A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(6)

“I’m not going anywhere,” Watson said in a low voice. “They’d have to drag me away from you. They’d have to put a gun to my head, and even then . . .” He made a helpless sort of shrug. “I mean, Holmes, the worst has already happened, and look. We’re here. We’re together.”

I reached out to take his hands, warm and calloused and gentle. “I don’t want to pretend about anything important. But is it okay, if sometimes . . . I pretend to be a girl who would want to go dancing at a disco?”

“Is that pretend, though?” Watson asked. “Because I remember a homecoming dance when—”

“Or,” I hurried on, “if I pretended I wanted to hold hands while walking to, say, play mini golf.”

“Mini golf,” he said, like it was a delicious, awful thing that he would lord over me for months. “Mini golf.”

“That is not the point.”

“You with a little putter, whacking away to get the ball through the tilting windmill—”

“Watson. Focus. Holding hands.”

“Like we are now?”

“Yes,” I said, and he brought them up between us.

“You can pretend whenever you like. But how do I know when you’re pretending, and when it’s real?”

“We’ll need some sort of code word,” I said. “Something we wouldn’t ever say otherwise. Like ‘kumquat.’ Or ‘asymptote.’”

“I can do that.” He regarded me over our clasped hands. “Can I add one term myself?”

“Of course,” I said, though I could feel myself tense.

“Once a week, we have to do something that cannot possibly kill us.” Then he smiled, a bit wickedly. “And once a week, we have to do something that probably will.”

In that moment, I loved him more than anything else.

“And that’s all right?” I asked. “All this is all right?”

Watson considered it. “I . . . I don’t have any agenda this summer. I feel like the last year has wiped me completely clean. I’m so tired of just surviving,” he said. “And in three months everything is going to start, the whole train ride straight into adulthood, and I just . . . I want to lay around on the couch in your flat, and watch dumb television, and write stories, and I want to solve this mystery you’ve got. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have a bloody Moriarty at the other end. So it’s a chance to try out solving a crime without our necks on the line. We can try our hands at being detectives for real.”

“For real,” I echoed. There was something to that idea: the last few years had felt like fiction. “I agree to your terms. I’d like to give these terms seven to ten days, then renegotiate if needed.”

“Or call the whole thing off?” He said it lightly, a cord of uneasiness just below.

I tried my best not to hurt Watson. I also tried my best not to hurt myself. “Yes,” I said. “Should we shake on it?”

Below us, a pair of taxis went by like racehorses loosed from their gates. A tangle of pedestrians were peering into the windows of the souvenir shop, their umbrellas up against the light rain. I knew they were tourists for that; the rest of the city threw up their hoods, or a newspaper, or simply squinted their eyes and pushed on forward as the clouds gathered and the wind picked up. And above it all were the towers and turrets of the university, rain-washed, sharp-edged against the sky, some commingled promise of what was past and what was to come.

It would start, it would start soon, and if Watson was hurt, he was also happy, and that was the way it always went, with us. “Shake on it?” he asked, disentangling our hands. “I sort of think we already have.”





Three


PRECOLLEGE PROGRAM ORIENTATION WAS SCHEDULED for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime.

My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy.

I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend.



2b. Loudly.

2c. He did this as often as he could.

2d. To wit: “A latte for my niece and her young man”; “Charlotte, wasn’t that your Jamie’s favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner’s later work—”; “Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren’t barbarians.” And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child.

By the time orientation rolled around, I was, in fact, feeling quite barbaric. Watson, true to form, was too delighted by the stack of paperbacks he’d bought and the pigeons on the corner and the raspberry cake he’d had with his tea to register any of the above as obnoxious.

It wasn’t that I was upset by the thought of Watson being my boyfriend. It was something else that bothered me. Whatever Watson and I were to each other was our business, no matter how the world leaned in and breathed against the glass, and Leander, my excellent all-knowing uncle-slash-guardian, should have known that. And not found it half as funny as he apparently did.