Discovering Delilah (Harborside Nights, Book 2)(8)

My heart sinks. Greatest friend ever.

~Delilah~

THE TAPROOM HAS become my safe harbor, a project that fills my head and keeps me from thinking too much about the loss of my parents or my feelings for Ashley. It took a few weeks for me and Wyatt to get a system down for managing the bar. Luckily, we had Jesse Steele to help us. He and his brother, Brent, own Endless Summer Surf Shop, where Ashley works, and recently purchased a restaurant in town, which they’re renovating. Before buying the restaurant, Jesse ran the Taproom in the off-season, and after my parents died, Jesse stepped in to help us learn the business. Now we have a system. I handle inventory, ordering, and staffing, and Wyatt manages the accounting and administrative end of things. We don’t have a huge staff, so when someone is out, Wyatt or I often have to fill in.

Today Tristan is working the bar. Charley, one of our waitresses who also fills in as a bartender, is out on a three-day assignment with her other part-time job, and Rusty, a waiter, couldn’t come in early to cover her shift. It’s just me and Livi handling tables. Livi’s worked here all summer. She’s an excellent waitress. She lost her mother when she was a teenager, so she understands what Wyatt and I have been going through and she’s always willing to talk, although I’m not big on talking about my parents. Sometimes it’s hard to separate how much I miss them with how much I hate some of the feelings they’ve left me with.

I hand my customers’ orders to Dutch, our cook, and grab a stack of napkins to refill the napkin holder behind the bar. I stare at the box of napkins like it has answers written all over it instead of napkin sizes. It’s no use. No matter how much I try to focus on those words, hoping they’ll replace the look in Ashley’s eyes when we were on the dunes, I can’t. And it’s that look—the look that makes me think Ashley might be into me—that draws me back to Janessa’s offer.

Would it be so bad to climb between the sheets with her and figure this out? To see if I like being intimate with girls and make sure I’m not some freak who likes to check out girls but doesn’t like being intimate with anyone? Would that be using Janessa? Is she using me? I immediately push that thought away. Let’s face it—she’s pretty enough and sweet enough that she hardly needs to spend a night with a lesbian virgin.

I swear being with a guy was never this hard. Even when I had sex the first time, it wasn’t this complicated. Brad and I had been sort of dating for a few weeks. I was trying to figure out if I liked guys or not, because everyone I knew in Connecticut was straight, and here in Harborside I didn’t know any lesbian women, only gay guys. And as if that didn’t make me feel out of place, every time we saw a newscast about same-sex marriages, my parents’ faces would pinch up, and Dad would make a comment about how wrong it was. I was really hoping that I was misinterpreting my feelings toward girls.

It was a painful road of discovery, because I felt like I was out in a dinghy floating in the middle of the sea with a storm brewing in the distance and no one to throw me a lifeline. It’s such a lonely journey, this whole self-discovery thing we have to do. My first endeavor into making sure I wasn’t misinterpreting my feelings was to be intimate with a guy. What a mess that was. I was seventeen and at least a year behind my friends in losing my virginity. We did it in the backseat of Brad’s father’s car, parked on a back road. The whole experience was uncomfortable and without emotion. He got all sweaty and grunted like he was in pain, and I kept thinking, This is what girls rave about? I still don’t get it. I thought it might have just been him, so I tried again with another guy my senior year. But sex experiment number two didn’t go any better than the first one. When I got to college I decided to try one last time, still clinging to the hope that it was all in my mind. Frank. I dated him for appearances’ sake, which allowed me to go to parties without being hit on by guys and made me feel a little less like an outsider. Looking back, I wish I had been like every other rebellious kid and jumped into bed with as many girls as I could, even though that’s not who I am. I cringe inside at the thought. I’m just not made of slutty cloth. But it would have made things easier to deal with now.

Sometimes I hate my parents.

Guilt chases that thought right out of my head.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

Run, run, run.

My desires are always chased by guilt, because being who I think I was born to be, who I want to be, goes against everything my parents believed and filled my head with. And yeah, I know they’re dead, but…That’s another thing I feel guilty about and the reason my guilt is always followed by the urge to run from dealing with my feelings at all.