The Old Wheel, page 14
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
For a while, Holmes kept it up. Then, by degrees, the punches got slower, the kicks got sloppier, the elbows came farther and fewer between. His breathing became ragged. It hissed through his teeth, the sound high and whistling. And then he threw a final punch, the blow arcing and wild and jelly-loose, and it didn’t come anywhere near the bag. He bent over, hands on his knees, his whole body shaking. He was still taking those shrill breaths through his teeth. Like if he opened his mouth, he might scream.
By then, my legs had decided to work again. I peeled myself up from the vinyl mats and got over to him. He was still shaking, still hinged at the waist. I carded his sweat-dark hair, and I don’t know if he couldn’t stand up anymore or if he wanted it, but he leaned into me, head and shoulder making a fork against my thigh. I ran my hand down his back, the bump of vertebrae like stones on a fairy path.
“Want to talk about it now?”
He shook his head against my leg.
I rubbed his shoulder. I tickled the back of his neck, where sweat made my fingers move with stuttering slickness over bare skin. His breathing slowed, changed. Goose bumps climbed his neck to the neatly trimmed hair. I felt it too, like a static charge building in my balls.
With a suddenness that startled me, Holmes stood upright and herky-jerked toward the door.
“H—”
“I need to be alone,” he said raggedly. “I—I need to shower, and I would like to be alone.”
“Are you ok?” Which, yes, I undermined slightly by adjusting the semi in my shorts.
“I need to be alone!” he called back.
I rubbed my eyes. I walked in an unsteady circle and thought about the BYU basketball game. I needed to call medical science and report this, because apparently you could have your inner ear discombobulated and get skewered by your own ribs and still violently need to jerk off.
But after a few minutes, I had my head on straight (so to speak). I put away the heavy bag, my arms trembling in the aftermath of the workout, and I stripped out of my gear. I carried my stuff and Holmes’s to the locker room. The pieces were identical; Holmes had given me the set with the offensively blatant lie that he’d outgrown it, which was interesting since it fit me perfectly and we were the same size. But since I couldn’t afford any of my own, I didn’t have any other options. I cleaned our gear, and my only company was the sound of the water running in the showers—a steady, hissing spray uninterrupted by splashing or the echoes of movement. If he was showering, he was doing it Holmes-bot style. He might have been crying, and he needed the water to cover the sound. He might have been doing something else, and I chubbed up a little at that thought, but I dismissed it. My guess was that he was sitting there, the water washing over him, motionless and shut away from the world as he locked up all the parts that had threatened to come unchained. How did you tell someone that it was ok to let the feral parts out sometimes? Look at me; maybe that would work. Look at me, I’m basically a hundred percent feral emotions and unmitigated horniness.
I won’t lie; I was tempted. It would have been easy to walk past the showers. They were open, and I could have turned my head, looked. He’d be there, the water sluicing over the arrows of his shoulders, hugging the vee of hips, rounding the curve of that jack-in-the-box ass. The little patch of blond hair on his chest would be dark. The hair under his arms would be darker. And lower? The little treasure trail? I’d thought of his vertebrae as a fairy path, but now I was thinking about each dark, wet hair below his navel.
It took me a couple of minutes. But I was determined to be, if not a good person, then at least a semi-decent one. I carried our gear back to our lockers. His was still open, which wasn’t like him, but then, he’d been in a hurry, maybe even in a panic. His black leather notebook lay at the bottom of the locker, and I wasn’t trying to snoop, but it was hard to miss the piece of paper that had fallen out.
When I saw it, I stopped, and I tried out a few different explanations. Then I kept staring.
It was a sticky note, the kind people keep at their desks to jot something down. And I recognized this particular sticky note because I was the one who had drawn it—a happy janitor blowing a kiss. Nothing but a few lines in ballpoint. Nothing at all, really.
But here it was.
He’d forgotten it was in his notebook.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and I stored our gear.
That was all; he’d forgotten it was in his notebook. He’d picked it up back in September, when he still thought I might be involved in Sarah Watson’s death, and then he’d forgotten about it.
Never mind that he was a Holmes. Never mind that he never forgot anything, never did anything without a lacework chain of reasons and logic and evidence.
I took a few deep breaths and told myself: he forgot. That’s all.
The sound of the water had changed, splashing mixed in with the steady hiss of the spray. He’d finish quickly; Holmes liked to be clean, and that meant sometimes after we sparred, he wanted to shower immediately. I’d gotten used to his maximum-efficiency showers, even though I’d tried to explain how nice it was to stand under the water and zone out (and yes, monkey around with your dangly bits, but that would have made his head explode), Holmes had never taken to the idea. He’d be done in a few minutes, and he wouldn’t be happy to find me lingering here. He’d probably say I was lurking.
I let myself out into the hall, and the door fell shut behind me, closing off the sound of the shower. I walked and stretched and got a drink, and I was telling myself—again, firmly—that he’d simply forgotten about the sticky note when the voices reached me.
Girls’ voices. More than one. And then peals of laughter.
For a moment, I froze. Then I turned for the locker room.
I was too late. They came around the corner before I could reach the door, five of them. And then I suppressed an internal groan.
The Bloopies.
The Boy Band’s equivalent weren’t as actively cruel as their counterparts, but they could be life-endingly cataclysmic in their own way. I’d sold to each of them, some more frequently than others, so I knew them, and they knew me, and there was no way to get out of their path now.
They all wore athleisure gear—tech-fabric tops and expensive yoga pants. Skye was tall and willowy, and she wanted fashion magazines. Obscure ones, which I had to go to Salt Lake to get. D’Layne had long, dark hair with bangs and a French braid, and she also had a serious booty. She’d only bought from me once: morning-after pills. Remmi had feathery blond hair and, even in the gym, she wore concealer to cover a rash of acne. She collected vinyl, and I’d spent an ungodly number of Saturday afternoons digging through old boxes to find something good for her. Kaylee was that painful kind of white that made her look half dead, and while she was pretty now, in twenty years she’d be pinched, the skin on her face too tight. Like D’Layne, she’d only bought from me once, and she’d wanted brownies with pot in them, even though I’d offered to get her edibles. Marielle was last, olive skin like mine, hair held back with a velvet bow, small and with a painted-on smile like a doll. A chess set, chess books, even, once, a chess video. Hey, there’s something for everybody.
“Hi, Jack,” D’Layne said.
The other four cooed echoes, and the sound of high-priced sneakers squeaked along the linoleum toward me.
“Hi, ladies. What are you doing here?”
“You mean because it’s after hours?” Remmi asked.
“It’s none of your business,” Kaylee said.
“You’re here too,” D’Layne said over them with a smooth smile. “What are you doing here?”
I gave her my best smile—assuming Holmes hadn’t knocked out any of my teeth without my noticing. “Trouble. Mischief. General bad-boyishness.”
Remmi and Kaylee rolled their eyes. Skye laughed. Marielle gave me that painted-on doll smile. And D’Layne’s own smile became a little more suggestive.
“Trouble,” was all she said.
And then they reached me, and I stepped aside. They passed me, all five of them giving me looks that ran the gamut from frozen fish to cat scratch, and when they’d gone a few yards, they broke out into a flurry of whispers. The laughs came next—they cracked themselves up.
“Bye, Jack,” D’Layne called without looking back.
“See you at Wintersmash,” Remmi said, just to be a bitch.
They knew I hadn’t been invited; they were in charge of the invites. But saying it cracked them all up again, and they were still laughing when they got to the end of the hall and turned the corner. I started moving toward the locker room again, but I stopped when one of the Bloopies backtracked. In the shadows, I didn’t recognize D’Layne until she was halfway to me.
“Sorry about them,” she said with the same suggestive smile she’d given me before. “They’re all PMSing hard.”
I shrugged. “What are you doing here? For real?”
“The boys wanted to show off. Have you met the new guy?”
The boys could only mean the Boy Band, and I had an idea who the new guy was. “Paxton?”
“He’s your competition, Jack. You need to pay attention. Anyway, it was boring, so we left.” She smiled. “And now I’m talking to you.”
“What do you mean they were showing off?”
“You could come to Wintersmash, you know.” D’Layne knew what she was doing—the way she stood, for one thing—and she hadn’t missed me checking out her butt earlier. “Everyone likes you. It’d be fun.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So, you’ll come?”
“I’m washing my hair.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to have an invitation. Just show up.”
“And give Axle and Riker an excuse to kick my ass? No thanks.”
“You’re tough, though.” She put her finger on my arm and traced my biceps. “You could handle them.”
“No invite,” I said, “no Wintersmash.”
“What if I promised you that they’d let you in? For real.”
I wasn’t as smart as Holmes, but I was smart enough to know that asking, What do you want? probably wasn’t a good idea. So, instead, with my own brand of genius, I said, “Yeah?”
“You have to make sure they’re interested. We’re all bored. Because we’re all so boring.”
“And I’m interesting?”
Her laugh was bright and amused. “Oh God, no. Not really. You’re cute, Jack, but no. But you know somebody interesting.”
Her smile flashed again, and without waiting for an answer, she turned and left.
Well, I thought, that one went straight to the ’nads.
The door to the locker room opened, and a damp-haired Holmes emerged in his coat and oxford and chinos. He glanced in the direction of the voices, which were still fading, and frowned.
“The Bloopies,” I said. “Ready?”
Holmes nodded, and we cut through the athletic center, taking a different route than the girls. In the spaced-out glow of the emergency lights, Holmes’s face was pale, and the circles under his eyes deeper. The sound of our steps was strangely out of sync, like there was a third person with us. Huh, I thought. And who the fuck could that be?
“My father insists I come to the annual Holmes family holiday party,” Holmes said.
We walked a few more feet. “Is that bad?”
“I am welcomed back with open arms, it seems. All is forgiven. Or, at least, forgotten.”
We went on for a while. In the atrium, the Christmas tree seemed much larger with its lights off—a cancer that had grown to fill the opening.
Finally, I said, “Do you want to go to your family party?”
“It’s a tradition.”
“Yeah, but do you want to go?”
“Everyone important will be there. People from both coasts, anyone significant in Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada.”
“H.”
We passed through the vestibule, and the deeper darkness there dropped over us like a cloak, and when we stepped out into the night, his face was as cold and unmarked as fresh snow.
“When,” he asked, “has it ever mattered what I wanted?”
Chapter 13
Surprise
We could hear the shouting in Aston’s room from the stairwell.
It was Friday afternoon, and Baker House had hit its typical lull. I’d spent the morning in class, pretending to pay attention while groveling via text. Ariana still hadn’t forgiven me, but at least she was talking to me. Holmes had barely been able to stay in his seat; Aston wasn’t in class, and Holmes couldn’t wait to track him down. We needed to talk to Aston about, among other things, a man named Kazen Bates—who was an attempted murderer and possibly Aston’s former booty call.
I shot a quick glance at Holmes as we hurried down the hall.
“Maybe we’ll be too late,” Holmes said, brows drawn together. “Maybe someone will have murdered him.”
He’d been like this since I got to his room: an aspen-haired thundercloud. His answer, when I pestered him, was that he was fine. When I pestered him some more, he finally admitted that he had tried again to locate Paxton, with no success. Oh, and that he hadn’t slept last night. Oh, and that he hadn’t eaten. Oh, and that he was fine, and that I should stop asking. But he hadn’t even made me wait while he fixed the length of his shoelaces, so I had my doubts about the last part.
“I like grumpy H,” I said. “In case you’re interested.”
“I am not.”
“I bet grumpy H would love to feed crusts of bread to the ducks and shout at children to watch where they’re going and stay off his lawn.”
“That scenario is inconsistent—” But he caught himself.
I grinned at him as I hammered on Aston’s door.
The shouting cut off, and the silence that followed was prickly and dense.
“Open this door right now,” Holmes said. “Or I will open it for you.”
“Engage Daddy protocols,” I whispered.
Fire flared in Holmes’s face.
It was fun until he shattered my ankle.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!” I hopped and swore. “What the hell, H? Are those things steel toed?”
“That’s an excellent idea.”
“It wasn’t a suggestion!”
The door swung open an inch. Aston stared out at us. His hair was mussed, and not in its usual, artful way, and his eyes were bloodshot, the tip of his nose glistening. “I’m busy—”
Holmes poked him in the throat.
Aston fell back, gagging, and I gave Holmes a look.
Elbowing open the door, Holmes lifted his chin. “I’ve decided I’m not fine.”
“No shit.”
“Do you have a comment about that?”
“Hold on. I’m considering if I want to spend the rest of my life walking on two canes.” His eyebrows knitted together again, and I smirked. “Nope, no comments.”
Holmes pushed his way into the room, and I thought I heard him mutter, “Idiot.”
Aston’s room was pretty much the same—the high-end electronics, the red U of U flag, a wisp of Axe body spray hanging in the air—unless you counted the suitcases that lay open and empty on the floor. Aston leaned against his bed, both hands around his throat, still gagging and looking like he was trying not to puke.
“Don’t be a baby,” Holmes said. “You’re fine.”
“What did you do to him?” The question came from a woman. She looked like she’d just come from the office—caramel-brown hair fell in long, feathered layers, and she wore a white button-up and a skirt with a geometric print. The blazer on the back of the chair probably belonged to her; it looked slightly oversized, and doubtless it would achieve that relaxed-in-a-good-way look that white ladies had when they wore blazers in Nordstrom ads. She was checking her hair in the mirror on the back of the closet door, and the only sign she was hella pissed off was the tension around her mouth. “That’s assault.”
“Who are you?” Holmes asked.
“Hey,” Aston croaked. “I told you—”
“You lied to us,” Holmes said. “I suggest you think carefully about the next words that come out of your mouth.”
Aston looked like he might have poked himself in the throat again: his eyes bugged out, and he snapped his teeth together, and he slid a little farther down the bed like he might end up on the floor.
“Tell them to leave.” She took out a phone. “Or should I call campus security?”
They shared eyes and chin, but if she was his mom, she’d kept herself in great shape. Stepmom, maybe? Even that seemed like a stretch, and anyway, Aston had never mentioned anything like that.
“Who are you?” Holmes said. “I won’t ask again.”
“I’m calling the headmaster,” she said. “This is ridiculous; we paid for a private room.”
“No,” I said at the same time as Aston.
He shot me a weirdly grateful look, and, voice still a little raspy, he said, “No, Cam, don’t. It’s—it’s complicated. Guys, this is my sister, Camdyn.”
She studied us again, phone loose in one hand, her finger poised to make the call.
“He’s Holloway Holmes. And he’s, uh, Jack. They’re helping me. You know. With…this.”
“You’ve probably heard of me,” I said.
But the woman’s eyes were trained on Holmes. She pocketed the phone and rounded on Aston. “How stupid are you?”
“I—”
“Because I knew you were stupid. I knew you had a gift for making the worst choices over and over again. You’re practically a savant when it comes to that. But this is a whole new level, Aston. Holloway Holmes and Jack? Do you hear how that sounds?”
“Hey,” I said, “first of all—”
“Pack your bags,” Camdyn said. “Now. The argument is over; the conversation is finished. This final proof of your total, abject idiocy means we’re done talking about it.”
