The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(40)

Or she knew I was going to cock this up, and she wanted me to go after Marie-Helene and leave her, Holmes, the hell alone. I could see it now, her laughing to August about it—You know what Watson’s like, she’d say. It’s never been about me. He likes every pretty girl.

Well, there’s a pretty girl right now, I thought, that wants me, and I let Simon come crawling out of his cave. I slipped my arms around Marie-Helene’s waist and kissed her like a man coming home from war.

Here was another point under the “monster” column: it was a good kiss. She leaned into me, she put her hands in my hair, she pulled me down into her like she wanted me, like I wasn’t the terrible person Holmes thought I was, like I was somehow good enough for a girl like her.

Like Marie-Helene, I mean. Of course that was what I meant.

With a small noise, she drew me in closer, pulling out the tails of my shirt so she could touch my stomach. Her hands were warm, but they were still in her gloves. We realized it at the same time, and laughing, she pulled them off, one, two, with her teeth. Something pulled hard in my chest, something open and raw. I wanted to get my hands under her jacket. Unbutton her blouse.

A bigger part of me wanted to be back in Sciences 442, knee-to-knee with Charlotte Holmes, while she talked to me about her vulture skeletons.

“Hey,” I said to Marie-Helene, out of breath, “hey, you’re leaving tomorrow. Isn’t this a little fast?”

“I don’t think so.” She traced a finger up my arm.

“I think—I think it is for me, actually.”

With a show of surprise, she sat back. “Simon, you’re a gentleman,” she said, teasing, but I could tell that she was hurt underneath it.

“Not like that.” I ran a hand through her hair. “I mean that I actually wanted to see your art.” True, but not in the way it sounded. “And I want to see you, too, again, after Christmas.” True, sort of. “When are you coming back?”

“This wasn’t—” She sighed. “I broke up with my boyfriend last week. I don’t want . . . I don’t want to see you after Christmas, okay? I wanted to hook up with you because I thought you were leaving, and I . . . when I go back to Lyon, I’ll probably see him. I didn’t want him to be the last person I’d been with.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry. Too honest?”

It wasn’t. Both of us were in too deep; it just wasn’t with each other. “I’m fine,” I said, and it was completely true.

Marie-Helene smiled a bit sadly. “You’re cute, you know. I just . . . my heart’s somewhere else.”

“That’s fair.” I offered her a hand, and she hopped down from her worktable. We looked at each other, and I laughed a little at it all. The cup of paintbrushes. The straightforward way she’d shot me—Simon—down. That I was in Germany at all, with a strange girl in her art studio, and that Charlotte Holmes had set it all up to see what I would do.

“While I’m up here,” I said, “would you show me some of what you’re working on, art-wise? Or is that a bit weird?”

She giggled. “A bit weird,” she said, wandering over to a stack of paintings by the wall, “but sort of nice. Yeah, okay. How about this one? It’s a riff of one of the Turkish baths in Budapest. I really loved the tile—look, I wanted to represent the mosaic I saw there in abstract. I used these brushes. . . .”

Even though the canvases she showed me were all clearly originals, studies of places she’d seen, landscapes that had stayed with her, I found myself interested and asking questions. Real ones. At first, I was trying to distract myself from how I was still uncomfortably turned on—a case of my body acting without my brain’s permission—but she spoke with such authority about the work she made, rifling through canvases in her little fur-collared coat. I was coming to realize that I always found that compelling, that kind of mastery and passion, that she could be talking about her rock collection this way and I’d still want to know more.

We’d come to the back of her finished work. “These last few are exercises for class,” she said. I caught a glimpse of a piece that looked familiar.

“Wait,” I said. “That looks like—well, Picasso, actually.”

“That’s because it is.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “It is.”

“Simon,” she said, ruffling my hair, “you’re really sort of adorable.” While she pulled out the painting for me to get a better look, I decided that I needed to do something about my haircut.

“It’s a take on the really famous one, The Old Guitarist. For Nathaniel’s forms and figures class. All first-year students have to take it. He’s really into imitation as a teaching practice.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, peering at the painting. It was obvious what it meant, but I wanted to hear her say it. Especially because this didn’t seem like an outright copy. I didn’t know much about Picasso, but I was pretty sure that the guitarist in his painting was a man. This was an elderly woman, wrapped around an instrument that wasn’t a guitar.

“It’s a kokyū,” she said in response to my unasked question. “My father has one in the house. It belonged to my great-aunt. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”