Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(22)

“Welcome to London,” David said. “This is Craven House, where you will be staying. That building”—he pointed to an identical building to the one that they stood in front of—“is where I live. It’s connected to this one through this lobby and the common room. You live this way.”

He grabbed the closest suitcase and started pulling it along. It happened to be Nate’s. Nate was perfectly content with having David do his lifting. There is no elegant way to drag your suitcase up some steps and into a lobby with too many fluorescent lights, which Stevie was certain turned her skin a fetching shade of grayish green, like a sad cabbage. It was still late November, but a small Christmas tree was up in an empty corner of the lobby, looking like it was at a party at a stranger’s house and hating every minute of it.

At the front desk, their photos were taken and printed onto ID cards. Stevie tried not to look at hers, with her bloodshot eyes and salad dressing hoodie. Each of them was handed a key on a plain ring.

“Room 5-19,” the person behind the counter said to Stevie. “Fifth floor.”

There were elevators, but they were hilariously small, clearly designed to aid people who needed it and not to carry stupid American suitcases up five flights. They pressed into the elevator in two loads of people and bags, and it made the begrudgingly slow ascent to their floor.

“This way,” David said, grabbing the handle of Stevie’s suitcase and pulling it along.

To get to their rooms, they had to pass through three separate heavy doors that segmented the hallway for no clear reason.

“Someone’s in the pocket of Big Door,” Nate said.

“They love fire doors here,” David said. “Something to do with the whole city burning down.”

Most of the doors along the hall were closed, and there was only a faint sound of voices behind some of them.

“Seems empty,” she said.

“Well, it’s the pub hour. A lot of people go down for drinks or food or to hang out in the lounge around now. There’s kind of a routine. I’ll show you. This one’s yours, Vi. Nate, here you are. Janelle, I think you’re down a few doors. And here . . . nineteen.”

Stevie opened the door of a compact, utilitarian room with front-facing windows that looked out over the street. Unlike Ellingham, which had big, quirky rooms, this room was a modern blank canvas—plain white walls, empty corkboards, built-in lights overhead and next to the bed.

David half closed the door and embraced Stevie, looking down into her face.

“You actually came,” he said.

“Wait. Were you joking about the invitation?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Can you go back?”

All the time and distance that they’d been apart fell away, and Stevie was full. Full of love and feeling, not just for David, but for everything—the built-in wardrobe, the slightly crooked window blind, the reusable plastic water bottle with the school logo; taking in the general vibe.

“I was only sort of joking about being busy,” David said. “I have a lecture I have to go to. I’ll be back in about two hours. You guys can get settled and then I’ll meet you back here at four? I’ll take you guys over to the local, and then I have a surprise.”

“What?”

“A surprise surprise. The kind where you don’t know what it is.”

“The local,” Stevie clarified. “What’s the local?”

“That’s what they call the pub. Your pub is your local, and we have a local. And you have to go. It’s the law.”

Then he took her face in his hands and kissed her. It wasn’t designed to be a long kiss, since he had to go—but it was also the kind of kiss meant to make up for time already lost. A strong kiss, one that made solid contact and held it and seemed to ask, “Are you really here?” She grabbed him around the back of the neck, pressing him harder into her. She forgot how you could hear the other person breathe, feel the warm exhale, know that they were alive, that they wanted to be with you so much that they pressed their mouth against yours and then the room spun away.

David broke the embrace first, taking a step back and smiling.

“There will be plenty of time for that,” he said. “I wish I could skip. See you in an hour.”

When he was gone, Stevie unzipped her suitcase and looked down at what she smilingly had called her “packing.” Unlike Janelle, who had planned outfits for every day and layered them in day-to-day order in compressed packing cubes, Stevie packed like someone who just heard that reports of the monster were true, and it was headed toward the city. And what was weird was that she had really tried. She had pulled things out of her drawers and closet at Ellingham and put them on the bed and tried to make sartorial sense of it all. She was the kind of person who had both kinds of shirts: the T-shirts with writing on them and those without. There were the jeans she liked, the ones that fit okay, and the ones that fit badly but she’d bought them and was therefore stuck with them for the rest of her life, or whatever it was that happened to jeans. She’d brought the one dress she owned, which was black and still had the tags on it. All these things had been shoved into the bag in a teeth-grinding frenzy the day before she left because she was up late the night before writing a paper that was already two days late. She had, she discovered, only brought three pairs of socks.