The Unchaste

When it rains.

"All things are lawful unto me but all things are not expedient, all things are lawful unto me but I will not be brought under the power of…"
The Vicar paused mid-reading.

Thunder crashed outside, sudden November storm unleashed and rain started to pour down without warning as if seam of the heaven had been shred apart and all its moisture cast to cascade down to the earth with an abandon.
The bleary Yorkshire ambience suddenly turned darker, skylight next to gone and the church candles were the only source of light.

Three benches away, he was there, sitting. Staring out of the window. Like everyone.

Naturally.

The raining rivulets running down the glass window of the church cast a moving shadow on Delilah’s cheeks. Like translucent, waterless tears, slivers of water gullied down the window, parading a similar silhouette on her pale cheeks.

Lightning flashed and all went quiet for a moment, then a loud rumbling shook the sky and the Vicar resumed his paragraph.

Delilah’s dark eyes were fixed at the altar, where the graying clergy stood, and candles burned to death, and thoughts materialized and were spoken but she was not listening. Her senses appeared to have hone and heightened and without evening looking, Delilah could tell the minutest details of his action. His silence and motions.

Him. His all.

It had staggered her earlier, when Lord Richard announced he was courting a lady. And what had stunned her was not his seeing a lady itself, but the fact that by revealing that, it seemed, he had injured her physically. That she was, in some way, bothered, wounded by his words_ that had disconcerted her. Not weeks ago, she had been designing his death.

She had made sure to sit farthest from him and now, when his neck turned away from the window and he faced her direction in general, Delilah’s fist shivered in cold kindliness. It was hard to tell if he was, or not, looking at her, yet she dared not let her eyes wander his way.

Determinedly, she kept looking straight ahead of herself, her lips pursed.

When she felt him turn ahead and her fist loosened, but her toes got curled inward on their own as if to protest the loss of his warm, tentative attention.

Don’t look at me. Don’t stop looking. Don’t look away.

She shifted marginally and cold, stone wall pressed against her shawl and lace covered body. She hoped cold would distract her. So that she could lock him out of her damned conscience.

She hoped the prayer would last forever. So that she could sit there and petrify into the meadow, humiliated that she was of her heart.

Did she desire him?

***

One auxiliary, more significant question Delilah clean forgot to ask was, did he desire her too? Because when she wasn’t_ couldn’t look at him, he had been looking at her a lot, over and over again.

***

The congregation ended, against Delilah’s wish and way too soon, for when she stepped out of the church with her mother at her side, it was still raining cats and dogs. Worse yet, if that was imaginable, beyond the lush green courtyard of the church; drains had swollen and were torrenting down the drenched thoroughfare.