Chapter 14

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Somehow Henry had expected this realization to change his whole life. In the few days that followed, that was absolutely not the case.

Everything just went back to...normal. Or at least their current definition of normal.

Delilah cooked up a storm in his parents' kitchen, the bruises starting to lighten more each day and she came out of her shell, grinning at him and playing with Kal and generally seeming to just...get better.

They still slept in the same bed every night, an unspoken agreement, where he waited until she was sleeping before he curled himself around her and buried his nose in her hair. She woke up often during the night, but most of the time it was nothing that her crawling into his arms couldn't solve. And a part of him hated himself for how much he liked it that he was the one who could offer comfort even more than Kal could. It was him that Delilah sought out, he was the one who she wanted to curl up, the one that she wanted to be held by even when she had every damn reason not to want to be held by anybody ever again.

Still...all of this left him hovering somewhere, with not really any idea how to move forwards, or backwards, or move at all.

It did give him ample time to reflect and to try and figure out what he wanted to do with his newly acquired knowledge though.

Which was exactly nothing. Or at least...not right now. Delilah wasn't in any place to make any life-changing decisions right now, not when the bruises were still marring her skin, not when she still flinched away when any of his brothers moved too fast in her direction, even when he knew that none of them would ever lay a single finger on her.

Delilah had enough things to grapple with, even without that big elephant in the room, with her grandmother's death and her needing to build a complete new...well not quite life but she would need a new apartment and new clothing and figure out what she wanted in the future.

And maybe there was a part of Henry that just didn't want to tell her.

His realization had slammed into his heart with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and left him utterly wrecked...and he knew that it also had the power to completely wreck...everything else.

Henry was doing everything in his power to procrastinate actually talking to Delilah about these feelings that were there on his part and then for her to respond with..."Henry, you are my best friend."

Delilah would rip out his heart and she wouldn't even mean it that way, because Delilah didn't have a mean bone in her body. Delilah would just...Delilah would still try to be nice about the whole thing when she didn't feel the same for him. And she wouldn't feel the same for him, right? Otherwise, she wouldn't have stayed with that bastard for as long as she did. If she loved Henry, then that would have ended differently, right?

She must have known that for her he would do everything. She was his very best friend in the whole world. If there was anything that was in his power to give her then Henry wouldn't even hesitate...

At least he managed to train himself into not creepily staring at her for minutes and completely blanking out about the way her chocolate hair caught the light, or her eyes were the colour of juniper, or even how she looked in the dresses she wore, that somehow skimmed over her body and made her waist appear so tiny that Henry wondered if he would be able to just cover it with his hands.

These were all lines of thoughts that he really should not be having. It wasn't going to result in anything.

Also, he was quite sure that his family thought he was having some sort of mental breakdown but they were just too nice not to comment on it. And he was dreading the time when that stopped and instead they would try to be helpful.

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