A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(5)

It was best to chip away at those things we could control, now, than to run screaming from him after he touched me.

“Jamie, I’m sorry,” I said instantly. “I am. You know this has everything to do with me.”

“With the both of us,” he said, and reached out to touch my knee. “I’m fine with it. The green nail brush, huh? My favorite color’s blue.”

It was a very sad attempt at banter, but I beamed at him as though he were both Abbott and Costello. He wasn’t hurt. I was getting better at not hurting him. “That’s point one,” I said, affecting unaffectedness. “Points two through ten have to do with that ridiculous list your father made you as to how to deal with . . . me.”

Watson had the grace to wince. His father had given him a strange little journal into which he had compiled a list of suggestions for how to handle one’s Holmes (as though I were a small-breed dog or similar), drawing not only from Dr. Watson’s own accounts but also from his own efforts with my uncle Leander back when they’d been flatmates. This was absurd on many levels. Leander was very easy to live with. He hardly ever stalked around anymore with a pistol in his bathrobe pocket.

I knew about this journal because my Watson had written about it, and we shared our accounts with each other, warts and all.

This wart was particularly large.

“For instance,” I said, running the curtain through my fingers, “I seem to remember an item along the lines of ‘Do not allow Holmes to cook your dinner unless you have a taste for cold, unseasoned broth.’”

Watson coughed delicately. “Holmes. Have you ever made . . . anything?”

“I have made you at least four cups of tea.”

“In the last two years.”

“I dislike cold, unseasoned broth, and my uncle Leander is quite a . . . foodie”—I despised that word—“and your father has quite the talent for hyperbole. I can’t believe that Leander once made him clear, tasteless soup. I will make you no broth. Verbum sap.”

“Noted,” Watson said. “I’m not proud of that journal, you know. I’m not proud of a lot of things my father has done.”

James Watson had a habit of boosting his son from class to go listen to his police scanner in the Walmart parking lot. He was a bit of a rogue, a bit of a bad influence, a bit of a silly suburban dad. The last I’d heard, he’d been fighting with Jamie’s stepmom, Abigail, over his friendship with Leander. They’d been gallivanting about together like schoolboys, leaving Abigail to take care of her and James’s kids and the minutiae of their lives.

“You’re still not answering his calls,” I ventured.

Watson sighed. “They’ve split up. For good this time, I think. He keeps leaving me messages . . . I think he’s been spending time with my mom and Shelby in London.”

“Interesting,” I said. It made a certain kind of sense. Jamie’s parents had a reasonably good relationship for a divorced couple, and Grace Watson had just gone through the harrowing, absurd experience of being duped into marriage by a Moriarty. I imagined they were both feeling somewhat fragile right now.

“Ten-year-old me would have died and gone to heaven at, like, the suggestion that my parents might get back together. But now . . .” He shrugged a bit too forcefully. “I don’t care.”

I touched his knee, and he put his hand over mine, and said, “You know, these aren’t . . . unreasonable things to ask for. The things you’re asking for.”

“Compared to your parents?” I asked.

“Compared to anyone.”

Generally speaking, I had no real basis by which to judge relationships as reasonable or unreasonable. My family was composed of a number of odd, sad adding machines who lived in a lonely house on the sea. They weren’t precisely role models. And as for Watson—we’d smashed our friendship into bits and rebuilt it from the ground up. It resembled nothing, now, other than itself.

“Good,” I said, for lack of a better response. “Well, then, I also take issue with the idea that I don’t give you compliments. Your father claimed that I would give them to you every ‘two to three years.’”

Watson bit his lip again. He was going to do himself an injury.

I ticked them off on my fingers. “For someone who does not style it, you have very good hair. You are better at French than you think, though your written syntax is appalling. And you have developed an excellent right hook.”

“Thank you,” Watson said gravely.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “That should tide us over for at least the next six months.”

He leaned back in his chair with a rueful expression. “Is there anything else? I know you said that you’d put together, like, twenty-three pages of this stuff, but I was sort of hoping we could walk around the college—”

“I want to date you,” I said in a rush. “I want to, and I have no idea how to do it, even if I am behaving as myself. Whoever that is. And now I’ve picked up this case, and so often in the past we’ve played at being together to extract information that I’m not sure where that fake relationship begins and our real one ends. Or vice versa.” I fidgeted, then forced my hands to relax. “What’s worse is that pretending . . . it makes it easier. It lets me try out things that I might want to do for real, and there aren’t the same sort of stakes. Because the stakes are very high. It’s you.”