And as sharp as his anger had been, his relief was soft, palpable, as he waited for her. Etta hurried to his side, but he still didn’t move; his throat worked as he swallowed.
“You don’t have to explain,” she said. “Everything about this is hard.”
“It’s not that,” he said, his whole face tight with strain as he eyed the street. “It’s only…you resign yourself to a certain invisibility, when…when you look as I do. I didn’t expect the opposite to be true in this time, and I find I don’t like the attention. The looks.”
You idiot, Etta told herself. What a privilege it was to never feel like you had to take stock of your surroundings, or gauge everyone’s reactions to the color of your skin. Of course he felt uncomfortable. Of course. And if he’d never been to this time before, he wouldn’t be able to predict people’s reactions.
“I don’t mean to be so…irritable,” he muttered. When he looked at her again, his eyes weren’t as wild as they’d been before. “But I cannot be what I’m not.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be anyone but yourself. I’m glad you told me,” Etta said. “I want to understand how you feel.”
Something she said made him pull back again. He opened his mouth and Etta knew what was coming, the way he would try to wedge more space between them.
“Miss—”
“Don’t you dare call me Miss Spencer,” she warned. “It kills me when you act like we aren’t even friends.”
“We aren’t friends,” he said, and she couldn’t help it—she flinched. One of them had clearly misunderstood whatever was between them. Apparently, it had been her.
Etta charged away from him down the sidewalk. He caught up to her in three long strides and took her arm in his hand, forcing her to stop. She couldn’t bring herself to look up; she only waited for Nicholas to speak.
“I forget myself with you,” he said roughly. “I forget the rules. I forget every other living soul in this world. Do you understand?”
We are not friends.
Because, to him, they were…
Her heart threw itself at her rib cage, hard enough that, for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. “I don’t care about rules or anyone else. People are awful—they’re idiots—and if they try to hurt you, I won’t need the revolver. I care about you, and all I ask is that you try not to make me feel like an idiot for it. You’re supposed to…” She clenched her hands to keep from gripping his shoulders. “You’re my partner.”
Etta risked a glance up, meeting his eyes. That same flush crept up her throat, washing over her cheeks. Her hands hovered above the warm, smooth skin of his strong forearms, and for a moment she wondered what it would be like to touch him there, to ease some softness into the rigid lines.
Stop it. She knew herself well enough to know that if she kept looking, if she leaned forward like she wanted to, rocked up onto her toes, and he pulled away again…this partner thing would get very complicated, very quickly. And Etta couldn’t think of that now. She couldn’t think of his jawline, the scars and nicks in his skin, his lips as they parted, the way the fabric of his shirt would feel between her fingers.…
Home, she reminded herself, even as her own skin came alive, prickling and sensitive to the cool autumn air.
“Okay,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest, looking back in the direction of the museum. “Glad that’s settled. Back to business.”
Nicholas raised a brow. “Hardly, but I take your point.”
The afternoon was creeping on, and they needed every hour of the day. She didn’t want to try to imagine where they would have to sleep if they were caught here another day, and she also didn’t want to think about how easy it would have been to find out the statues’ location by plugging it into a search engine. Or even just asking Alice, who had always given the Internet a run for its money in her breadth of knowledge and speed of recall.
The thought of Alice gripped her, pinned her in place with a weight she couldn’t fully shake off. Think, think, think.…She should know this. She must know it—she’d felt something looking past the gates to the solemn museum, a flutter of awareness.…
But when Etta closed her eyes, trying to picture the empty courtyard, what she saw wasn’t the deserted steps or daunting locks. Instead, she was on her back, on the couch in her living room at home, looking up at her mother’s paintings on the wall. The third one down, square in the middle, was of this very same scene. Birds scattering as a younger Alice walked through them.
The answer seemed to drift down from the sky like a lone feather, landing right on top of her head.
No, she thought, no…
It couldn’t be that simple.
The clue was most likely about the Elgin Marbles, as they’d thought. But to find them, to find the passage, she’d need to do what she and her mother always did when they needed something explained: ask Alice.
Alice, who had grown up in London during the war.
Alice, whose father was a curator at the British Museum.
Alice, who had shown them the house she’d grown up in at least three times.
She turned toward Nicholas, trying to steel herself to tell him without going to pieces, but his gaze was fixed across the street, where a man in a trench coat and hat stood leaning against a gleaming mailbox. There was a folded newspaper in his hands, but he didn’t seem to be reading it.