That was it. All I knew about Delia’s life prior to my being adopted at six days old. The rest of my story belongs to the people who raised me, and Delia’s belonged to her. And it isn’t a bad story. Or it wasn’t. Her mom died a year after I was born, but then she managed to work her way through college and law school, and by the time I met her, she was a happily overworked immigration lawyer living in Brooklyn.
Delia never had any other kids. It turned out, she realized during college she was exclusively attracted to chicks. “She smiled like you do,” I tell Beth. “With her eyes and her cheeks.” Though she didn’t have Beth’s sweet lips.
Delia met her longtime girlfriend, Rose, during law school, and though they talked about adopting, themselves, for a while, once they were a little older and more financially stable, the timing never quite worked out.
Then she got sick.
“I bet she’s really beautiful,” Beth murmurs softly.
I blow out a heavy breath, wondering how she could possibly know that. “Yeah,” I confirm.
And Delia knew it, too. It was hilarious. We’d go out to lunch and shit like that, and men and women alike would stare and smile. Delia wasn’t above a little shameless flirtation if it worked to her advantage, either. Like to get better service from that bored waiter at the diner by her office—she’d just conveniently leave out the fact that she was gay for that one.
“She was like you in that way, too, actually,” I admit to Beth. “Didn’t need or wear much makeup. Just blessed by nature or God or whatever—in totally different ways, though.” Delia was vaguely exotic, with dark hair and olive skin. Beth is more angelic—demure, but somehow in the most sexy way.
Beth tenses subtly, and if I didn’t have my jaw pressed against her shoulder I might not have sensed it. “Is different a good thing or a bad thing?” she breathes.
I chuckle lightly and press my growing erection more firmly against the curve of her ass. Beth stiffens even more. “Well, I definitely didn’t want to fuck my birth mother, Bea.”
A laugh bursts from Beth’s closed lips and I burrow my grin into the crook of her neck, tightening my arm around her waist. “Well, that is a relief to know,” she teases.
“Yeah, keep wiggling your ass like that,” I warn against her skin, “and I’ll need my own relief in a second.”
“Again?” she mock-chides.
I rock against her to make my point. I’m not there yet, but I could be in a microsecond. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this now,” I suggest. “My birth mother and you naked in bed aren’t two things I want connected in my memory.”
Beth twists suddenly under my arm, turning to face me without losing an inch of closeness, and it’s impressive. And I sure as fuck appreciate it. But it’s her eyes that have my full focus right now. This close, I have no power against them whatsoever.
“Please, David,” she whispers earnestly, and I can’t deny her now any more than I could when we were kids, and she would look up at me with those same big, blue eyes and ask me to sneak her ice cream, or to convince Cap to let her play with us. “Tell me more,” she implores.
So I do. I tell her stories about the Delia I got to know over the next few months, and every smile I draw from Beth feels like a badge of honor or something. Like a prize I’ve earned—one I can actually be proud of.
Her thin brows pinch together in thought and she starts chewing on her bottom lip, so I free it with the pad of my thumb. I raise my eyebrows, giving her a look that demands she spit out whatever’s bugging her.
Beth shrugs in my arms. “I would love to meet her sometime, you know? You could bring her to one of my parents’ brunches.”
I smile wistfully. I never even considered bringing Delia around my family or friends—or in this case, my friends who are my family. But now, imagining the scenario in a completely abstract, what-if kind of way…it fills me with a strange sense of warmth.
But it’s quickly doused by reality, and for the first time since I started talking about her, the rare but familiar sting of grief pierces my chest and burns behind my nose.
“She really would have liked you,” I murmur to Beth, tracing the small, barely noticeable freckles that dot her nose.
It’s true, of course. Delia would have loved her. She admired honesty and good times, and Beth is the epitome of both.
Beth frowns, not surprisingly catching on to my use of the past tense.
“Cancer,” I confirm.
Beth swallows thickly, and my fingers graze south to her pretty neck to trace it. “When?”
“She was diagnosed a few months after I met her. She died a couple of months after that.”
Beth’s eyes widen in shock, but she tries to compose herself. I don’t blame her. It’s a lot of information at once. “Which was…when?” She keeps her voice level.
My lips twitch in a smile. She’s searching for context. To pin down this major life event of mine very few people ever knew about. “She died the summer before my junior year.”
Beth frowns even more deeply. She knows what she was distracted with that summer, and I can’t blame her for it—being wrapped up in her new relationship with her first boyfriend. I didn’t want her to know then, anyway—I didn’t want anyone to know. It was nobody’s fucking business. Cap and Tucker only found out because my mom called them, and she only did that because it happened to be the one period in Cap’s and my lifelong friendship that we weren’t speaking. I never actually found out what my mom told them or didn’t tell them. All I know is when I walked into the funeral home, they were both there in black suits, with minimal questions, and rock-solid support. Cap and I never talked about our fight again, but I’ve got the foreboding sense that, all these years later, it’s going to resurface—and soon. With a fucking vengeance.
