fading the longer he looks away from me. And then he starts to move me away and I open my lips to protest, but all that comes out is, “Wait, I want to do this.”
I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to say, but he looks at me and I feel the slightest bit better. Yet for some reason my shoulders feel more weighted as the pressure builds inside me.
“Are you sure?” he asks, leaning closer, his eyes focused on my chest.
I give a very shaky nod, my whole body trembling. Then he looks up at me and the lust in his eyes is so overwhelming I have to shut my own eyes. Seconds later, he kisses me and I kiss him back, letting his hands wander all over my body, feeling my skin, touching me. The longer he feels me the more settled I get. I don’t feel as nervous. As scared. And when he lays me down on the backseat of the car and looks down at me, I literally become lost in him.
I’ll spare you the details of the rest, other than we had sex, it hurt, and he held me afterwards. That was probably the only part I liked about that night; lying in the backseat of his car with my head resting on his chest, my thoughts racing a million miles a minute.
Even looking back at it now, I still get confused over what was going on in my head that night. Why I couldn’t see it for what it was. Why I couldn’t be stronger and tell him that I wasn’t ready. Why I couldn’t just do what I wanted to do, instead of what he wanted to. Why I couldn’t see that I wasn’t Odette and he wasn’t Prince Siegfried. That instead I was Little Red Riding Hood and he was the Big Bad Wolf.
Chapter 7
The Thunder Before the Rain
It’s funny how when I look back on my life, I can see all the mistakes I made and how blinded I was by wanting to be noticed. I’d spent so many years in my mother’s shadow that when a guy finally noticed me, I thought it made me stronger. But really, it only made me weaker.
Maybe if I knew what lay ahead of me, I’d have wanted to stay in the shadows and remain unnoticed. But honestly, I doubt it. I think I was too vain at the time to believe that anything could happen to me, especially death.
And now all I can do is lie here in the cold water, staring up at the storm clouds, listening to my heartbeat fade away, and reflect on how I lived my life… let my memories take me over and haunt me…
Despite my awkward and uncomfortable first time, I end up ha**g s*x with Dylan a lot. By mid-July, we are one hundred percent consumed by each other, spending every waking hour together. We go to parties, and instead of hanging out in my front yard, watching him work on his car, I sit in a folding up chair beside the car while we talk.
Not to say that everything is perfect. Sometimes we argue over stuff, like what we’re going to do for the night. It’s nothing major and we make things work. Plus, he always makes me feel special. Always holds my hand. Always kisses me. Touches me. Always lets everyone know I’m his.
I’ve pretty much been walking around with a huge smile on my face for weeks now, something my mom’s noticed.
“God, I forgot how exciting everything is when you’re young,” she comments as I enter the kitchen wearing the red dress, because I love how Dylan looks at me whenever I wear it.
I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and skip toward the doorway, doing a little pirouette. “Aw, to be young again,” I joke, and part of me loves that she’s looking at me with a hint of jealousy instead of the other way around. That I don’t feel so insignificant standing in the same room as her when she’s wearing nothing but a nighty.
“So where are you going tonight?” she asks as she takes out a pan to cook dinner.
I check my reflection in the small mirror on the wall. “To a party.”
She sets the pan down on the stove. “You’re being careful, right?”
I nod. “Always.”
She turns up the temperature of the burner. “Good.”
I leave the room and go get my purse before heading out to meet Dylan. It’s nearing sundown and storm clouds are rolling in. I hear a boom in the distance, the thunder before the rain, and I step back inside and grab my jacket off the coatrack. I slip it on as I cross the lawn and wind around the fence to Dylan’s driveway. Then I sit on the hood of his car and wait for him to come out, because he told me never to knock on the door, that his mother hates when people come over.
But twenty minutes go by and he still hasn’t come outside. I eye the door, willing him to come out, but it stays shut. The sky starts to rumble again. Lightning strikes and flashes across the land. And then the rain comes pouring down.
I jump up from the car and run up to his front door, soaked by the time I get there. I hesitate before I knock quietly. No one answers, so I knock a little harder, then I startle back when it swings open. Dylan stands there with more anger in his eyes than I’ve ever seen, and it’s all directed at me.
“I thought I told you to never knock on the damn door,” he growls, his chest heaving with his breaths.
I trip backward and into the rain. “I’m sorry.”
His mom starts shouting in the background, telling him to shut the damn door, that he’s in deep shit for making noise and waking up his father. That he’s such a fuckup. With each one of her words, he gets tenser. Angrier. But he doesn’t say anything back. He just bottles it in and steps outside, slamming the door behind.
He doesn’t say a word to me as he brushes by me, stomps through the puddles to his car, and climbs in. I stand on the porch in the rain, my jacket drenched, wondering if I should follow him. He seems so angry that I’m not sure what to do. But he keeps sitting in his car with the engine running, like he’s waiting for me, so finally I run to the car and hop into the passenger seat.
His knuckles are white as he grips the steering wheel, breathing in and out. He’s not wearing a jacket, his T-shirt is soaked, and beads of rain roll over his skin.
“Are you okay?” I ask, wiping some of the rain off my forehead.
He doesn’t look at me. “I’m fine,” he says coldly, and then he puts the car into reverse and backs into the road.
He doesn’t speak as he drives down the street toward the edge of town. The longer the silence goes on, the smaller I feel. I watch the buildings and houses blur by, the rain crashing down against the ground and washing everything away.
“I’m sorry I knocked on the door,” I finally tell him as he turns off the main street and down a dirt road where trees line the side and mountains are in the distance.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re sorry,” he says, his attention straight ahead on the road. I can see the lightning reflect in his eyes every time it snaps, and it lights up his anger.
I start to grow nervous. “Where are we going? Is the party up here or something?”
He doesn’t answer me and a few minutes later he stops the car at a turnout beneath a canopy of tree branches. I look around, wondering why we’re here, wondering why he won’t look at me. Wondering if he’ll ever look at me again.
Without saying a word, he turns off the engine, gets out of the car, and stands in the rain in front of the car. I watch him lower his head, the rain pounding down on him, making him sink lower, like he’s drowning.
Finally I get out of the car and take tentative steps toward him, the ground below me soft, and my sandals sink into it. When I reach him, he doesn’t look up at me right away. He stares at the ground, a thin trail of water trickling off his forehead. The longer the silence goes on, the more I wish he would look at me. Please. I can’t take the silence anymore. The invisibility.
Eventually, he gives me what I want without asking, elevating his chin, and his eyes lock with mine. Part of me wishes I could take back my inner wish, that I could tell him to look at the ground, because he’s looking at me like he hates me.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” he asks, stepping forward. “How much I’m going to deal with for you knocking on that damn door?”
“I said I was sorry,” I tell him in a shaky voice. “But you weren’t coming out, and I don’t know another way to get a hold of you.”
My excuses make him angrier, his face reddening. “Then you should have just waited by the car like I told you.”
“But it was raining,” I say, wrapping my arms around me as the cold seeps into my bones. “And I got cold.”
“Cold.” He gapes at me, fury burning in his eyes as thunder and lightning snap above us. “You’ve made the next week of my life a living hell because you were cold.” He lets out this sharp laugh, but not because he thinks it’s funny. He starts pacing in front of the car, running his fingers through his wet hair, clenching his hands into fists. “Do you know what it’s like? To be yelled at all the time?” He pauses, like he’s waiting for me to answer, and I shake my head. “Of course you don’t.” He laughs again, and it’s filled with so much pain and anger that it makes my hairs stand on end. “I should have never got involved with you,” he says. “You were too immature. I knew it, yet I looked past it because I wanted you.” He turns away from me and starts walking toward the trees, like he’s going to disappear into the forest and leave me alone. “God, you can’t even listen to a simple direction.”
I panic the further he gets from me, not wanting to be alone, and ultimately I rush after him. “Dylan, I’m sorry,” I say. “I promise, I’ll make it better. Tell me what I can do to make it better.” I catch up with him and wrap my fingers around his arm, trying to pull him back to me.
As soon as I touch him, I feel this ripple course through his body. I don’t even realize what’s happening until it’s over. Until his fist collides with my cheek. Until my ears start to ring. Until the world spins. Until the pain sets in.
I cup my aching cheek as he stands in front of me, looking so much calmer as hot tears spill down my cheeks and the raindrops instantly wash them away.
When I replay the moment in my mind, I can see how my pain brought him some sort of peace from his own internal pain, pain that I would never fully begin to understand. But at the time, I didn’t see it. At the time, I only felt my own pain and shame. My own worry that this meant it was all over.
That I was no longer Odette.
The swan.
That I would become Delilah again.
It seemed so repulsive. So horrifying. To become that girl again. The one no one saw. The one that lived in the shadows.
God, what I would give to be that girl again.
Chapter 8
The Death of Delilah and the Making of Red
Over the next couple of days, I keep my distance from Dylan, and he seems to be keeping his distance from me. I see him working on his car sometimes, but I don’t dare go out, afraid of what he’ll say to me, afraid he’ll hit me again, afraid he’ll say that’s it’s really over, that he never wants to see me again.
I’d like to tell you that part of the reason I kept my distance was because I was mad at him for hitting me, but sadly that wasn’t the case. Anger over that never crossed my mind. Only fear. I was so afraid of being alone again that it consumed my mind.
The fear only grew whenever I’d spend time in the kitchen, eating breakfast with my mom and her latest one-night stand.
“Your cheek looks like it’s healing,” my mom notes as she pours syrup onto a stack of pancakes. It’s the fifth morning in a row I’ve eaten breakfast with her and a different guy.