Jamie Killed Delilah

[moonbird]

1



Delilah was dead.

Within an hour of her death, her boyfriend also was dead.

His name was Connor Brians, and most people who knew him would have described him as the typical frat boy, before he met Delilah. He was often seen sauntering aimlessly around campus, hair in his eyes and visor flipped up-side-down, with a sleeveless red t-shirt announcing proudly his membership to the Gamma Sigma fraternity. The Gamma Sigma frats were known for their constant supply of cheap beer and sloppily-rolled marijuana cigarettes, as well as the rumored “craziest parties on campus,” often featuring the girls from a nearby sorority, Kappa Nu. At the parties, the notoriously large-breasted sorority girls were often referred to as the Kappa Nudes.

For his first two years of college, Connor somehow scraped by on minimal effort, if any. It was rumored he “had something going” with the somewhat pretty chairwoman of the Film Department, but no one really knew for sure. Connor often bragged that he was studying film to be the director of a porn movie, but most said he was just in college for the frat parties, and would probably drop out or flunk out in a year or two.

And maybe he would have, if he hadn't met Delilah Joyce.

She was the perfect opposite of wild, cocky Connor. She was a gentle, kindhearted girl, and very intelligent, with a B on her report card being a rare occurrence. She was studying to be a nurse.

When Connor met her, he didn't know or care about any of these qualities. All he knew was that she was different from any girl he'd ever dated.

They met under awkward circumstances. Connor had just been partying and chugging cheap beer when his current Kappa Nude girlfriend, Trisha, invited him back to her place for “a little playtime.” After eagerly complying, the pair had burst into the silent, deserted sorority house and begun to make love on the moth-eaten sofa.

Five minutes later the door opened, and a girl entered the room.

“Hey!” Connor exclaimed, surprised and a little embarrassed. He tried to cover himself up with Trisha's naked body.

The girl didn't respond. She didn't seem to have noticed them. She was facing the opposite directions, and wore a pair of earphones. A few seconds later she glanced in their direction, did a startled double-take, and cried, “Oh!”

Her face was mostly hidden by the veil of darkness covering the inside of the sorority house. “Who the hell is that?” Connor demanded to Trisha, whose faced was pressed against his sweaty chest.

Trisha glanced up. “That's just Delilah. Don't mind her.” She looked impatient to get back to business.

Connor sat up. “You're a Kappa Nude?” he asked the girl doubtfully, noticing the outline of a bulky backpack slung over her shoulder. Connor couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a sorority girl carry a backpack.

Trisha answered for her. “Hardly,” she scoffed. “I mean, she lives here, but all she does is study. She won't go to any parties with us or even drink a single can of beer. She probably hasn't even popped her cherry yet.” She shot the girl a malicious look.

Delilah took a step toward them, and a strand of moonlight filtering through the drapes fell on her. Connor took one look at her face and was immediately confused. She was very pretty––but that wasn't really the right word. Trisha was pretty; she had shiny blonde hair and wore bright red lipstick, she was thin but curvy and had long, tan legs and large breasts and a belly button ring. This girl was dark-haired, and she wore no makeup. She was very slender but didn't have many curves compared to Trisha, her legs and breasts looked about average though her conservative clothing covered them mostly up, and Connor severely doubted she had a belly button ring. But she had pretty eyes, dark blue and framed with long brown lashes, and her lips looked very soft, and something about her (Connor supposed the moonlight played a role) looked soft and faint and gentle, like an old photograph.

“Don't worry, baby, Delilah will leave,” Trisha cooed, stroking his hair.

As Trisha said this, girl in the doorway turned to leave.

“No!” Connor exclaimed on a random impulse. When the word escaped his lips he instantly wondered why he'd spoken it; of course he wanted to get back to Trisha, without any further distractions.

Delilah paused, glancing over her shoulder at him with a cold stare.

“What?” Trisha demanded.

Connor put on his flirty smirk. “Why don't you join in, cutie?”

The moment the words left his mouth Connor knew they were the exact wrong thing to say. Delilah's face curled into a disgusted expression, and in a flash she was gone, letting the door swing shut behind her. Connor felt a strangely acute sense of disappointment.

“It was a nice try, honey,” Trisha murmured in a saccharine voice, caressing his chest. “Delilah's the biggest prude you'll ever meet. Doesn't even wear makeup, and her shortest dress goes down to her knees. She's pretty, though. It's a shame.” Slowly, her soft, manicured hands probed lower down his body. “But I'm no prude, Connor,” she whispered, gently pressing his lips to his and giving him her tongue.

Suddenly Connor felt disgusted, mostly with himself. “I don't think I want to **** you tonight,” he said calmly.

Trisha looked at him, a confused frown on her face. “What did you say?”

Connor ignored her and continued, “And you know what else, babe? I think I'm breaking up with you. Yeah, I think I am.” He was smiling faintly.

Trisha giggled. “You're kidding, right, baby?”

Connor smiled back at her. “No,” he said cheerfully.

Trisha's smiled faded. “But... But why?”

“Because you're a whore, Trisha.” With that, Connor scooped her up in his arms and dumped her roughly onto the floor with a thump.

Trisha looked shocked. “You bastard!” she cried, scrambling away from him. “Get out of here! You get out and never come back!”

“Gladly!” Connor replied, and with that he left the Kappa Nu sorority house, and never did go back.

[moonbird]

2


“Maybe we shouldn't have let him go, John.”

Officer John Harris looked up from his desk. “You mean the boyfriend?”

His deputy nodded. “He seemed pretty upset.”

John smirked. “Something tells me if your girlfriend was stabbed to death a psychopath, you'd be pretty upset too.”

“You shouldn't call him a psychopath, sir,” the pretty young phone-operator piped up from her desk across the room. “It's not politically correct.”

Both men ignored her.

“Maybe upset was too weak a word,” said Deputy Ryan Thatch. “He looked almost... crazy.”

“Like I said, nothing out of the ordinary. The guy's probably still in shock.” John poured himself another large mug of coffee from the pot he always kept brewing on his desk and took a hearty swallow.

“All I'm saying is that his likelihood of suicide probably quadrupled in the ten seconds after we told him she was dead,” Ryan said, starting to sound a bit exasperated. “What will the press think if the guy goes home and slits his wrists?”

“We're the police,” John said, setting down his mug. “Preventing suicides is not our job.”

“But isn't it our job as human beings?” Ryan seemed to feel like he'd struck a powerful blow on John's argument and looked at his superior officer smugly.

John wasn't moved. “Go get him, if you're so worried,” he said, looking at his deputy over the rim of his mug as he took another big gulp. “His address is in the computer.”

Ryan looked uncomfortable. Now the deed was on his shoulders. “What if he won't come with me?” he asked nervously.

“Then you've done all you can,” John answered, giving him a good-natured smile. “You can go to sleep tonight with a clear conscience, my sensitive friend.”

“Sensitive,” Ryan grumbled, but he was already getting out of his swivel chair and heading for the door, grabbing his dark blue policeman's jacket on the way out. At the door he paused and looked back, as if waiting for someone to offer to do it for him. When no one came forth, he grumbled something under his breath, snatched a paper off the printer, and sulked out the door.

Outside the weather was, as Ryan's daughter often put it, “yucky.” It was the middle of November, and the low-floating clouds completed covered up the moon and stars, making the night especially dark. A monotonous drizzle had been going on for several hours, and everything thing was coated in clammy dampness. The air was heavy with moisture and smelled faintly of worms. “Damned awful night,” Ryan muttered, turning up his collar and stepping out into the mucky dankness.

Brians, Connor H.
5231 Greening Ave., APT #17
Cleveland, Ohio 42199

it said on the paper in his hand. Ryan, who'd lived in Cleveland his whole life and knew the basics of the bus routes by heart, waited at a nearby stop, wishing it were one of the nicer sheltered ones they'd built in other places. He didn't have an umbrella, and already the top of his head was soaked.

He was starting to shiver when the right bus finally came. Ryan stepped gratefully into the toasty artificial heat, dropped a couple of quarters into the box by the driver's seat, and plopped down on a seat with a half its stuffing poking out of a large rip in its side. He blew steamy breath onto his damp, shaking hands and waited patiently as the bus slowly creaked its way through the rain toward Connor Brian's apartment.

[moonbird]

3


As the slow, steady drizzle coated downtown Cleveland with dewy raindrops, Connor Brians's apartment was warm and dry. Connor himself, however, felt deeply cold, like ice was being pressed against his bare skin; he felt like a ghost shivering in its own rotting corpse.

He didn't see Delilah for a few days after that first awkward meeting in the Kappa Nude house. For some reason he'd felt humiliated that she'd seen him naked. He wasn't a prude by any means, but he felt like a little kid again, terrified of catching cooties. He didn't know it yet, but Delilah was already beginning to change him.

He couldn't get her face out of his head. That wasn't an uncommon occurrence, as he often daydreamed about sexual encounters with various Kappa Nudes in his free time, but this was different. First of all, they weren't sexual in the least. In fact, they didn't even tell a story, not even an erotic story like normal. He would just start thinking about her, and he'd see her face (which really wasn't all that pretty, not really, she wasn't any better looking than the average girl, and nothing compared to Trisha or the other Kappa Nudes), and he'd find he could just sit there and stare at her face in his mind for hours on end.

He was so distracted by her that he forgot all about beer and sex and weed, and he even started going to his classes. It was an odd sensation; he'd remember walking to the lecture hall, vaguely, like in a dream, but he couldn't figure out why he'd decided to go, or even when he'd made up his mind to grab his books and go. Sometimes he even found himself taking notes during the lectures, and doing his homework after it ended. Even his friends noticed the difference in his personality.

“You high or somethin, Con?” Matt asked him once after a class.

“No,” Connor answered in a slow, groggy voice, not taking his eyes away from the smudge on the brick wall he'd been staring at for several minutes.

“You've had this weird look on your face lately,” Matt told him. “Like a kid passing gas, you know? A little smile like that. Only yours is less... I don't know, less mischievous, I guess. Know what I'm talking about?”

“Yeah.”

Matt stared at him for a few more seconds, then decide he was probably high and didn't want to share whatever he had with him. He walked away grumbling.

Almost a week passed before Connor saw Delilah again. He was walking through a small grove of walnut trees with no destination in mind, a dreamy expression on his face which was now starting to become commonplace, and there she was, just sitting at a bench reading.

“Delilah!” he exclaimed without thinking.

She looked up and saw him. “Oh, um...do I...?” she asked, an apologetic smile on her face.

Connor blinked, surprised. “Don't you remember me? I was with Trisha, in your sorority house.” He was aware he was smiling like a little kid on picture day, but he couldn't stop.

She considered this for a moment, a thoughtful frown on her face. Connor observed that this expression suited her face quite nicely. Then her eyes widened slightly as she remembered him, and she lowered her eyes back to the book in her lap. “Oh,” she murmured.

Connor's tongue suddenly felt huge. He found himself tripped over his words. “We were... We didn't, you know, we were just...”

Delilah smiled weakly. “I know what you were doing.”

“I don't even like Trisha,” he blurted out.

She didn't even bother to look up this time. “Oh,” she said again.

Connor moaned internally. He was never all stupid and blurty like this, what was going on? “I'd like to buy you a coffee sometime,” he said finally. The offer was awkward, but at least he'd managed to get it out without making it sound too desperate.

(Was he desperate? No, he couldn't be, he didn't get desperate, he wasn't that kind of guy. She wasn't even that pretty. Not really.)

Her eyes didn't leave the book. “I'm not sure,” she answered doubtfully.

Now what? Connor couldn't remember the last time he'd been rejected. “You're very pretty,” he told her, his voice high and nervous.

“Thank you,” was all she said. It was automatic, robotic.

“Please, just give me a chance.”

(Now he was practically begging. He didn't beg, he never begged, she wasn't even that pretty!)

Something in Connor's mind screamed at his to get out of there before he made an even bigger fool of himself, but he couldn't. He felt like his feet were cemented to the ground.

Finally Delilah looked up at him. Her eyes met his, and he felt a faint shiver roll over his shoulders. She did have very pretty eyes, maybe even beautiful. He didn't detect any trace compassion in those eyes, but he thought he saw something like pity. He supposed it was better than nothing.

Delilah looked at him for a long time. Connor studied the ground nervously. He felt like she was looking right into him, reading his thoughts and memories, exposing his guilt, his anxiety, his weakness. Finally, when Connor felt he might just burst, she said quietly, “Okay.”

For a moment he was only shocked. “Really?” he said, feeling stupid once the words were out of his mouth.

And then she laughed, and it was the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard, like countless tiny bells ringing in unison. He found him laughing along with her, and he laughed a little too loudly, a little too long, but he didn't really care. He listened dazedly as she told her when and where to meet her, trying to focus on her words but really only seeing her face. Then she stopped, glanced at her watched, gathered up her books, and began to walk away.

Connor snapped back to reality. “Bye!” he called after her.

She waved over her shoulder, not looking back at him. He heard her call something in farewell to him, but it was faint, as she was facing the opposite direction; it sounded like, “See you tomorrow,” but he didn't know for sure.

He didn't know why, but once she was out of sight he sat down on the bench and laughed like a loon for a good five minutes. Soon his face was bright red and huge tears were rolling down his cheeks. It was the first real laugh he'd had in years, the kind that began in his belly and rolled through his entire body like thunder. It was infinitely more satisfying than the staccato barks of laughter he normally used.

When he finished wiping away the tears from his cheeks, he wondered briefly what had been so damned funny. Then he decided he didn't care in the least. In fact, from that moment on, there was little he really cared about on the face of the earth.

Except, of course, for Delilah Joyce.

[moonbird]

More to come, stay tuned! :)