my delilah

03

The sun stood high in the sky but in her body, it felt like midnight. She fell down into the bed the second she came home - her feet ached and her hamstrings seemed to be too short for her legs. She'd never been very active, and just being on her feet for ten hours straight proved to be more difficult than she'd previously thought. Along with it, she couldn't remember the last time she was up before eight, having to be at work at five in the morning had almost seemed impossible.

She heard Wick moving around in the sparsely decorated kitchen, and soon he appeared with a cup of coffee in hand. She had expected that he'd drink it himself, so she was pleasantly surprised when he held the hot mug out to her with a small smile on his lips. A small grin peaked out over her lips at the gesture and she quickly sat up at the edge of the bed, nodding appreciatively at him before sipping at it - Wick was by no means a talent in the kitchen, and the coffee tasted bitter and strong, but she appreciated the gesture no less because of that.

"So, how was it?" he asked as he sat down, placing his hands over her shoulders and carefully massaging her. She sighed pleasantly and smiled, her eyes closing at the touch.

"It was fine," she began, thinking of her day. She'd gotten a full tour that morning by Azlan, who showed the two women around the store. It was by no means a large building and she appreciated that - it felt like a genuinely cozy place, and she imagined she'd like it there. Nonetheless, combined with the record shop, it was pretty spacey. "I'm completely busted though."

Delilah had studied literature in college, only realizing after she finished that she didn't really have many options as far as work went. The only offer she'd really gotten was as a teacher, and quite frankly she was too scared of teenagers to take it. The moment she'd set foot in the book department of Open Mind that morning she'd been completely blown away - she'd never before visited the store and for some reason she'd thought it would've been purely music. Turns out that it was a lot more than that, and she'd never been so pleasantly surprised as when Azlan told her he wanted to put her education to use by placing her in the literature department.

"Really?" Wick said and smiled briefly as he massaged her shoulders carefully. "Rough day, huh?"

"Eh, not really. I'm just not used to the early mornings and the running around all day," Delilah muttered with a sigh, but through her tired demeanor she felt excited to return. Ever since she'd left college a few years earlier she'd worked as a waitress at a rundown bar just down the road from her apartment. The work had been alright, but there was a lot of stuff you had to put up with at a place like that. She often got her paycheck at the end of the month and realized several of her shifts would just disappear from her list of worked hours - she was tired of being scammed out of money and decided to look for something else, and Open Mind seemed to be her knight in shining armor.

"So, you think you'll like it there?"

"I hope so," she said, nodding her head. "Otherwise, I have no idea what to do."

"Well," Wick muttered and dropped his hands from her shoulders. "You're always welcome to come work at the bar, you know."

Delilah sighed, feeling a knot in her stomach that always seemed to make itself noticed when Wick spoke of "the bar." They didn't speak much of his job, purely because Delilah wanted no part in it - she knew that what Wick did for a living was wrong, however she didn't yet know if it was wrong on a moral or legal level. To be completely honest, she was too scared to find out. A brief smile decorated her face as she turned around to look at him, letting his past statement go unnoticed to change the subject. "What are you doing tonight?"

She watched Wick as he pondered his response, admiring him as he did. She remembered how mesmerized she'd been by him when they'd first met years ago, and there was still a feeling of disbelief when she watched him, because she couldn't fathom that a man like him could exist. They had their ups and downs, sure, and sometimes the downs felt endless, but at the end of the day, the love he gave her could conquer every single bump their relationship stumbled upon - at least it felt like that as long as they were on good terms.