The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(29)

“Milo is a spymaster. God knows how that one worked out, for someone so determined to not leave their building. He doesn’t hate anyone. He doesn’t like anyone either. But he does love his sister, and she wanted me to have a place to go, so he did her a favor. I’m dead. Nobody out there can know I’m not dead. Nobody out in the world can recognize me. I had limited options. So I took it.” He downed his wine in a determined gulp. “Do you want to know why?”

“Yes,” I said, because I’d been wondering why for weeks.

“I took that job because there’s a ridiculous war on between my family and theirs, and I wanted to wave the white flag. If I made friends with Milo, if I convinced my parents to extend an olive branch, if I was able to smooth things over . . . but I was younger, then, and stupider. My parents won’t even talk to me anymore.”

I whistled. August made an ironic little bow. “You know what they say about good intentions,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“So here I am. No friends. No family that aren’t criminals or would-be ones. Just me, and a mathematics dissertation I can’t finish researching, because dead men don’t do postdocs, and I work on fractals. In Antarctica. There are no dead man ships headed that way anytime soon. I live in a sad little room in Milo’s sad little palace. I can’t leave the building because . . .” He shook his head angrily. “Look, when Charlotte walked in, I was . . . I don’t know. It was like my past hadn’t been erased after all. The good and the bad, all of it—it was like it still existed somewhere out there. I still existed. I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been until I saw her.”

“And it’s as simple as that.”

“She’s my friend. Maybe it’s self-destructive for me to like her, but I do.” He shrugged. “I try not to blame her for what happened. Her parents—well, never mind. You can’t keep her in a box, Jamie, and you can’t let her do that to you, either. She and I were quite close, if you can believe it, and when it didn’t play out between us the way she needed it to, she threw a grenade at me and ran away.”

“August—”

“We were trained in the same way. We think the same way. We have the same self-destructive solutions to problems we face. . . .”

“So you’re casual bros now? I don’t buy it. You want me to believe you can just hang with the girl who ruined your life.” The words came out more caustic than I’d planned.

August blinked rapidly, almost as if he was fighting off tears, and there it was, the real emotion I’d been waiting to see—and it was brutal.

“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” he said finally. “Dead, remember?”

I eyed him. Despite the clothes and the polish and the heaps of self-pity, he was hard to dislike. Later I would wonder if it was because he reminded me of a version of Charlotte Holmes who’d been raised by the enemy.

“Do you ever get sick of playing the victim?” I asked him, because I was good at taking those kinds of openings.

“No,” he said, “it’s actually quite fun,” and he sank his last few balls one right after the other.

“Asshole.”

“For reference, that’s the only sensible way to answer that kind of question.”

“Rack the balls, dickweed,” I said, and for that night, at least, we were friends.

TWO GAMES LATER, MARIE-HELENE DRIFTED OVER IN time to catch me in the middle of a yawn.

“Long night?” She did that pretty-girl thing where she casually slid under my arm.

“No,” I told her as August took his fifth shot in a row. “I’ll win in the end.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed that. But Simon did. Simon liked how soft she was, too, and after a moment, I caught myself playing with the ends of her hair.

Honestly, it felt nice. Simple. When did I start thinking a good relationship had to be complicated?

Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood. I saw you in the quad that day, mine would go. I’d always thought you would be blond. I always thought you’d be my twin sister. My other half. And then I met you, and someone killed the meathead down the hall, and you became something else to me. Because other than our friendship, I felt like I had nothing to show for this year. Like I was a circuit board where all of the tangled cords ran straight to Charlotte Holmes.

And still it wasn’t just a friendship. When I’d met her, I’d stopped looking at girls in the way I used to, and I used to look at girls all the time. More than look—I made out with them in my room to Radiohead turned all the way up. I texted them to say goodnight. I was a good boyfriend, while the relationship lasted—though it never lasted long. Still, they were never my friends, not the way that Holmes was, and I didn’t know if what I was feeling was a kind of reversion to my former self. Was I re-becoming fifteen-year-old James Watson Jr., a pair of tickets to the Highcome School Spring Fling in my pocket? I was so much more now. I was past all the hopeless crushes, my inability to separate friendship and love.

Wasn’t I?

I’d been thinking for so long that what I wanted from Holmes was—everything. Like this thing between us was a Wonderland rabbit hole, that we could fall endlessly and never hit the bottom. I wanted us to belong to each other, completely, in a way where no one else could come close. Maybe I felt this way because she was so strange and private and still, somehow, had invited me in. Me, out of everyone in the world. Maybe it came from how we met, the two of us together in a foxhole. Maybe I wanted her to be my girlfriend because I didn’t see what could happen if I found myself wanting someone else. I wanted a stamp to put on our file: All boxes checked. No one else needed. She didn’t want me to touch her, but she wanted to be near me all the time. Closed circuit. Keep out.