Nodding, I poured the whole milk into the ceramic creamer and left the half-and-half in its disgusting little carton. That was Leander’s; he called it his “nasty American habit,” though he said nothing about the Oreos he had to buy from the international store for eight pounds a package and then kept under his bed. Most likely because he didn’t want me to know they were there.
The best way to keep a disinterested face was to be interested in something else. I wondered what flavors Leander had squirreled away this week. Red velvet Oreos? Birthday cake? Candy cane? Perhaps that was just at Christmas.
“But I was scared,” Anwen said, staring down into her empty mug (it was as though I wasn’t there, exactly what I intended), “I was so scared, and after what happened to Matilda it all just went to shit, and what if it happens to me?”
I took a calculated risk. “Matilda?”
“It’s all her fault,” Anwen said, and a moment later, began to cry.
The kettle went off then, a punctuation mark.
She startled back to herself. “Where’s your toilet?” she asked, and I pointed down the hall in defeat.
Anwen returned from the bathroom with her blank expression back in place and a fresh coat of mascara. I made a mental note that she kept makeup in her bag. A girl interested in maintaining her mask.
That mask remained firmly on after that. “It’s not that I hate Matilda,” she said. “Hated? I don’t know if she’s even still alive. But she and I were never friends. She was really only into Theo. Anyway, I have trouble with that—making friends with girls. I’m not really sure why. Guys are just easier.”
I raised an eyebrow. I despised this attitude, how it shoved all girls together into one category, how it carried the smug suggestion that male friendship was better.
“We should really start rehearsing—don’t you have a lecture at two thirty?” Unfortunately, I did.
“Oh God,” I said. “Do you mind if I watch the time on your phone? I don’t know where mine is.”
I took it from her and settled in at the kitchen island. “You’re low battery,” I said, pulling a cord from my pocket. “I’ll charge it for you. Whenever you’re ready—go ahead!”
Her Ophelia monologue was excellent. “‘As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors,’” she whispered, a hand up as though Hamlet’s pale face were there before her. Ophelia was a vulnerable character, a girl driven to madness through her beloved’s disregard, and I hadn’t thought someone as self-possessed as Anwen could pry herself open that way. And yet, in my living room, her red curls crackling around her, I had the sense I had whenever I watched someone transform, onstage or elsewhere. That a quiet door had been opened somewhere, that a wind was coming through.
I performed mine for her—from after Ophelia had lost her mind, when she rants and sings in Hamlet’s fourth act—but I did my worst version, all rolling eyes and mock-rended clothes. I wanted to see what kind of notes Anwen would give me, if she would be honest.
She wasn’t. She told me I was “great,” cast another careful look around my flat, and exited, as it were, stage left.
I had approximately ten minutes to do the following things:
Ensure that the text messages between Anwen and Theo that I downloaded off her phone (when I’d taken it to charge; she really should have been more careful) had made it safely to my inbox.
Confirm the appointment I had just made for tomorrow morning.
Decide what the girlfriend version of myself would possibly wear to dinner with Watson that night.
A dinner. Somewhere nice.
What version of myself could I construct before then that could be even passably acceptable?
Nine
I WAS EARLY FOR DINNER, SUPPOSING THAT WATSON would be late, as he so often was.
The restaurant he’d chosen wasn’t a fancy place, though I will be the first to admit that my standards weren’t exactly standard. I had spent my childhood attending stifled, terrifying dinners at any number of Michelin-starred restaurants across Europe. I had beheaded many tiny cauliflowers and broccolinis while my father stared me down across a white tablecloth. This was not that. Neither was it counter service. It was the sort of place where the waiters wore white shirts tucked into denim, and the menu featured no fewer than four tarted-up versions of macaroni and cheese. At least that was what I could tell from the website, which I’d scanned (rather nervously) in the back of the taxi.
I would arrive early. I would settle into our table. Watson would approach. I would then say, “Hello, Watson,” and then I could ask him about his day.
This is how people behaved. For two hours, I could behave like a person.
Only Watson was not late. He was waiting for me on a bench in the vestibule, toeing the gray-washed hardwood floor.
“Holmes,” he said, standing as I walked through the door. “I think our table’s ready.”
“Hello, Watson,” I said. (That much I could manage.)
He had on his brown leather jacket and a white shirt, open at the collar. He looked very much like himself. Was that a good thing? Should I have imagined he looked different? I searched myself for the sort of response I was meant to have in this scenario, a first proper date with the boy that I cared for. Should he have a golden sheen around him? An inner glow? Should he be looking at me as though I were a treasure, or a princess? Biting his lip? Averting his eyes?
Should I be imagining us doing this—dining out at strangely posh comfort-food restaurants—for the rest of our lives?
I was spiraling. I took myself back to what was in front of me. Watson looked handsome, in the way he always did, which is to say clean but not manicured. The only difference was that he smelled a bit like cologne. Something, again, clean, like water if water had been supercharged into having a smell. Perhaps he’d made an effort. Was that exciting?
I was excited, I supposed, in the way in which I wanted to throw up from nerves.
I realized then that I had been standing in front of Watson for forty-five seconds without saying a single word.
“Miss?” The hostess hovered behind him. “Um. Your table’s ready?”
“You look a little like you’ve short-circuited,” he said, smiling, and took my hand gently as we followed her to the back corner of the restaurant.
Brick walls. A leather banquette. A votive candle on the table, and a sprig of lavender in a mason jar. The silverware was not silver but copper, polished to a shine. For a moment I was terrified that Watson might do something wretched like pull out my chair, but he gestured instead toward the booth side of the table. I slid in and immediately pulled up my feet. Sometimes it helped to make oneself more compact in combat situations.
Across from me, Watson fiddled with his watch, pulling it out from the cuff of his jacket and then sliding it back in. “How did it go?” he asked. “With Anwen?”
“Good,” I said brightly. “Fine.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“Not really.” That was untrue, but I didn’t want to be my clinical self just now. The rest of the world got that self. Tonight, I wanted for once to be the Charlotte beneath all the Holmes.
Whoever that was.
“Oh,” he said. His disappointed eyes met mine for a second before dropping again.
If our date were a test, I was failing. I had no idea how to do it right but still knew I was doing it wrong. I had no real examples for this sort of thing. Books? I didn’t read fiction. Television? The characters in Friends were hopelessly mean to the people they dated, and besides, I only watched that show to watch Joey, who was very attractive even while consuming entire pizzas. I thought back to the films that Leander and I had watched when I was convalescing these past months—screwball comedies from the 1940s, brightly lit mid-2000s films about “crashing” weddings to meet girls, the odd Transformers movie or two—and despaired. I should have curled my hair. I should be touching my face. I should be tastefully revealing bits of my past in anecdote form
, until he found something with which he connected or which he found hopelessly charming.
Aha, I thought, and leaned forward. “Have I told you about the time that my aunt Araminta tried to teach me to handle the hives at her apiary?”
“No,” Watson said. “It’s a big one, right? Her apiary?”
“Hundreds of thousands of bees. She tends them herself. The honey, when she jars it, is a beautiful amber color. Some of it’s flavored—she has a tarragon one that’s quite sharp, and a lavender.” I touched the little bloom in the jar. “She does the infusions out in her workshop. It’s the original one, built about a century ago.”
“Sherlock’s, then.” He was watching me, now. Watson always had a fascination with my family history. Was it terrible to exploit that?
The villa, as my ancestor had called it, wasn’t far from the manor where I had grown up. His was a southern-facing set of buildings that overlooked the chalky cliffs that led down to the Channel. The cottage itself wasn’t particularly grand; it had a garret stuffed with books, many dating back to the turn of the last century, and the kitchen was one of those prodigious old caverns with an Aga stove and a tabletop for rolling out biscuits. Araminta made wonderful biscuits, made still better by the honey that dripped down into the little crevices of dough, and as a child I had gone down the lane—when issued an invitation; I had always been required an invitation—to eat those and look out over the sea.
“Yes,” I said, “though she’s expanded a bit. It isn’t a commercial production, her honey. She sells it in a few shops in town. A neighbor boy helps her in the summers, but I think she intended to have me come on as her partner. I hadn’t known that until my parents decided to send me to America for school. She was very resistant. Didn’t like the idea of my being so far away.”
“I didn’t know you were close.”
“Physically, she was right down the road, in that cottage on the hill. Emotionally . . . I don’t know how close she was to anyone, really. I certainly didn’t know how to speak to her. She was quite a bit older than my father. Had a job as a codebreaker in the 1970s, until something awful happened—”
“Walter Moriarty,” Watson said, surprising me. “Leander told me. She found out Moriarty was negotiating the illegal sale of a nuclear warhead. He cottoned on that she has turned him in, killed all three of her cats.”
I thought of Mouse, and shuddered. “I’d heard something like that. She acted . . . not as a grandmother, exactly, but something like it. She took us on errands to London and to short weekend trips to Prague and Munich and Rome. We’d be marched through a few museums, photographed against a river or two, taken to a nice restaurant. And then at night, Milo would inevitably end up watching me in the room while she went to the theater.”
Over his shoulder, I noticed the waiter hovering, but Watson was watching me again now, his eyes warming back up, and I realized that the look in them was a sort of tempered delight. “Araminta didn’t take you with her?” he was asking.
I took a steadying breath and addressed the waiter. “A beer for him—something floral, I imagine you have it—and a French 75 for me.” He jotted it down and said he’d return for our dinner orders, though we hadn’t yet looked at the menu.
Watson lifted an eyebrow. “Something floral,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Floral.”
“You don’t drink often,” I told him, “and you make a bit of a face whenever you have beer, but you insist on ordering it, now that we’re back in the UK—I think it pleases you to have it. The pint glass to cup your hands around. The color of it and how you look when you’re drinking it. You sip it slowly, so you can make it last the whole night, and that’s cheaper for you on the whole, which should be moot anyway because my uncle will be paying for this meal, and any meal, and anything you need, really, because he loves you like a son. But. The beer. I’m not going to presume to change your order entirely, but I may as well send for something a bit easier for you to drink.”
“You may as well.” He used finger quotes around each word.
“Watson, I’m only helping you achieve your ultimate goal of imagining yourself drinking a beer while you’re drinking it.” I folded my hands on the table.
Without dropping my eyes, he reached across the table and took one of them in his, running his thumb against my knuckles. “Floral beer,” he said softly. “It seems like a good solution.”
“It is,” I said, my voice higher than I intended. “I thought it through before I came.”
“And the French 75?”
“I saw it in a film, and I liked the flute it came in, and—”
Gently, he turned my hand over, running his thumb along my palm. The skin was more delicate there, and I could feel his callouses from riding his bicycle this spring, from gripping the handlebars too tight. I could feel the soft edge of his nail.
We had been in bed together. I had pressed myself against him in the dark and said his name. And now we were out in the open, and he was touching me in a way that was almost innocent, and still I was flushed and freezing and babbling like a fool.
“—and I thought I might look nice drinking it, that you might like the look of my holding a flute more than a wineglass, especially considering the ones for red wine, they’re so large and silly, like a soup tureen on a stilt. And my ordering a strong cocktail would be ill-advised. You know I really shouldn’t let myself have things like that, not with my past, my habits, but the doctor said if I’d like, I could have a single drink, and—”
“And so you ordered this one.” He should have been laughing at me, but he wasn’t. “It checks out.”
“My deductions check out? Fancy that.”
“You’re very smug.”
“You,” I said, “are terrible at compliments.”
He took a breath, running a finger down the center of my palm. “Ask me again,” he said, voice low, “when we’re alone.”
“Ready to order?” the waiter asked, setting down our drinks. I startled. I’d forgotten we were in a restaurant, in public; I’d forgotten the fact of other people. I’d forgotten myself.
My whole self, except for the palm of my right hand, his finger tracing its lines.
There was something to being Charlotte, only Charlotte, for the night.
“Not yet,” Watson told the waiter, still watching my face, and the man nodded and walked away. “Is this what you wanted?”
“What I—” I shook my head a little, but I couldn’t stop smiling. “I don’t know what I want. I spent the last year running through possibilities in my head, what a night out would look like, you and I as ourselves—”
With quick fingers, he’d undone the cuff of my sleeve. Slowly—achingly slowly—he ran his thumb over the line of my wrist, as though he were smoothing out a length of cloth.
“You sound like me,” he said quietly. “Telling yourself stories.”
“There isn’t much else to do when you’re on the run. Didn’t you do it? When we were apart?”
“I did,” he said. “I’m trying something else now. None of that worked for us before. What if I don’t want some grand story?” His eyes were very dark. “What if, right now, I just want to touch your wrist?”
My voice came out faint. “Yes,” I said, then: “asymptote.”
“Asymptote?”
“Is this real?”
“It’s always real,” he said. “Holmes . . . do you still want dinner?”
His eyes were kind. His mouth had more complex ideas.
These were not the kind of games we’d played before.
“No.” I stood too quickly, and I saw the panic rise in his eyes, as though he thought I’d bolt out the front door and away for good. There had always been a chance of that in the past. There would be, always, despite the time passed and the help I’d received. Watson had always let me take the lead in these things before, had always waited until I’d approached him.
I wasn’t used to not being the one runnin
g the show.
These thoughts, I should mention, were ones I had later, when I was able to analyze this scene at my leisure. At that moment I wasn’t thinking anything at all except how quickly I could get him out of that restaurant and into my bed.
He drained half his beer. I left my French 75 on the table. We dropped twenty quid for the waiter, more than we needed to, and he took me by the elbow and pulled me out onto the street, and we were only blocks away from my uncle’s flat but I couldn’t stop touching him. As we waited to cross he fitted his hands around my waist and dipped his head and kissed me. My hands went up and underneath his jacket, and I was shaking. I didn’t know why I was shaking. I wasn’t short, and he wasn’t tall, and I’d never done this before, kiss someone like this, dash across traffic hand in hand with a boy, desperate to get someplace quiet and dark and alone. At least not when we weren’t running for our lives.
Though if this wasn’t dangerous, what was?
It was still light out, eight o’clock in the evening, and the streets were nearly empty. The air was close and heavy, the clouds low in the sky, and as we rounded the corner to my street it started to rain.
I stopped before my front door, looking up to our windows. “There are lights on,” I said, pushing my damp hair from my eyes. “I thought Leander might be going out, but—”
Watson stepped up behind me. “We can go to mine,” he said, his breath hot against my ear.
Anwen, Rupert, Theo. The case. I couldn’t let anyone see me this vulnerable. I had to stay here—this night, this self, this boy. Even now he had moved his lips down to my neck, his arm keeping me fitted against him. As I fumbled my keys from my bag, I felt too hot, too tight in my body, and when I finally had the door open we spilled into the stairwell like a thunderstorm.
“Quiet,” I said, and he whispered hoarsely, “There’s no way we weren’t heard,” and still it didn’t matter, how could it—I pushed him up against the wallpaper and he was laughing, bright-eyed, as I pushed his jacket down his shoulders and began undoing the buttons of his shirt. He hissed at my fingers, cold against his chest.
A Question of Holmes Page 7