The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(73)

When that myth I’d made of her shattered, I didn’t know what to do. This last year, any thought I had of her felt wrong. Skewed. How could I understand what had happened, when I had put up so many lenses between my experience of her and the girl herself?

Holmes wasn’t a myth, or a king. She was a person. And to have a relationship with a person, you had to treat them like one.

“Can I forgive you a little now?” I asked. “And then a little more tomorrow, and the next day? If there is a next day?”

“Yes,” she said, quickly, like it was more than she had asked for. Like I might take it back.

“Provided you don’t blow anything up, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Or try to look in my ears again while I’m sleeping—”

“Yes,” she said, laughing. That look on her face, always, like she was surprised to be laughing, like it was something involuntary and slightly shameful, like a sneeze.

I couldn’t take it. “I missed you,” I said, gripping her shoulders. She was here. She was here, and I could touch her and God, how could I be so lucky? I said it again, like a compulsion: “I missed you, I missed you—”

“Jamie,” she said helplessly. She said my name again, trying out the word’s edges, almost like she was saying it aloud for the first time.

“Since when you do call me Jamie?” It came out soft, a little dangerous.

“Why don’t you call me Charlotte?” she whispered. Her fingers went back up to my neck, and then followed an invisible line up to my cheek, traced my lips. “Why don’t you call me by my name?”

Because she’d been a girl from a story I loved. Because when we first met, she told me to call her Holmes, and when Charlotte told me to do something, I listened.

“Do you want me to?” I asked.

“No,” she said, urgently. “No, I only want to know why.”

“Because I needed a name for you that was mine,” I said, and her eyes went wide and dark with something I didn’t have a word for. An hour later, I still had her in my arms.





Twenty-Six


Charlotte


WE ROUSED OURSELVES, FINALLY, WHEN THERE WAS A knock on the door.

“You have thirty minutes before the car arrives to take you to Sherringford,” Milo’s assistant said, handing me a bundle. She had bought dark clothing in our sizes and then had it pressed. It was far nicer than anything I’d been able to purchase myself this past year; the shoes, in particular, were things of beauty. I thought that I might love her. I felt very loving, just then.

Watson and I took turns showering. Back in the room, I hummed a little to myself as I did up the buttons of my shirt. He laced up his new black boots. He was smiling—he had always wanted a pair like mine.

“How are you feeling?” he asked when he’d finished.

For me, anything done in a bed with a boy was a fraught prospect. I didn’t know how long that would be true, if it would be true forever. Several times tonight we had had to stop ourselves, talk through what we were doing and how we felt about it. It sounded like a tedious exercise, and perhaps in some ways it was. I didn’t care.

How was I feeling? Like one of my Aunt Araminta’s beehives, buzzing, like I had a city inside of me. With Watson I had always been made better. I had spent the last year mourning our friendship, but knowing too it was better to be away. And now—

Now I’d have to keep on mourning our friendship, I supposed. He and I had been here once before, in a hotel in Prague, but before we could reconfigure what we were to one another, everything had disintegrated around us. Tonight, his dark, tousled hair was half dry, and he smelled the same as I did, as we’d used the same shampoo. He’d done the half cuffs on his trousers because they were, like all his other pairs, a bit too long, and there was nothing new about his shoulders, but an hour before I had mapped them anyway with my fingers. I loved them, his shoulders. He’d watched me, wondering, while I touched his wrists, his palms. What are you remembering? I fitted his hand against my hip and told him the three other times he’d put it just there (a bookshop in South London, by accident; on the flight back to England, to take my phone from my pocket; while brushing our teeth in the same bathroom in Sussex, because he needed to open a drawer and I’d been in the way). I was unmarked by what had happened tonight, but his torso was darkening with bruises where that bastard had driven in his fist and there was still a bit of blood under his fingernails and there was a look to him that was altogether new, wary and alert and impossibly sad, even now, especially now, one I’d first seen when I’d barged in on him beating the life out of Lucien Moriarty. I’d thought I’d come in to save him, but Watson had needed a partner, not an avenging angel.

He had a lovely left hook. He had a nick on his jaw where he’d cut himself shaving. How had I just seen it now? I wanted to examine it with my fingers, to put my lips there, and so I did.

He made a sound deep in his throat. He pulled me down onto his lap, his breath coming fast and warm and when the knock came I tried not to snarl at it.

“Hide the knives,” Watson said, laughing at my expression, his hands caught up in my hair.

“Mr. Watson and Miss Holmes,” the assistant said through the door. “Your car is here.”

Nothing cut the feeling of it—not the dash out the door to the car, not the rain that had started to break up the snow, not the not-knowing of what would be waiting there for us at Sherringford. I had the pieces of a plan. Watson helped me rearrange them to my satisfaction, or something approximating it. So much of what we’d needed to know this past year had been in our separate hands—Anna Morgan-Vilk, for one. Had I stayed at school I would have known her for what she was. I could have done my work without leaving school, without leaving Watson, and if I told myself I’d gone away only to track down Lucien Moriarty, I knew it for a half-truth. Had I stayed I would have had to face the mess I’d made. Had I stayed, Watson would not have been wearing that scarf when I’d met him. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, the idea that some kind, resourceful girl had been kissing him. Because I knew Watson well enough to know that in my absence, there would be another girl beside him. He wouldn’t pine forever. Why should he? The thought gave me comfort. It made me furious. It made me reach out and take his hand more forcefully than I’d meant to. He raised an eyebrow, then intertwined his fingers with mine.