The Old Wheel, page 24
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“It’s nice to see you too.”
He came across the room and took my arm. There was a slight tremor that might have been nerves—he was never comfortable with touching—but was more likely a compound of taking too much speed and not sleeping or eating or being human. “I can help you get back down,” he was saying, trying to turn me toward the window, “but then you must run, Jack.” Some of the English was slipping out again. That was even more distracting than the tie. He reached for the window, and the woodsy heat of him filled my lungs.
I squeezed his hand and, as gently as I could, detached it. When he slid the window up, I pushed it back down.
“Jack—”
“When was the last time you slept? Without a million addies running through your system?”
“You don’t understand. Certain events have been set in motion—”
“You didn’t sleep last night; I already know that. And I don’t think you slept the night before. You must have slept a little, but I bet you were so wired that it was more like a crash and reboot.” I turned his head. “Let me see—”
He knocked my hand away. His breathing quickened. “You aren’t listening to me.”
“I heard you; I don’t care. Dawson drugged me. Paxton used me as bait. Kazen Bates kidnapped me today and pulled out some of my hair, and you know my hair is one of my top five best features. Everywhere is dangerous, H. Big fucking deal. I asked you a question, and I expect you to answer me.”
“You expect me?” Yes, we were definitely getting the full English now. “You expect me?”
“Let me see—”
He knocked my hand away again. His voice was brittle when he said, “Don’t touch me.”
So, I touched him. Poked him, technically. In the chest.
He swiped at my hand, but I’d already pulled back.
“Jack—”
I poked him again.
He was slower than usual, but that’s what happened when you never gave yourself a moment’s rest.
I poked him again, and this time, he made a feral noise and grabbed my arms. He shoved me, and my back connected with the wall. The corner of his mouth was twitching harder. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils like tiny lead dots.
“Enough,” he said with that posh whip-crack of a voice. “If I have to, I will incapacitate you. Those are your options, Jack. Leave, or I will ensure that you remain safe, albeit slightly uncomfortable. For your own good.”
“Interesting,” I said. “When I want to do something for your own good, like make you eat three whole chicken tenders, you have a million excuses and protests and complaints about human rights and privacy and how it’s your body and you know what’s best. But when you—”
He made a choked noise, hauled me away from the wall, and slammed me against it. My head connected with the drywall this time, right where Kazen had torn out some of the hair. It was as much shock as pain, but I cried out anyway.
Holmes’s face transformed. The color bled out of it, and his mouth opened, and his eyes widened. He dropped his hands from my arms, and then he reached out, and then dropped them again. “Jack, I’m so sorry!”
“That hurt, dumbass!”
“I’m very sorry. Jack, I’m so very sorry. I don’t know—I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t mean to do that.”
I glowered at him. I rubbed my head. I rubbed it a lot, but it wasn’t that much fun because he looked so miserable. Finally I said, “Do I have a bald spot?”
“This medicine makes me reactive—”
“It’s not medicine; it’s speed, and you don’t need it, and you definitely need to stop using it the way you have been. Check me for bald spots.”
Holmes’s mouth worked soundlessly several times. Then he inched around me. His fingers parted the hair on the back of my head, and his touch was light. He was trembling harder than before. “There is scabbing in several places, and the hair here is thinner than on the rest of your head, but to a casual glance, it does not look significantly different.”
“So, no bald spot?”
“Not as such.”
I blew out a breath. “Thank God.”
“Jack—”
“No, go away.” When he didn’t move, I looked over my shoulder. “I’m mad at you.”
He gave me his guilty look and fiddled with his cuffs. “I am sorry I laid hands on you—”
“Not about that. Well, yes, about that. But mostly because you disappeared.” I turned to face him. “Where have you been? I needed you. The police think you killed Dawson—you didn’t kill Dawson did you?”
“Of course not. He was already dead by the time I found him.”
“Uh…but you were planning on killing him?”
“I was planning on breaking his knees and elbows.”
I chewed on that. “When the police ask, don’t tell them that, ok?”
“Jack, I apologize that I worried you—”
“Someone tore apart your room.”
He nodded like he’d been expecting that.
“They left you a weird note,” I said. “Where is it?”
That one went home. His mouth quirked, and then he went totally still.
“H, what the hell is going on?”
It must have cost him. He was silent for a long time, but when he finally lifted his eyes, they were the color of starlight. “There is a game afoot, Jack.” The words were delivered simply, evenly. Like facts. “I must make my move.”
For a moment, I had no idea what to say. Then I cuffed him on the side of the head and said, “What game, dummy? What the fuck is going on?”
“I understand you’re angry—”
“You’re goddamn right I’m angry. To repeat: in the last twenty-four hours, I got drugged and almost date-raped by Dawson. Paxton used me like bait. Kazen kidnapped me—”
“What do you mean—” Holmes began, and then his jaw snapped shut, and calculations began in his face.
“—and my best friend, the guy who’s supposed to be helping me with all this, he’s not anywhere. I can’t find him. He doesn’t answer his phone. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Do you know how freaked out I’ve been?”
Absently, Holmes said, “Jack, please, lower your voice.”
“I’ll talk as loud as I want to talk,” which was actually more like shouting. “Everything has been terrible. I’m exhausted. I feel like shit. I got in a huge fight with my dad—” But my throat closed around that because I couldn’t tell him, of all people, about that. My voice was too tight for shouting when I finally managed, “Do you know how scared I’ve been?”
The array of thoughts and plans and scenarios playing out in Holmes’s face died, and then he was just Holmes again, his gaze intent as it settled on me. He reached out like he was about to pet a viper and touched my shoulder. I wiped my face and focused on the enormous bust of Jesus, but he wasn’t any help, so I had to wipe both cheeks this time.
“Jack,” Holmes whispered.
He sounded so out of his depths, so lost, that I laughed, and then I had to pull my shirt up to dry my eyes. He was still petting my shoulder, and he was such a creeper, and I wanted to tell him he was the biggest dork I’d ever met. Instead, I started legit crying, and all I could do was shake and mop at my face with my shirt and try not to fall apart into sobs.
Holmes’s hug was tight and, of course, stiff, but his shoulder felt nice under my chin. He smelled like Holmes, that green heat, and underneath the fancy clothes, his body was the same maze of hard lines that I remembered. The sounds of the party—Christmas music and excited voices and the accumulation of lots of bodies moving in a relatively small space—filtered up to us through the floor. It was snowing harder, the flakes seeming to spring out of nowhere when they passed from the dark to the light of the windows, sudden and spinning and glittering.
“I’m ok,” I said and gave him a nudge, but he didn’t release me. “Get off me, you big dork. I’m ok.”
He released me slowly.
“I’m still mad at you.”
He nodded. Warily. “Will you be less angry if I tell you I disposed of my phone so I couldn’t be tracked?”
“No, H. No, I will not be less angry. Because you could have told me. You could have found a way to tell me.”
The dilemma in his face surprised me; it was rare to see Holmes indecisive about anything, much less torn. Finally, he said, “I couldn’t be sure your phone hadn’t been compromised as well. I’m sorry; it was important that no one know I was no longer carrying my phone. But I wanted to tell you. I did not like…”
The words crumbled into silence. He didn’t like what? Not talking to me? That was bullshit because he never wanted to talk, not even about fun stuff like Dead by Daylight or which Stream Queen was the bitchiest or why he had a crush on Niall, of all the options in One Direction. He didn’t like being away from me? A part of me kindled at the thought, but that wasn’t true either—most nights, after I forced him to hang out, he couldn’t wait to be alone again. He didn’t like not being in control of the situation? Well, yes, that shoe fit.
“H, what’s going on? Paxton said something about a game. You said it too. What game?”
Indecision showed in his face again. “It’s complicated.”
“Bullshit.”
“If you can trust me, for now, I swear I will tell you later.”
I grunted. My eyes had that stinging warmth that came as the last tears dried and began to crust, and I rubbed at the irritation. “Is it about Aston?”
“Aston is simply the battlefield.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means whoever is behind this, they don’t care about Aston.”
“I don’t understand. Paxton was blackmailing him. Then the blackmail disappeared—and my guess is that Dawson stole it—only Dawson got killed. It’d be easy to say that Aston’s family had Dawson eliminated, but the killer released the blackmail, and now Aston’s the lead suspect in the murder investigation. Well, you might be tied with him.”
Holmes huffed a little breath. “It’s insulting, really. If I were to kill someone, I’d at least do it well.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Holmes shot his cuffs and looked anywhere but at me as he mumbled, “It’s the principle of the thing.”
I’d been thinking about this for almost three months; before I could stop myself, I said, “Is this about Watson?”
Holmes’s head came up, and his eyes were flat and unreadable. “What do you mean?”
“The stuff on her computer. The stuff about Zodiac.”
A tension I hadn’t realized was there went out of Holmes’s body, and he shook his head. “No, Jack. Someone has arranged events to keep my attention occupied. The question is who; that’s why we’re here tonight.”
“What do you mean, to keep your attention occupied? What don’t they want you paying attention to? Does it have something to do with someone searching your room? Because we already know Paxton—”
“Paxton is a tool, and, more importantly, he is not to be trusted, even when he is telling the truth. Especially when he is telling the truth.”
That was so bizarre that for a moment, I didn’t know what to say.
“I plan on learning who sent Paxton to Walker,” Holmes said into the silence. “But Paxton may not know why he is here. He may not even know who sent him. And he is, ultimately, always his own agent. That is an important thing to remember about the Adlers. It would be foolish to believe that these events were only about Paxton and Aston.”
“So, what? You think somebody, this mastermind, was behind Dawson’s death too? Why would they kill Dawson?”
“I don’t know what to think, Jack. I have hypotheses. I am testing one hypothesis tonight, which is why you must leave—”
“Holy shit. You called Kazen.”
He was remarkably good at stilling his body, but in that moment, I was better at reading him. The slight curl of one finger against his thigh. The tension at the corner of his mouth.
“H, are you out of your mind?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I didn’t call him.”
I crossed my arms.
The music downstairs switched. Mariah Carey now, the one everybody plays every year. I wondered what marble-bust Jesus thought about it. And in a religious home, too.
Holmes ducked his head and muttered, “I did not call him.” And then, as though it had been ripped out of him: “I forced Aston to do it.”
“Oh my God.”
“This is why I wanted you to leave.”
“H, oh my God. He’s insane. You realize that, right? He’s going to come up here, guns blazing, and try to kill Aston and anybody else who might out him for being queer.”
Holmes let out a dry little laugh, and then he checked my face, and his eyes brightened with atypical amusement.
“What?” I asked.
“Jack, he’s not coming to kill Aston.”
It took me a moment. And then I couldn’t keep the horror out of my voice: “Your genius plan was a booty call?”
“Don’t be crass; obviously the ideal lure for Kazen was a sexual rendezvous—”
The horror turned my whisper shrill. “Don’t call it that!”
“Jack, you’re being very immature about all this. You saw that video on Kazen’s laptop. There’s a strong possibility that Kazen saw whoever met Paxton that night outside Aston’s residence. Thus, Kazen is the next thread to follow.”
I opened my mouth to respond to that, but I had no words. Zero words.
The sound of voices in the hall startled both of us. Holmes grabbed my arm and propelled me toward the closet. I was about to say something about the door being locked, but he had a card in his hand, and he ran it between the jamb and the latch so fast that I could barely track the movement. The door popped open, and Holmes pushed me into a wall of coats. For a moment, the world was wool and hangers, and then Holmes crowded in next to me. I heard him test the handle to make sure the lock hadn’t reset, and then he pulled the door shut. A moment later, the hall door opened, and steps moved into the room.
“You’re being a child about this.” It was a man’s voice, older, with the kind of engrained confidence that came from bossing people around. “I told you we weren’t having this conversation.”
“Why are these lights on?” That was a woman’s voice.
There was the slightest hint of metal on metal as hangers shifted, and then Holmes’s mouth was at my ear. “Bruce and DeeDee Young. Aston’s parents.”
I nodded, but I was having a hard time focusing. Holmes’s breathing tickled my ear, and it was having…an effect. His thigh was between my legs. The closet was packed with clothes, full of the smell of musty fabric and a hint of rubber soles and cedar. We’d been in such a hurry, and the space was so tight, that I was leaning against the wall at an angle, and as the snow on my Stan Smiths melted, I felt like I was slipping. No, scratch that, I was slipping. And that meant more of my weight was coming to rest on, uh, a certain area and, in the process, pressing that area against Holmes.
Holmes shifted. I could feel the definition of his quadriceps, which, let’s be fair, the boy was jacked as hell. But worse, the movement increased the friction and pressure. I let out a little breath, and the sound was distressed, maybe even a little panicked, as blood rushed to my face.
I grabbed Holmes’s wrist, my nails biting into the skin. I shook my head.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything. Then he moved again. Only a fraction of a turn, but there was no chance he didn’t feel a death-defying boner grinding on him, and a part of me wondered if this last movement hadn’t been done exactly for that purpose. My sneakers slipped again, and I dropped a few more inches. His hand slipped behind my back, and his breath on my ear made me fight back a whimper when he said, “I’ve got you.”
It was either fall on my ass and, in the process, announce to the Youngs that we were hitting second base in their closet, or let him help me. So, I gave up and embraced death by sheer humiliation. I let my weight come to rest fully on Holmes’s thigh. His arm flexed behind me, securing me. If anything, it made me harder, and it felt so good to be against him like this that I was breathing too fast. His face was next to mine. He was so warm, and the closet was so small, and sweat was slowly dampening my shirt. If I turned my head, we’d be kissing. I was starting to realize it would take a team of shrinks to unpack how fucked up I was.
The angle of our bodies made it impossible to know if he was having a—um, a reaction—as well. I wanted to know. Part of my brain had accepted back in September that he didn’t feel the same way. But I had felt him against me, that first time we’d slept together on the sofa, and I wanted to believe that meant something—even if he wasn’t ready for it, maybe never would be ready for it. Maybe something had changed in the last couple of months. He hadn’t started screaming and trying to get away from the hard-on that was literally about to kill me, which was how things had gone last time.
His arm tightened against me, and his lips brushed my ear. “Stop thinking about it,” he whispered. “You’re hyperventilating.”
Easy for him to say. His traitorous dick wasn’t currently trying to drill through a semi-new pair of jeans. But I took deep breaths, and I dragged my attention away from our bodies. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed—it had felt like an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute, maybe two. On the other side of the door, Camdyn was yelling.
“—Aston needs to stay and face the consequences of his own actions. How’s he ever going to learn?”
“DeeDee,” Bruce said, “will you talk to your daughter, please?”
“Don’t do that,” Camdyn said. It was like she’d never been shouting at all; her voice was ice, smooth and clear. The change made the hairs on my arms stand up. “I’m not hysterical, and you can’t let Mom run interference for you on this one.”
“Sweetheart,” DeeDee said, “I don’t understand what you’re getting so upset about.”
“You can’t pack him away. You can’t make it all disappear and act like nothing happened.”
