Society Girl (Animos Society)

by Alys Murray

  Oh no.

  Color drained from her face. The last time she’d listened to music—really listened to music—she was shivering in her bra and panties in front of Christ Church.

  Somewhere in this house, Daniel was playing those songs again.

  Of course, it didn’t matter to her. Nope. She trudged up to her room and settled in for a long read from one of the books she was using as the basis of her thesis.

  Still, the music played.

  She read fifteen pages, parsing ancient Latin as if it were warm butter.

  Still, the music played.

  She changed into her pajamas, ran a brush through her hair fifty times, and did a few sun salutations to return some limpness to her tense body.

  Still, he played his damn music.

  “That’s it.” She cursed under her breath, throwing off her bed covers and storming out of her room. She would find where the music was coming from even if it killed her. The sound was too loud; the tune tugged at her. Every chord threatened to open up her chest’s cage and let those strange Saturday night feelings back into the world.

  Daniel should have been easy to find. He was a mechanic, and mechanics work in the garage. Only, the garage was detached from the house, some hundred yards away. Surely, the music she heard wasn’t coming from there. She engaged a sweep of the house, opening door after door.

  She’d almost given up when she stormed down to the basement servants’ hall—a long, modest dining room. It once served three meals and midnight coffee daily to a staff of thirty, but now only saw twenty people at most for lunch five days a week. There, at the far end of the room, as far as he possibly could be from her, sat the man she’d been looking for.

  The sight of him was a punch in the throat. It stole her breath, quickened her pulse, and she found him more than beautiful. The sun crowned his golden head with a shimmering halo, casting light into all corners of the room as if he was its radiant source. His heavy hair cast a shadow over his eyes, but if they’d caught the sun they might have blinded her. He leaned on the back legs of one stiff wooden chair. The guitar sat in his lap.

  Sam glanced down and blushed when she realized his strong hands were covered in bandages. He’d made his fingers bleed to play and protect her. A rush of emotion clogged her throat. What emotion it was, she couldn’t tell, but she shoved it away.

  After moving to England, she’d finally sat down and watched every season of Downton Abbey, and besides her father, she had one other role model who helped her craft her aristocratic persona. What would Lady Mary do? What would Lady Mary do? With this framework in mind, she tilted her chin up, her shoulders back, and tried to get the first word in edgewise, only to fail spectacularly and get caught off her game right from the start.

  “I was wondering when you’d come and find me,” Daniel said, his head bobbing to the closing notes of a melody she barely recognized.

  “What?” Sam stiffened; her brow furrowed.

  She yearned to cross the room’s long floor and give him a piece of her mind, to tell him to cut this romantic Love’s-Labour’s-Lost, Singing-a-Song-to-Win-the-Heart-of-the-Princess shit out. Sam’s legs might as well have been rooted to the spot.

  “Music seems to be the only way to get your attention,” Daniel said.

  God, was she really so transparent? Surely she hadn’t let him know she thought his music was entirely tolerable, unlike all other music, which she found practically unbearable?

  “You don’t have my attention,” she sniffed, dismissively. “It takes a lot more than a little guitar ditty.”

  “Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”

  The barb was sufficient enough for him to look away from his guitar and turn the force of his eyes on her. Even in the shadows, they spoke volumes. The bastard was enjoying needling her. After being around men with near constancy since moving to England, she’d learned to read them with almost pinpoint accuracy. Daniel thought tugging at her strings would get her to unravel, to remove the mask as she had for those few hours in front of the cathedral.

  She would never let him get so far under her skin again. Her grip on her own arms tightened painfully. “We don’t play music in this house,” she said.

  A sour note corrupted the unbroken stream of music.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Music is forbidden,” she said with an authority she did not possess.

  Part of her wanted to cringe. Forbidden? She might have been channeling the 1910s, but she didn’t have to adopt their lingo.

  “Forgive me. It wasn’t in the employee handbook,” he replied, too dry to be serious. “Is this a new rule?”

  God, he recovered quickly. One minute, his jaw was on the floor, the next he was back at arms, ready to rip off Sam’s armor and expose her.

  “It’s an old rule. We were”—Sam swallowed, grasping for a lie and finishing it with complete, incorrect certainty—“Puritans.”

  “Really? Because…” Daniel moved the guitar away from his chest. “I think you made it up on the spot because you think it’ll get rid of me.”

  Yep.

  “If I need to get rid of you, Mr. Best, I’ll fire you,” she said.

  “Will you?”

  She tried not to watch his imposing body rise to its full height or his lightning eyes flash or his smile shoot shivers down her spine. But… She was only human. A human woman who found him undeniably attractive. It was lust, all right. Lust she could have easily shaken off if he hadn’t been so damn nice to her the other night.

  His smile was like the second sip of hot cocoa after being outside in a blizzard all day, warming from the inside out. She turned away, busying herself with a glass of water so she didn’t have to look at it. The cold tap sprung to life and she filled the glass, gulping back its contents to extinguish the warmth blossoming within her chest.

  “You give yourself more credit than you’re worth.” She returned the glass to the counter, a little too hard. “You can barely play.”

  “Did I… Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

  “You broke the rules,” she snapped, without thinking. And he had. Oh, how he’d broken the rules. She was supposed to be the one with power. In the pursuit of the Mud Duck, the Animos was supposed to pull the puppet strings. So why did she feel so out of control? Why was she struggling to keep her breath in check every time he so much as glanced her way? She amended her statement, gluing up the cracks beginning to form in her plastered-over defenses. “You can’t play music in here.”

  “I can’t break rules you made up,” he said.

  How was he so optimistic? Why was he still smiling when up against her cold-as-ice debating skills?

  “I’m the lady of this house. I can do anything I want.”

  She should have shut him down, but again, the conversation took an unexpected turn. He maintained cheerfulness, though he didn’t dare approach her. He kept his distance as though the lady of the house was something of a wild, wounded animal he didn’t dare get too close to.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “What?” Sam spun on her heel, facing him again. She was going to get whiplash if this conversation kept going any longer.

  “After you left, and not hearing from you, I started to get kind of worried. I thought maybe you’d caught a cold or pneumonia or the plague or something.”

  It was, weirdly, maybe one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to her in her entire life. Her brother goaded her about surviving Animos. Doctors asked her about her health. This was different. Genuine. She coughed, clearing her throat.

  “I’m fine,” she said, tightly. “And yourself?”

  “Actually.” He took his first brave steps toward her at a stroll, like he was approaching her in some dive bar in New York and not her family’s ancestral home. “I’ve been feeling a little under the weather. See, I gave this beautiful woman my coat and now I can’t seem to get the chill out of my bones.”

  “That was silly of you, wasn’t it?
”

  “I thought it was chivalrous.”

  “Impractical.”

  “Potato-potahto. Do you still have my coat, by the way?”

  By then, he was near enough. Near enough for what, Sam didn’t give herself time to imagine. Her rapidly racing heart gave her enough of a hint. She couldn’t let herself get too close. Pushing away from the counter, she fled her place.

  “It’s not been dry-cleaned yet. I’ll send it off tomorrow. Should be back Wednesday. Mrs. Long will give it back when it’s done,” she rambled and dashed for the stairs. Her bedroom was her only sanctuary. He could play here in the basement forever for all she cared. She’d shove stones in her ears to block out the noise. She didn’t want to be any nearer to him. There was something pulling her to him, and it got stronger the closer they got. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Maybe you could give it to me on Friday,” he called after her.

  Taking the bait, Sam paused on the staircase.

  “Why Friday?”

  “Because I hope I’ll see you then. On our first date,” he replied.

  Don’t say yes. Don’t you dare say yes. Heart. You keep in that cage where you belong. I’ll handle this, her brain commanded.

  “What?” she asked, stupidly.

  Her genius was rewarded with a breathy chuckle from a few steps behind her. He’d climbed the stairs.

  “Would you like to go out with me?”

  “You can’t ask someone that.”

  “Of course you can. You find someone you like, ask, and hope they like you back.”

  Her heart was banging against its cell walls. Tell him yes. To hell with the Animos Society. To hell with your dad. You’ll have Thomas for family and a chance to go out with this guy. No more initiations, no more embarrassments, no more property damage. Just half a family and a date.

  “No,” she said, trying for the firm dignity thing Lady Mary Crowley always had going for her.

  “No, you don’t think it works or no, you don’t want to go out with me?”

  “No,” she repeated.

  “Listen.” The more he spoke, the more she realized she wasn’t even halfway right about him. He was an honest-to-God, wide-eyed, clear-hearted romantic. “There’s this Blitz Ball happening in town on Friday, where everyone dresses up like it’s 1943 and we drink cheap champagne cocktails and swing dance until we can’t stand up. My great-grandparents met at a county dance during the war, real proper and polite, so I thought maybe we could see what it was like back then. And the best part is, we’ll both be fully dressed.”

  He was a romantic. He believed in love. He looked at her like he wanted them to share something. And so, Sam would have to make him suffer all the more for it. She’d spent her whole life wondering if someone like him existed, and now she’d found one, she couldn’t even be his friend.

  She was no longer channeling Lady Mary. Turning back to Daniel, she conjured up the frozen fury of Captain. She returned his hope with deep, cutting cruelty.

  “I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last penniless guitar player on earth.”

  Daniel stumbled back down the steps as if he’d been shot. Ran a hand through his hair. Paced a few steps. Opened his mouth to speak and closed it several times. If Sam had been ashamed by her nudity at Christ Church, it was nothing compared to what ripped open her chest now.

  “I must have misunderstood. I thought… The other night, in town… I thought there was something between us. Something we could…”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she tilted her chin and waited for the spark in his eyes to vanish.

  “Stupid, right? A guy like me with a girl like you. Well.” His popping, joyful, teasing voice softened, and he reached for his guitar to return it to his case. “I’ve got to get back to work, miss. I’m sorry for the distraction. It won’t happen again.”

  Sam fled. Up, up, up the staircase to her room, where she tried to return to life as normal. But once the evening sun had set, a small knock rang out at her door.

  “Come in,” Sam called.

  She’d been reading the same paragraph of a textbook for three hours, intermittently checking the news and scrolling through her spam inbox though she was sure she didn’t need male enhancement pills or emails from American politicians. A distraction was welcome. It came in the form of Mrs. Long, the Ashbrooke housekeeper, a spindly woman with a constantly beleaguered expression on her square face.

  “Miss?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mrs. Long?”

  “Your brother asked me to draw up this list and bring it to you. Didn’t tell me why.”

  A yellow folder landed in Sam’s lap. From its weight, she could tell it only contained a single piece of paper. Two, at absolute most.

  “Not much of a list, is it?”

  “No, miss,” Mrs. Long replied, skipping over the sarcasm like a feather-light rock over a pond. “Is there anything else?”

  “Uh… No. Thank you.”

  The woman left Sam with her paper, which Sam refused to look at for too long. She did everything to distract herself. Solitaire. Reddit refreshing. Her homework. Thesis reading. Then, when her eyes were too heavy to keep open any longer, she removed the folder’s single sheet of paper.

  Worse than a single piece of paper, the information it contained held only one name.

  “Shit.”

  Daniel Best.

  Chapter Eight

  The trouble with his nan—well, the trouble with everyone in Daniel’s life—was that they didn’t mind giving their opinions. Not only did they not mind it, they insisted upon it, even when it wasn’t wanted or necessary. From her vigil behind the counter of her bookshop, Nan watched him through narrowed eyes as he shuffled in through the frosted door, and verbally pounced.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Daniel relieved himself of his guitar case and knapsack. It was good to be back in the shop. For one thing, there was centralized heating, something he’d been in sore need of ever since giving his coat away.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t huh me, Danny Boy. You can’t even keep your miserable head up. Now, what’s the matter? Your mum told me you left the house this morning whistling like a tea kettle.”

  “I was in a good mood. Now I’m not. Nothing to it,” he dismissed, reaching for his uniform apron. The familiar fabric with its fraying edges comforted him in a way it hadn’t yesterday.

  “You’re always in a good mood,” Nan said. “One time an entire shelf of books fell on you and you smiled the whole way to the hospital.”

  Around them, the store idly hummed with activity. A handful of regulars sat at their usual tables, reading their newspapers and chatting in hushed tones. Some tourists charged their phones in the corner, mooching the free wifi and nibbling on a homemade scone. At night, the shop really came alive, with book clubs and writer’s nights, with open mic evenings and pop-up art showings for the starving artists of Oxford. Community happened here, but not a lot of actual bookselling. It gave no room for Daniel to escape, not his grandmother or this conversation.

  “Angie was right about something,” he confessed. “And you know I hate it when she is. She never stops gloating.”

  “What was she right about?”

  “I struck out with this girl. No big deal.”

  But it wasn’t no big deal. A girl who’d put a song in him turned out to be everything he’d thought she was better than. He’d thought her ice queen act was nothing more than a facade. But now, whenever he thought of her, he only saw her eyes. They were cold and thick as Antarctic ice. Impenetrable.

  “Which girl?”

  “Nan, I’m really not in the mood to talk about this.”

  Ding. The bell over the door rang as it swung open.

  “Don’t want to talk about what?”

  A gust of cold outside air accompanied Angie as she marched right up to the counter. In some ways, she was like a trained seal. She knew if she approached Nan, she would be rewa
rded with a cup of tea and a homemade biscuit.

  “Great.” Daniel fought a groan. Couldn’t he wallow in peace? “Just…great.”

  “What happened? You look like shit.”

  Focusing on the espresso machine in front of him, Daniel appraised his reflection in one of the aging silver knobs, grateful he didn’t look nearly as tired or defeated as he felt.

  “I look normal,” he snapped. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see if the new song was finished.”

  “You own a phone. Text me if you want to talk about something.”

  An unfamiliar tide of emotion welled up under Daniel’s skin, flushing his cheeks. Annoyance. He was annoyed Angie had showed up here, he was annoyed Nan was nagging him, he was annoyed things hadn’t worked out with Sam, and more than anything, he was annoyed at himself for being annoyed. These things usually rolled off of his back, slid right off of him and disappeared in his sea of the best is yet to come thinking.

  Not today.

  “If I texted you, I wouldn’t get any of Nan’s free tea. This shit costs me a pound seventy-five at Costa.”

  “Hey.” Nan snapped a towel in his friend’s direction, almost disturbing the steaming hot liquid in the dainty china cup.

  “And I can’t get any of Nan’s sparkling wit if I text you, of course.” Angie recovered with a smile and a wink.

  “Well, you won’t be getting it today.” With a speed and agility remarkable for a woman of her age, Nan ripped off her apron and collected her oversize sewing box. She wasn’t a particularly good stitcher and was more of a humanist than religious, but every Monday she rode the bicycle she’d owned since she was fifteen down to one of Oxford’s many churches and stitched away for hours. She wasn’t good at sewing or God, but she was excellent at gossip and worshipped stolen stories above everything else. “Off to my Stitch ’n’ Bitch. See you two later. Daniel, make sure you mop back here before you close tonight. And pick your head up. You can’t see the sun if you’re always staring at your feet.”