ONE
The restaurant had been her idea. The jazz club after had been his.
Walking her home was negotiated somewhere between the second glass of wine and the moment the trumpet player hit a note so clean it silenced the room for three full seconds—the way only New Orleans could silence a room, not with absence but with reverence.
“I’ll walk you,”he’d said.
“You don’t have to,”she’d said. They’d both known he would anyway.
August in the Quarter never truly cooled. Even past midnight the air pressed close, thick with river humidity and the residual warmth of a day that had climbed past ninety before noon. Delphine walked beside him with her heels in one hand, bare feet on the still-warm pavement, her dress a dark sweep of fabric that caught the light from iron-bracketed streetlamps. She’d worn her hair up. It had come mostly down. He’d noticed both states in equal detail, which said something he wasn’t ready to examine at this particular moment.
“You were watching me again,” she said. Not an accusation. An observation.
“I watch everything.”
“You watchmedifferently.”
He didn’t argue the point. After months of careful distance—Delphine had earned the right to name what she saw. She usually named it accurately, particularly when it came to his attention on her.
They turned onto her street. The magnolia on the corner was blooming late, its white cups heavy on the branch, scent landing like something pressed from another century. He’d walked her to this door before. Many times. He knew the exact number, which was another thing he chose not to examine.
“Come up,” she said, at the foot of the steps.
The words were simple. Everything beneath them was not.
He glanced at her with a slight smirk. She looked back at him with directness implying it was more than a nightcap invitation. Delphine LeClair did not dissemble. It was one of the things about her that had undone him slowly, the way a tide moves, not dramatically but with complete and total inevitability.
“Delphine.” The word held suggested restraint he was having a hard time holding onto and knew he’d give in soon. It was what he wanted, the intimacy with her he’d craved, but he was a patient man.
“Don’t.” She tilted her head, her remaining hairpin catching the light. “Don’t give me the version where you have seventeen excellent reasons this is complicated or it’s too soon, or whatever it is this time. I know it’s complicated. I’ve always known it was complicated since the day you strolled into the Archive.” A beat. “We are on our own timeline, and I know you want to. Come up.” She batted her eyelashes playfully at him and tugged on the lapel of his jacket.
He followed her up the stairs.
Her apartment was dim, one lamp burning in the corner, the ceiling fan turning slow enough to be decorative. She set her shoes by the door and moved into the kitchen—muscle memory, automatic—and he heard the familiar sounds of her reaching for glasses, then stopping. Reconsidering. She came back into the front room without them.
He was still standing near the door.
“You’re doing it,” she said.
“Doing what.”
“Calculating.” She crossed the room until she was close enough that the distance between them became a decision rather than a fact. “I can see it from here. You get very still when you’re calculating.”
“I’m always still.”
“Not like this.” Her hand came up, not to touch him but to gesture at the space between them. “This is different. This is the still where you’re about to say something thoughtful and careful and designed to protect me from something I’ve already decided on.”
He had, in fact, been about to say something along those lines.
Charlotte had loved him before he understood what love cost. Delia had loved him not knowing what he was—had saidsome truths are the only things that make life worth livingon a cobblestone street in 1906, in gloves, with a clock tower marking the hour like a chaperone. They had moved slowly then because that was what the world expected, the traditions of the time period, and because she had been careful, and because he had not wanted to rush anything that felt, after centuries, like grace.
Delphine was not careless. But she did not move like a woman who believed the world’s expectations applied to her.
He was still adjusting. Mostly he liked it. Occasionally it nearly stopped his heart. While he’d been fully present in the dayto day of contemporary human activities, he hadn’t partaken in any of the vices offered after dark. He’d been a man on a mission since the day he fell. He enjoyed how forward Delphine was—emotionally, physically—but he owed her some truths before he visited her bed. She deserved his honesty.
“There are things I haven’t?—”
“Bastien.” She paused, taking a moment to look at him. “Is any of it going to change the fact I’m standing in my apartment at midnight waiting to…kiss you?” The pause held more than expectation.
