A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(23)

“You may as well.” He used finger quotes around each word.

“Watson, I’m only helping you achieve your ultimate goal of imagining yourself drinking a beer while you’re drinking it.” I folded my hands on the table.

Without dropping my eyes, he reached across the table and took one of them in his, running his thumb against my knuckles. “Floral beer,” he said softly. “It seems like a good solution.”

“It is,” I said, my voice higher than I intended. “I thought it through before I came.”

“And the French 75?”

“I saw it in a film, and I liked the flute it came in, and—”

Gently, he turned my hand over, running his thumb along my palm. The skin was more delicate there, and I could feel his callouses from riding his bicycle this spring, from gripping the handlebars too tight. I could feel the soft edge of his nail.

We had been in bed together. I had pressed myself against him in the dark and said his name. And now we were out in the open, and he was touching me in a way that was almost innocent, and still I was flushed and freezing and babbling like a fool.

“—and I thought I might look nice drinking it, that you might like the look of my holding a flute more than a wineglass, especially considering the ones for red wine, they’re so large and silly, like a soup tureen on a stilt. And my ordering a strong cocktail would be ill-advised. You know I really shouldn’t let myself have things like that, not with my past, my habits, but the doctor said if I’d like, I could have a single drink, and—”

“And so you ordered this one.” He should have been laughing at me, but he wasn’t. “It checks out.”

“My deductions check out? Fancy that.”

“You’re very smug.”

“You,” I said, “are terrible at compliments.”

He took a breath, running a finger down the center of my palm. “Ask me again,” he said, voice low, “when we’re alone.”

“Ready to order?” the waiter asked, setting down our drinks. I startled. I’d forgotten we were in a restaurant, in public; I’d forgotten the fact of other people. I’d forgotten myself.

My whole self, except for the palm of my right hand, his finger tracing its lines.

There was something to being Charlotte, only Charlotte, for the night.

“Not yet,” Watson told the waiter, still watching my face, and the man nodded and walked away. “Is this what you wanted?”

“What I—” I shook my head a little, but I couldn’t stop smiling. “I don’t know what I want. I spent the last year running through possibilities in my head, what a night out would look like, you and I as ourselves—”

With quick fingers, he’d undone the cuff of my sleeve. Slowly—achingly slowly—he ran his thumb over the line of my wrist, as though he were smoothing out a length of cloth.

“You sound like me,” he said quietly. “Telling yourself stories.”

“There isn’t much else to do when you’re on the run. Didn’t you do it? When we were apart?”

“I did,” he said. “I’m trying something else now. None of that worked for us before. What if I don’t want some grand story?” His eyes were very dark. “What if, right now, I just want to touch your wrist?”

My voice came out faint. “Yes,” I said, then: “asymptote.”

“Asymptote?”

“Is this real?”

“It’s always real,” he said. “Holmes . . . do you still want dinner?”

His eyes were kind. His mouth had more complex ideas.

These were not the kind of games we’d played before.

“No.” I stood too quickly, and I saw the panic rise in his eyes, as though he thought I’d bolt out the front door and away for good. There had always been a chance of that in the past. There would be, always, despite the time passed and the help I’d received. Watson had always let me take the lead in these things before, had always waited until I’d approached him.

I wasn’t used to not being the one running the show.

These thoughts, I should mention, were ones I had later, when I was able to analyze this scene at my leisure. At that moment I wasn’t thinking anything at all except how quickly I could get him out of that restaurant and into my bed.

He drained half his beer. I left my French 75 on the table. We dropped twenty quid for the waiter, more than we needed to, and he took me by the elbow and pulled me out onto the street, and we were only blocks away from my uncle’s flat but I couldn’t stop touching him. As we waited to cross he fitted his hands around my waist and dipped his head and kissed me. My hands went up and underneath his jacket, and I was shaking. I didn’t know why I was shaking. I wasn’t short, and he wasn’t tall, and I’d never done this before, kiss someone like this, dash across traffic hand in hand with a boy, desperate to get someplace quiet and dark and alone. At least not when we weren’t running for our lives.

Though if this wasn’t dangerous, what was?

It was still light out, eight o’clock in the evening, and the streets were nearly empty. The air was close and heavy, the clouds low in the sky, and as we rounded the corner to my street it started to rain.

I stopped before my front door, looking up to our windows. “There are lights on,” I said, pushing my damp hair from my eyes. “I thought Leander might be going out, but—”