Page 41 of On the Power Play

Jack thought for a moment. “Because Tony was right.”

Delia swallowed her disappointment. What had she wanted him to say? That he couldn’t stop thinking about her? Business only. “About what?”

“The Blizzard saw an influx of ticket sales for the weekend.”

She smiled. “That’s great.” Delia was about to go on and talk about her streaming numbers, but the last piece of her question blared like a foghorn. ”Actually, there’s one more thing I was wondering.”

“Yeah?” Jack straightened, and Delia shoved her hands under her thighs to keep them from trembling.

“Why’d you leave the other night?”

A muscle in Jack’s jaw flexed. “Clara was over at the pub.”

Delia nodded. “Right.” It was a stupid question. Even if she had done something to make him second guess everything, he wouldn’t?—

“And I got nervous.”

Delia looked up, her blood pumping faster. Hearing that sentence hang in the air between them hummed like she’d finally sung something real after repeating Heartbeat on the Dance Floor a thousand times. “Why?”

Jack shrugged. “It started to feel . . . I don’t know. Like an actual date.”

“Which you don’t do.”

“Right.”

The waitress walked back to their table with two tangerine drinks swirled with deep magenta beet juice. Delia smiled and thanked her, then opened her paper straw. Jack took a sip straight from the glass.

“You’re going to get all the orange and none of the red.” She dropped her straw in the drink.

“You’re going to get all the red.”

She swirled her straw until the two colours started to mix. “Not if I go like this.”

Jack scoffed. “Now you won’t know which one you like better.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It was the point until you ruined it.”

Delia stopped and took a sip. She grimaced. “Orange is best.”

“You didn’t even try the orange.”

“Well, it has to be better than that.”

Jack laughed and took another drink. “Orange is pretty damn good.”

Delia mixed until her cup was the colour of pink grapefruit. “Why don’t you date?” She paused, thinking again of the mantis tattoo. “Sorry, is that too personal?”

Jack didn’t answer for a moment, and Delia was about to come up with something else to change the subject when he finally said, “I lost someone close to me a few years ago.”

The air she’d been holding whooshed out of her lungs. Responses swirled in her head, none of them satisfactory. Whenever people asked about her dad and she told them that he’d passed, they were always so quick to jump in and say something like “I’m sorry for your loss,” which was impossible because they couldn’t be sorry. Not in the way they should be. They didn’t know him. They didn’t know what it was like to be without him. Then they’d move on to questions like, “How long ago? How did it happen?” like she should be able to give them a play-by-play. “Well, first the left ventricle in his heart started leaking, and then he got dizzy, and?—”

Jack coughed. “She was my fiancée, actually. She died in a car crash on the 401.”

That was a straight punch to the gut. “Shit, Jack.” She reached out for his hand without thinking. He pulled back before she made contact, and her stomach dropped out from under her. “I’m sorry, I just?—”

“No, it’s okay. I’m—if this is going to work, you have to know I have some . . . things.”

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