“Did you hear that? You almost said something profound. You came so close.”
She pushed her sock feet against the edge of the bed. “Leander liked to talk about the importance of control. No one would ever guess it. He’s famously lazy, you know, he lives like an absolute sloth. Goes from one house he owns to another, violin in tow, picking up the odd crime when it suits him. Living off his trust fund, eating out in restaurants. Going to parties.” She said the word with such disdain that I choked on a laugh.
“Parties! You know what they say—first, the parties. And before you know it, they’re on to the murdering.”
She rolled her eyes. “Watson. Some people don’t like to read. Or they don’t like sport. They don’t like the routine of it, or the slow pace, or the fast pace, or the noise. Whether it seems too intellectual or too base. But I’m an anomaly if I don’t like parties or restaurants? It’s wrong if I don’t like the idea that there are a demanded set of responses and that I’ll be judged on how well I can provide them?” Putting on a little-girl voice, she said, “‘Yes, please, I’d like the salmon, it looks lovely! Could I bother you for another soda? Ta!’ I hate the idea of performing a role when I haven’t written the script myself. I need more of a purpose than I want to get a chocolate pudding without the waitress calling the police on me.”
I made a mental note to dig up the rest of that story later.
“Leander excels at that kind of thing,” she said, “because he has some genetic aberration that makes him good with people. They like him. They trust him almost immediately, and because he can pass as a normal sort of man, he can be invisible. Left alone. He says the right things, and people approve of him and move on.” She looked at me. “I’ve always wanted to be invisible, and because I want to be, it’s impossible.”
“What kind of life do you want for yourself?” I asked her. “After all this? After school, after Lucien?”
She thought about it for a long minute. I had no idea what she’d say. Holmes had always had such a tenuous connection to her surroundings, like she was more real than anything around her. At school, she walked around with a backpack full of books, but they were like props in a stage play. I knew, of course, that she had to go shopping for shoes and shampoo, but I couldn’t imagine a world where she did so, and last week I’d watched her trimming her hair in the sink and wondered if she’d taught herself to do it from a YouTube video, because I couldn’t imagine either of her parents showing her how. But I couldn’t imagine her looking at YouTube, either.
Maybe it was just me. Maybe she was so endlessly fascinating because the world hadn’t ever scratched up against me the way it did her, leaving her raw and unhappy and wanting to disappear. She used grocery-store-brand shampoo, I knew, because I’d used her shower back in Sussex, and I’d stood there smelling it, the water beating down on my face, because it was impossible that a girl like that shopped at the same stores I did, because, despite my best efforts not to, I’d romanticized her beyond all sense, because even if I wasn’t in love with her, I couldn’t see myself loving anyone else.
“I want an agency,” she was saying. “A detective agency, a small one. In London, because it’s the only proper place to live. We’ll take back over Baker Street. It’s a museum, now—none of my family wants to live there, it’s too gauche for them—but it would make you happy, I think, and anyway it has all the original furnishings, so we wouldn’t have to shop for them. Furniture stores are horrid, aren’t they? And we’ll take cases. You can deal with the clients, comfort them, take notes. We’ll solve them together, and I’ll handle the finances, since you’re so terrible at maths.” She paused. “It sounds childish, when I put it that way. I imagine in practice it’ll feel rather adult.”
“Is that it, then?” I asked her. It came out quiet, though my thoughts were loud and cluttered. I’d never imagined that she’d daydreamed like this, not the way I had. “Is that what you want? I’m in those plans, when you imagine them?”
“If we both make it that long.” She tipped her head back against the wall to look at me. “You’re determined to take on all this responsibility for mistakes that I’ve made. I’m beginning to think you like having a target on your back. So if you insist on staying, I might as well make a place for you. I—”
I kissed her then.
I kissed her slowly. Patiently. It was always too desperate between us, the clock nearing zero, the last secret about to slip out, or too cautious, or too clinical, an experiment gone wild and wrong. It was a huge, impossible thing, kissing your best friend, and each time we’d tried, we’d managed to fuck it up so badly that the next felt even more impossible.
I wanted to give her an out. I always did, especially after Dobson. But God, it was hard. When she leaned into me, her fingers tracing the hollow of my throat, I had to clench my hands not to touch her back. Then she slipped a hand underneath my shirt, and I forced myself to pull away.
Her breathing was coming fast. “What if we weren’t doing this? If we were just friends? You’d still come along. You’d be there, with me, in London. Say you would.”
“I don’t—we’ve never been just friends, though, have we?”
She smoothed out the sheet between us, avoiding my eyes. “You wouldn’t want me either way, then. You wouldn’t want me as just your friend.”