She had. I backtracked. “No, of course. Ha. But that was when you decided you liked art. I meant, like, when you wanted to, uh, make it.”
Marie-Helene raised an eyebrow, but she gamely launched into a story about seashells, and her grandmother’s spoon collection, and a pencil she stole from her postman. It was a well-told story, funny and smart. I stopped listening almost immediately. Instead, I took her hand in mine and set off toward her studio in a wandering sort of way.
“Do you have any of that old work up there?” I asked when we reached the door.
“I don’t,” she said. “Are you trying to get me alone, Simon Harrington?”
The last name Holmes had given me. “I might be.”
I watched her think about it. The tip of her nose was pink in the cold, and she was wearing some bright lipstick that made her look like she’d wandered in out of a fairy tale. And I didn’t want to kiss her. How did I not want to kiss her? I’d been completely ruined.
“Okay,” she said shyly. “I’ll show you my paintings.”
“Is anyone else around?” I asked as she fiddled with the keys.
“It’s only a few days till Christmas. I’m going home tomorrow, but I think that I might be the last one here.”
“Good,” I said, too eagerly. There’d be fewer witnesses, fewer occupied studios, and I wanted to dig around. If I could, I wanted to rule out Nathaniel’s students as suspects. I liked Marie-Helene. In another life, I could’ve liked her a lot, and I wanted to stop wondering how I could use her as a tool in our case.
The studios were dark, except for the pale winter afternoon streaming in through the windows, and Marie-Helene didn’t bother to flick on any lights as we went along. Not until we got to her space at the end of the row, and she hoisted herself up onto her worktable, kicking her legs.
“Hi,” she said, biting her lip.
Crap, I thought. Because of course. Of course I’d be expected to make a move here. Touch her neck. Kiss her; hell, maybe sing her an L.A.D song—do something to live up to the ridiculous texts Holmes had been sending.
They were ridiculous texts, and in more ways than one. There had to have been a way to arrange this meeting without all that over-the-top flirting. If they’d gotten friendly last night, why hadn’t Holmes gone and met Marie-Helene herself? She was the better detective. We both knew it.
Okay, I’d been kind of petty that night before, keeping my arm around Marie-Helene, bragging to Holmes that the French girl liked me, Ha-ha, I don’t care that August is hanging around, I have someone, too, and yeah, it was kind of a dick move, but I thought she’d brushed it off, and Oh my God, I thought, she’s totally setting me up. Either she knows I’m going to totally cock this up, or—
Or she knew I was going to cock this up, and she wanted me to go after Marie-Helene and leave her, Holmes, the hell alone. I could see it now, her laughing to August about it—You know what Watson’s like, she’d say. It’s never been about me. He likes every pretty girl.
Well, there’s a pretty girl right now, I thought, that wants me, and I let Simon come crawling out of his cave. I slipped my arms around Marie-Helene’s waist and kissed her like a man coming home from war.
Here was another point under the “monster” column: it was a good kiss. She leaned into me, she put her hands in my hair, she pulled me down into her like she wanted me, like I wasn’t the terrible person Holmes thought I was, like I was somehow good enough for a girl like her.
Like Marie-Helene, I mean. Of course that was what I meant.
With a small noise, she drew me in closer, pulling out the tails of my shirt so she could touch my stomach. Her hands were warm, but they were still in her gloves. We realized it at the same time, and laughing, she pulled them off, one, two, with her teeth. Something pulled hard in my chest, something open and raw. I wanted to get my hands under her jacket. Unbutton her blouse.
A bigger part of me wanted to be back in Sciences 442, knee-to-knee with Charlotte Holmes, while she talked to me about her vulture skeletons.
“Hey,” I said to Marie-Helene, out of breath, “hey, you’re leaving tomorrow. Isn’t this a little fast?”
“I don’t think so.” She traced a finger up my arm.
“I think—I think it is for me, actually.”
With a show of surprise, she sat back. “Simon, you’re a gentleman,” she said, teasing, but I could tell that she was hurt underneath it.
“Not like that.” I ran a hand through her hair. “I mean that I actually wanted to see your art.” True, but not in the way it sounded. “And I want to see you, too, again, after Christmas.” True, sort of. “When are you coming back?”
“This wasn’t—” She sighed. “I broke up with my boyfriend last week. I don’t want . . . I don’t want to see you after Christmas, okay? I wanted to hook up with you because I thought you were leaving, and I . . . when I go back to Lyon, I’ll probably see him. I didn’t want him to be the last person I’d been with.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry. Too honest?”
It wasn’t. Both of us were in too deep; it just wasn’t with each other. “I’m fine,” I said, and it was completely true.
Marie-Helene smiled a bit sadly. “You’re cute, you know. I just . . . my heart’s somewhere else.”
“That’s fair.” I offered her a hand, and she hopped down from her worktable. We looked at each other, and I laughed a little at it all. The cup of paintbrushes. The straightforward way she’d shot me—Simon—down. That I was in Germany at all, with a strange girl in her art studio, and that Charlotte Holmes had set it all up to see what I would do.