The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(10)

“I don’t want you to be one. I want you to understand.”

For some reason, it felt dangerous to breathe, and so I didn’t. I held myself as still as I could, except for my hand running down her soft, shining hair to her cheek. Her skin was pale in the dark, but as I traced my thumb along her cheekbone, she flushed the barest pink. I bit my lip, and her mouth opened, and without thinking about it, really, I let one finger brush against her mouth, and then her hands slid up my chest, pulling against my T-shirt and then pulling at the collar, pulling me down toward her until I could feel myself pressing her down into the mattress, and my nose dug into her neck and she laughed, she exhaled and her breath was soft and a little sharp, and I tangled my fingers in her hair, the way I’d wanted to for months now, all of this I’d wanted for so long, and she angled her head as though she was about to kiss me—

Then she dug her elbow into my stomach and heaved me off her.

“Shit,” she said as I gasped for air. She swore again, fluently, and pulled the pillow down over her face.

“That was a terrible idea.” I needed to throw up. I needed a cold shower. Maybe I would take a cold shower and throw up in the tub. That sounded great, actually. I staggered to my feet.

She nodded. I could tell because the pillow was moving up and down. “Come back,” she said.

I dragged my hands through my hair. “God. Why?”

“Just—”

“Holmes—are you okay? Like, really, actually okay?” It was such a dumb question, but I couldn’t think of another way to ask it.

“Don’t you think it’s sort of backward, that you’re the one always asking me that and not my family?”

“Honestly? All the time.”

We stared at each other.

“They think this sort of thing shouldn’t’ve happened to me at all,” she whispered. “Not to someone as . . . capable as me.”

“This isn’t your fault,” I said fiercely. “God. Has no one told you it’s not your fault? Of all the fucked-up families in all the world—”

“It was never said, as such. It was implied.”

“Like that makes it any better.” I stared at the ground. “I know this isn’t your favorite subject, but have you thought about—”

“Talk therapy isn’t a panacea. Neither are drugs. Neither is wishing it away.” When I glanced up at her, she was wearing a sad little smile. “Watson. Come back.”

“Why? No, give me an actual answer.”

With a groan, she pulled the pillow down against her chest. “Because, contrary to how I just reacted, I don’t actually want you to leave.” She looked at me with baleful eyes. “I also don’t want to . . . do that again. I just want to go to sleep, and if I’m correct, it’ll be much easier for us to continue talking to each other the way we normally do if we don’t have to first go through tomorrow’s formalities.”

Gingerly, I sat down. “I still think that makes little to no sense.”

“I’m fine with that.” She yawned. “It’s dawn, Watson. Go to sleep.”

I eased myself back in under the covers, careful to leave a few inches between the two of us. Leave room for the Holy Spirit, I thought semihysterically. I hadn’t been to church since I was a kid, but maybe the nuns had gotten it right.

“Are you measuring the space between us?”

“No, I—”

“It’s not funny,” she said but it was dawn, and we were exhausted, and I could tell she was trying not to laugh.

“What we need is a good murder,” I said, not caring how horrible I sounded. “Or a kidnapping. Something fun, you know, to keep our minds off all this.”

“All this? Do you mean sex?”

“Whatever.”

“Lena keeps texting me. She wants to fly out from India and take us shopping.”

“That’s not a distraction. That’s a reason to throw myself into the ocean. I need an explosion or something.”

“You’re a sixteen-year-old boy,” she said. “I think we’ll probably need a serial killer.”

Leander Holmes would turn up the next day. Three days later, he would disappear. And for weeks and weeks after, I’d wonder if, by wishing, we’d brought everything that happened after that onto ourselves.





three


I WOKE TO CHARLOTTE BESIDE ME AND SOMEONE ELSE flinging back the curtains.

Even with the sudden brightness, even knowing there was a stranger in my room, I couldn’t make myself look. It felt like I’d gotten less than five minutes of sleep—maybe five minutes in the last five months—and my body was finally drawing the line.

“Go away,” I mumbled, and rolled over.

The lamp flicked on. “Charlotte,” a low, lazy voice said, “when I gave you that T-shirt, I didn’t intend for you to interpret it literally.”

At that, I cracked an eye open, but the man speaking was too backlit to see.

“I don’t think you intended for me to ever wear it, either,” Holmes was saying beside me, but she sounded pleased. Somehow, she didn’t look tired at all; on the contrary, she was sitting up, her knees tucked under her shirt, stretching out the words CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS. “It really is the worst Christmas present I’ve ever gotten, and that’s saying something.”