Invisible Strings

Chapter Twenty

Brantley's POV:

Two weeks...

Fourteen days...

And if I thought about it hard enough, I could probably tell you right down to how many horse it had been since the most epic fuck-ups of them all happened. And in those two weeks, I hadn't heard one word from Delaney, hadn't seen her around town, and sure as shit hadn't grown the size of balls I would need in order to show up at her parents house to beg her to hear me out. Virtually every fiber of my being wanted me to fix what happened, I just didn't know how to even start to do so.

I'm not kidding when I say that all I'd been thinking of in the past two weeks was how I could explain why I'd called her the wrong name, of why I'd thought her pussy tasted like Amber's, and how the sounds she had made as I'd buried my face between her thighs had been almost like sensory overload. An overload that had taken me right back to the last woman I had done that favor for.

With each day that passed, my fear was that my slip of the tongue had cost me more than just the woman that made me feel alive again. Since I hadn't seen or heard from her, I didn't know if she was still willing to accept the position at the school. And if she didn't take it, I didn't know who I would put in the spot that would have the same vision for the school and the same passion for education that Amber had always envisioned for it. Which left me right back at square one.

Long story short, my mood and almost every other aspect of my life was affected by my epic fuck-up and I was starting to take my guilt over the whole shitty situation on the people closest to me. When Kolby had called because he'd heard that I'd been out on a date, I'd flipped out on him for nosing in my business. When Mama had asked about my date the very next day when she dropped the kids off, I'd snapped at her about how messed up that she had planted a seed in my head about dating when deep down she had to have known I wasn't ready. Even my day-to-day life with Barrett and Bray had been affected since they talked about Delaney, Colton, and Chloe seemingly non-stop. By some miracle though, I haven't taken out my frustrations over it all out on them. They were just kids and they didn't deserve my anger in the least.

My phone chimed from my pocket, telling me that someone had come through the gate at the front of the house. A flare of hope nearly consumed me, making me believe that Delaney was finally ready to talk things through. But that blossom of hope was short-lived since –as far as I knew– she didn't know the code to the gate.

Tossing the guitar that I had been mindlessly strumming onto the couch, I made my way to the front door and looked out, groaning loudly as I watched Daddy's truck pulling up to the house. Panic flared inside me though as I watched the passenger side door fling open at the same time as the back passenger one. I watched frozen in place as Kolby, Daddy, and Nick walked towards the house, all of them having an unreadable expression on their faces.

Falling back on the smart-assry that I was good for, I stepped out onto the porch and leaned against the railing. "No need for an intervention. I haven't fallen headfirst into a bottle of whiskey."

"It ain't that type of intervention..." said Kolby.

No sooner than the words left his mouth, I saw the back drivers-side door swing open. As soon as the sun hit the long, dark locks of the woman who had yet to lift her head and look at me, my knees got weak. I wanted to run to her, to fall to my knees and beg her to forgive me for my fuck-up. But the fear that she would knee me in the balls while gouging my eyes out stopped me. Lord knows I deserved it but that didn't mean that I wanted to be part of it; I valued my balls and my eyes more too much to have them ruined.

"We're doing a love-life intervention." Said Kolby. The fact that he sounded so damn happy as he said it pissed me off, making me want to punch in right in his damn jaw. And that urge only got stronger when he added "unless you would like to to have Mama, Hannah, Mrs. Gwen, and Delaney's friends handle this".

"Believe me, we're your safest option, Brantley." This from Nick, making me whip my head in his direction. I half expected him not to even speak a word to me before murdering my ass and tossing me into the river for hurting his daughter.

All three men stepped up onto the porch then, Delaney behind them. Still, she hadn't looked in my direction. But that didn't mean that I hadn't taken a good, long look at her. While she was just as beautiful as she had been the last time I saw her, I could see the effects that all of this had taken on her. She looked slimmer, tireder, more stressed; and all of it made me feel even worse.

"Want to do this out here?" asked Daddy, pulling my attention away from Delaney. "Or so you want to go inside where it's a hell of a lot cooler."

"Inside."

Daddy, Nick, and Kolby all headed inside, leaving Delaney to walk in last. As soon as she neared me, the fruity scent that I had quickly began to associate with her wafted around me. And when she was within arms reach, I reached out for her, placing a hand on her shoulder. Delaney's steppes stopped and for the first time, she looked up at me. On her face I could see every single ounce of hurt that my words had caused and how much she had been struggling. Her eyes seemed to have lost the glimmer they had in them, making them appear duller even though they were technically the same color. In that moment, all I wanted to do was pull her into me, hold her in my arms, and whisper over and over again how sorry I was about what happened that night, about how good things had been going and how good I knew they would have been had I not opened my big fuckin' mouth. But I knew we weren't ready for that. Hell, I was lucky that she was even here, much less allowing me to touch her –even if it was just on the shoulder.

We stood there, our eyes locked, a million words floating in my head but none of them coming out.

"Let's just get this over with, B." Delaney said after a while, stepping closer to the front door and out of my hold.

"Laney, wait,"

The words came out in a rush, after that.

"I know sorry doesn't even begin to cover what happened. But it's the only thing I know to say. I know it's not nearly meaningful enough, that it doesn't take away the pain, but I–"

"You're right, it doesn't." Delaney said, cutting me off. "That night, hearing you call me... it hurt Brantley. It hurt more than anything Alex ever did to me. And that's saying a lot since he cheated and abandoned me and his kids.

"Lane–"

When she took a step towards me, her name froze in my throat, scared that she was going to knock the shit out of me. "Do you know I'm not the girl I pretended to be that night?" she said, her voice low so that no one inside could hear. Her eyes locked with mine again before she continued. "I'm not the type to make myself seem like a sex kitten. I don't take charge. I don't make a move on a man. The fact that I gathered the courage to do it with you and then that happened, it broke something in me Brantley.

"Don't get me wrong, I know you didn't mean to do it. I do. But the fact is you did. Who's to say that if there was a 'next time' between us that it doesn't happen again? Who's to say that you having that slip up wasn't the universe's way of saying that things were moving too fast for both of us? Who's to say that this wasn't a sign that we just needed to take some time and reanalyze who we are as people, to focus on our children and not our personal lives?"

Delaney's words shocked me. Not the part about signs and the universe, but the parts about how she'd acted prior to when things turned to shit. She'd seemed so confident, so sure of herself in that moment that I would have never guessed that she was acting out of character. I wasn't proud to say that I had been with women who had acted to be one way when they were really another. And in those times, it was obvious, but with Delaney, I hadn't been able to tell.

"So, what... where do we go from here?"

"Inside, to get this damn make-shift intervention over with without having to spill all the dirty details."

Then, she turned away from me and walked inside, leaving me standing on the porch.