The Old Wheel, page 4
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“Ok,” I said.
Aston flipped it over and put his face in his hands.
I moved back to give him some space. “Do you recognize the men?”
“Dawson. In both of them.”
“You’re sure?”
He dropped his hands so they hung between his knees. His eyes were red again. “It’s not like I keep a stable of guys to fuck me on demand.”
“How many partners have you had in the last year?”
He wasn’t a great liar, but he wasn’t terrible either. He paused a little too long, that’s all. “One: Daw.”
“You want to try that again?”
“Is something wrong with your fucking hearing?”
“Ok.”
“And you’ve got no idea why Dawson might be suddenly hitting you up for money?”
Aston shrugged. “He didn’t say.”
“Maybe ask him next time. It’d be nice if I could wrap this up fast and earn that bonus.”
Lip curling, Aston didn’t say anything to that; he didn’t have to.
I moved over to the closet. I took the clothes out, which was a monumental effort, and then I removed the hang rod and checked it for anything suspicious—a tiny spy cam would have been awesome, but I found nothing. I ran my hands over the walls, but they were painted cinderblock. There were no secret doors, no blocks that could be removed, no discreet holes.
“What are you doing?” Aston finally asked.
“Do you leave the closet door open?”
“I don’t know.”
I tried not to sigh. Then I thought of my room, and I wondered if maybe this was what Holmes felt every time he set foot in my room.
“It’s open sometimes,” Aston said. “I don’t know.”
“Someone took those pictures of you from inside this room. It would have been nice if they’d had a more permanent setup, but my guess is that they managed to hide the camera in here at some point, and then they removed it later. Put those back.”
Aston looked at the heap of clothes. “You took them out.”
I put my hands on my hips.
“You should have to put them back,” Aston mumbled, but he gathered an armful and lugged the clothes toward the closet.
“Say something about how you’re paying me,” I said, “and see how that goes.”
He stared daggers at me as he gathered up more clothes.
While Aston put the closet back in order, I climbed onto his bed. He didn’t have a headboard, which would have been a nice place for a spy cam. The walls looked nice and solid—no obvious places where a camera could have been hidden. I got down, the mattress creaking, and checked his desk. He had a laptop sitting out, and when I opened it, a piece of blue painter’s tape covered the built-in webcam.
“Did you do this after you got the blackmail letter?”
Aston gave me a scornful arch of his eyebrows. “The day I got the laptop.”
“So nobody could watch you jacking it to your favorite channel of Boyfriend TV. Nice.”
“You’re gay. Or bi. Or whatever. I’ve seen you on apps. Why are you being so mean about this?”
“Because I don’t like you,” I said. “And it’s fun.”
But it actually hadn’t felt all that fun to begin with, and it was less fun after being called out, and even less fun after that comment about the apps. I should have thought about that before. Not that who or what I liked was a secret, but I hadn’t exactly been open about it either, and things were different now; I was a student here. I’d turned off the apps when Ariana and I had gotten official, but now I was starting to think I needed to have some quiet, careful conversations with a few of the kids I’d, uh, met up with back in the bad old days.
I moved over to the television because it never hurt to be thorough. I looked it over, and then I inspected the PS5. I had no idea what I was looking for. Maybe one of these days, I’d get lucky.
“I’m careful, you know.” When I looked over, Aston shifted his weight. His jaw was set like he hadn’t even meant to say that, but more words poured out. “I have to be careful. So fucking careful. About what I say. About my hair. My clothes. My—my voice. Can’t sound too faggy in front of Grandfather. It’s just—how was I supposed to know Olin was a pervert and had cameras all over campus? And now, in my own room? Sometimes it feels like—” He closed a hand around his neck. Not enough air, I thought. The walls closing in. Like someone’s choking you.
I considered saying, You can’t be too careful if you’re fucking in public, whether you know there are cameras or not, but it felt like a low blow. Maybe it was karma, for Aston to get blackmailed twice in such a short amount of time. But he wasn’t the only one who suffered the occasional lapse in judgment. I’d done my fair share of stupid stuff; it came from being sixteen and horny every waking minute and finding a minute alone with a cute guy, even if it was in his car, in the middle of the afternoon, parked by the dumpster behind a Deseret Book. Someone from the Mormon bookstore must had trashed a whole shipment of poster-sized religious art prints that day. If I’d ever wondered if I was going to hell, getting a fiver while a million Jesuses stared at me seemed like a clear enough answer.
Instead, I said, “When Olin did this, did he use a note?”
Aston arched his eyebrows again. “No. He came in person. Plugged the flash drive right into that TV and showed me.”
“Did you tell your family?”
“Christ, no. I wouldn’t be here.”
Gee, I thought. “How’d you pay him?”
“He wanted two hundred bucks a month.”
I waited.
An alarm clock started going off in the room next to us. Ten seconds. Twenty.
Aston shouted toward the wall, “Kyle, get up!”
“How’d you pay him?” I asked.
“It was two hundred bucks,” he said as though that were the answer.
I let that sit for a minute. Then I said, “And you haven’t told your family about this?”
He stared at me, eyes wide at, I guessed, my stupidity. After an insultingly long time he said, “No.”
“Let’s keep it that way for now.”
When I turned toward the door, Aston asked, “What are you going to do now?” His voice had risen, all the nerves exposed, the fear out in the open again. “What are you going to tell Sup—Holmes?”
“I told you,” I said, glancing over my shoulder as I opened the door. “We’re not telling anybody about this. That includes Holmes.”
There’s a Wikipedia page on the psychic staring effect, which isn’t psychic at all it turns out, and the page uses the word tingling a disturbing number of times. But there’s a section about gaze detection, and it turns out there might be something to that phenomenon of being able to tell when someone’s staring at you—that a different part of our brain lights up when we’re being stared at directly, and that you can pick up this information in your peripheral vision, subconsciously, without even being aware of it.
A frisson ran down my spine.
Holloway Holmes stood in the hallway staring at me, the cold perfection of his face a sealed book.
Chapter 5
Jonny Evans
“H—” I began. I was still trying to wrap my head around him being there, in the hallway outside Aston’s room, when he should have been in class. And, at the same time, a part of me wasn’t surprised at all. That part of me simply looked at him and thought, Of course. “What are you—”
He looked past me to Aston, then back to me. His eyes were gray cinders. “You shouldn’t skip class; you’ve got a C in Language Arts.”
“Did you follow me?”
“What aren’t you going to tell me?”
“Hey, I asked you a question.”
He studied me for a moment. Then he stepped forward, and I fell back. Holmes moved into the room, and his eyes scanned everything: me, Aston, the bed, the papers Aston had laid there. When his eyes came back to Aston, he said, “Leave us.”
He was sounding distinctly posher. Bad sign.
“It’s my room—” Aston began. The words withered, and he scurried out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him.
Then we were alone. Holmes moved past me to stare at the blackmail letter. He used a handkerchief to turn the photos over, considered each one, and then laid them face down again.
“If you were following me,” I said, “that’s not cool.”
He turned around. It wasn’t fast or surprising or sudden, but I took a step back. I caught myself doing it, and I planted my feet and shoved my hands in my pockets and glared back at him.
Somewhere down the hall, a flute trilled off key. This is how I’m going to die, I thought. Murdered by a jilted Holmes while some boner practices the flute.
“I told you I was going to be late to class,” I said.
Holmes’s pulse beat in his neck.
“Did you ever think maybe I was doing something private? Maybe I didn’t want you to know what I was doing?”
He didn’t do anything; he stood ramrod straight, hands at his sides, and stared at me.
“I have a right to some privacy sometimes,” I said. “Did you think about that? Did you think about the fact that even though we’re friends—”
“Are we?”
For a moment, the shock of it was so great that there wasn’t anything else. Then the hurt rolled in. “Uh, yeah. Of course.”
He took a step, and I completely forgot my resolution to stay put. I backed up, and he kept coming, and I kept backing up until my ass hit the windowsill, and I sat without meaning to. That was even worse, because now Holmes loomed over me. He was so skinny, but it was hard to remember that when I had to crane my neck to look up at him.
“H,” I said in a quieter voice, “don’t be mad.”
“I’m not angry.”
Definitely posher. He was bidialectical, and most of the time—probably as camouflage—he sounded American. But with each word he spoke, he slipped deeper into that cultured Englishness, and it was scary and he didn’t sound like my Holmes and it was, if I’m being fully honest, hot as hell. This was more of the accent than I’d ever heard at one time together. And I’m sixteen—see above regarding hormones and general stupidity.
“Everything happened fast,” I said. “I wasn’t—”
He took another step, and I leaned back until I was pressed against the window. The cold of the glass seeped through my clothes. He noticed, of course—he noticed everything. It made him stop, and an expression I couldn’t read crossed his face.
“Are you frightened, Jack?” The corner of his mouth twitched. His father had tried to beat that tell out of him, tried to train him not to bite his lip. Watching him as he struggled with the nervous habit, watching him as he tried to do what he’d been trained to do, made me want to track Blackfriar down and put him headfirst into a mulcher. “Are you scared of me?”
Then it clicked. This was Holmes, and Holmes, for all of being a genius and the best, most amazing person I knew, was—well, the polite word was insecure. Not that he didn’t have good reason, considering the fuckwads he’d gotten tangled up with in the past.
I stood. It was hard because he’d moved so far into my space that we were almost touching, close enough that someone seeing us through the window might think this was the beginning of an embrace. A kiss. Red warning lights flashed in my head, and I shut that line of thinking down. We were the same height. I could smell the woodsy heat of his body spray or cologne or whatever it was. His hands closed into fists at his sides.
Leaning in, I brought my mouth to his ear and whispered, “Why would I be scared of a skinny-assed white boy like you? Mess with me, and I’m going to give you a wedgie that’ll rip your asshole like tissue paper.”
I pulled my head back.
Holmes blinked.
“And then I’ll give you noogies until you’re begging me to stop,” I informed him at a more normal volume. “And then, if you’re still mad at me, I’ll tickle you.”
He gave up and bit his lip—not too hard, not the full distress that I’d seen before. His teeth made white crescents. He was trying so hard, the struggle playing itself out in his face until he burst out, “A wedgie couldn’t do that to a human being. The mechanics are impossible.”
“It happened to Jonny Evans in eighth grade. He was in surgery for, like, a week. They had to make him a new butthole halfway up his crack.”
“You’re lying.” But doubt had crept into his voice.
I shrugged.
“This is a joke.”
“Fuck around, boyo, and find out.”
I examined his face. Then I gave him a smile. He was doing a Holmes thing, not looking me in the eye, so I moved my head until he was. This was something we’d been working on.
“I lied,” Holmes said, but he still wasn’t looking me in the eye. “I am angry with you.”
“I guessed.”
“I don’t want to do this right now.”
“It’s good practice.”
“Not when I’m angry.”
“Especially when you’re angry.”
He made a frustrated noise. Then he smiled. The expression was a little stiff; he wasn’t used to doing it, and it was another of those things that he was self-conscious about. I’d read about people who get up at two or three in the morning—on vacation, no less, when they’re in Hawaii—and then they drive hours and hours, and all of it is to see the sunrise from this one specific spot, and I thought, Come to Utah if you want something worth your time.
“You’re such a dork,” I told him. “B-plus.”
As usual, his face relaxed, and the smile went from gorgeous to perfect. Then it shuttered into a scowl. “You always give me a B-plus.”
“Please don’t be mad at me.”
He hesitated. “Was I really being weird, coming to find you?”
“For you and me, it’s not weird. I want you to come find me. Especially if it’s some bad guy and he has me tied up with ropes on a train track or something. Although, if it’s a hot guy, and he’s got me tied up with ropes in a fun way, don’t you fucking dare get involved.”
Jokes like that used to send Holmes into a rage; now he scowled harder.
“I was being defensive,” I said. “I was surprised, and I was embarrassed, and then I got a little angry. That’s why I said that stuff. And, for the record, that’s why I kept backing away. I was—am—a tiny bit ashamed, so if you could try looking at me with, like, sixty percent less judgment, I’d appreciate it.”
Because he was Holmes, he probably calculated the sixty percent, but his face softened.
“If it’s someone you don’t know well, though,” I said, “you should be careful. They might take it the wrong way.”
He nodded. Another social detail processed and encoded. We were tutoring each other, I guess, although one of us (me) was definitely getting more out of the bargain.
His voice took on an unfamiliar edge when he said, “Is this what friends do, Jack? Keep secrets like this?”
Down the hall, the off-key flautist struck again. Then someone—a boy with an impressively deep voice—bellowed, “Touch that flute one more fucking time, and I’m going to shove it so far down your throat, you’ll be farting scales.”
In spite of myself, I grinned, but Holmes didn’t; he was still watching me, his face intent, the question hanging between us like the shimmer of a gong. I smoothed out my expression and shook my head. “Nope. It’s not what friends do.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because I’m a piece of shit.” Holmes frowned and opened his mouth, but I said, “Because I need money and I’m embarrassed. And because I’m embarrassed I’d help Aston for money—it feels, well, shitty. He hurt you; I should be trying to knock his block off, not helping him. And because I didn’t want you to think I was using you for, you know, your big, juicy brain. But mostly it’s the embarrassment thing.” My neck was hot. My face prickled. “I’m having round two of it right now, by the way.”
“Jack, you don’t need to feel embarrassed about your financial situation.”
“Tell me that the next time Ariana wants to go out and I can’t pay for Del Taco.”
“Ariana does not care how much money you have.” Holmes wrinkled his brow. “Does she?”
“No, she doesn’t. But I do. We’re getting off topic. I was a piece of shit. I shouldn’t have lied to you, and I shouldn’t have gotten angry when you found me. I’m sorry, H.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“Oh yeah? What are you sorry for?”
“I don’t know; you told me that’s what people say in fights.”
I grinned. “Yep, that was perfect.”
“You know I’ll help you, Jack. With anything.” You could only hear the question if you knew him. “That’s what friends do.”
I nodded. “We still need to figure out that butt-bump secret handshake you promised me.”
“I never promised—” He caught himself, folded his arms across his chest, and glared at me. “Tell me what’s going on.”
As best I could, I laid out what Aston had told me. Holmes examined the papers again. He didn’t ask any questions, so when I finished, I said, “To sum up: I know it’s fucked up; I’ll tell him I changed my mind—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If anything, you should ask for more money.” He moved to inspect the closet. “You’re sure there aren’t any cameras?”
“Not unless they’re invisible. Um, H, you’re sure you’re ok with this? I mean, he tried to kill you, and this is exactly the kind of thing you don’t like, people getting close to you for what you’re good at.”
