The Last of August

“You’re asking me for everything—”

“‘Everything’ doesn’t have to mean this,” she said, her voice breaking, and when I reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “‘Everything’ is a minefield, Jamie. I don’t know when I’m going to make a misstep. Maybe it’ll come two years from now, and what then? If you’ve already shackled yourself to me, will you resent me if I stop wanting to be touched? If one day, I wake up and it’s there, my own private hell is back and everywhere around me, and I won’t let you ever kiss me again? You wouldn’t be able to leave me, at that point. You’re an honorable man. But I know it. No one could sustain that. Bit by bit, you’d just—you’d go.” She laughed. “God, I just want to burn it all down now, so I can know the worst thing that could happen. So I can control it.”

I stared at her. “You’d what? Tell me to leave?”

“Or I could sleep with you.” The look in her eyes was cold. “That would have the same ultimate effect. Making you leave. Ruining it all.”

She was pushing me away. She had veered too close, and now she was overcorrecting, and she was overcorrecting with knives. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t sit there another second and listen to her say these things, and horrifyingly, I was still turned on. I needed her as far from me as possible. “Get out.”

“This is my room. You’re in my bed. Where do you want me to go?”

“Anywhere else. I can’t—get out, Charlotte.”

An awful moment passed, then another, and when she climbed down the ladder, she walked straight out the door.

All the time we’d been talking, my phone had been buzzing with texts. They were from my father, apparently; it was six a.m. in the States. I seized on it now as a distraction. Anything to keep my mind occupied.

Why are you asking me again? I’ve told you already why I won’t send them.

Dad, I wrote. I don’t see any other way. Milo’s in Thailand. Holmes just ran out on me. I can’t make bricks without clay.

No response.

Unless you can come out here and look for him, I don’t know how else we’re going to get Leander back.

I’ll send them.

I stared at his text for a long minute. Are you sure?

Yes. You should know that you’ll be staying at my house for every school break until you’re fifty.

Noted, I said, channeling Holmes without thinking much about it. When I realized I had, I turned the ringer off and stuffed my phone in my pocket. I lay back down, and forced myself to try to get some sleep. Forced myself to stop listening for her. She’d come back in, or she wouldn’t, and either way, I couldn’t face the world yet. What would I do? Go console August Moriarty for threatening someone who might have kidnapped Leander?

I finally accomplished it, sleep, though it was the middle of the day. My dreams galloped away from me. They were soft and threatening all at once, incomprehensible in their noise. When I woke, I felt around for my phone. It was dinnertime. The day had slipped away. I needed to wash my face. Get my head on straight.

I ran into August in the corridor, sending a series of rapid-fire texts of his own. He looked exhausted. “Rough day?” he asked.

“I could ask you the same thing. Where’s Holmes?”

He waved the question off. “I saw her a few hours ago. She looked like she was off to draw blood. What did she learn while I was out? She wouldn’t say.”

I made a noncommittal noise.

“Anyway, I had some information for her,” he said. “A friend of mine came through with an address. There’s a party spot some of the art dealers go to. Turns into a semi-respectable kind of gallery during the day. It’s Monday, so it very well might be dead, but I thought it might be worth a look. It’s a place my brother Hadrian might pop up. Lots of artists. Lots of coke. That sort of thing.”

I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “You told Holmes that.”

“Yeah,” he said, still looking at his phone. “I thought we’d maybe check it out tonight.”

“Where is she now?”

August shrugged. “Getting dinner?”

“Back up. You just effectively told a clearly upset Charlotte Holmes where to find coke in a strange city.”

August gave me a hard look. “Coddling her is a terrible idea, you know. Charlotte always knows how to find coke. She’s a recovering drug addict. How do you think that works? I trust her to know her limits. You can’t really do much else.”

“You can’t.” I got up in his face. “You knew her for how many months, when she was fourteen? What kind of limits do you think she has?”

“My brother,” he growled, “is an addict, so yes, I do know something about it, and unless you just completely shattered her world in half, I can’t imagine this being a situation that . . .” He trailed off. All at once, the blood went out of his face. “Oh my God, Jamie. What have you done?”

nine

ALL I COULD THINK IN THE BACK OF THE TAXI WAS, THERE needs to be a German compound word for feeling both guilty and enraged. Holmes had said just hours ago that I was always willing to take on the responsibility for her mistakes. Here I was, proving her right. What rankled me the most was that August had immediately asked what I had done, as though I’d been callous enough to reach in with my two hands and break her heart. She’d done that herself. Hadn’t she? She’d said I’d leave her if she was hurting. She said I’d sleep with her and run. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">