“With the both of us,” he said, and reached out to touch my knee. “I’m fine with it. The green nail brush, huh? My favorite color’s blue.”
It was a very sad attempt at banter, but I beamed at him as though he were both Abbott and Costello. He wasn’t hurt. I was getting better at not hurting him. “That’s point one,” I said, affecting unaffectedness. “Points two through ten have to do with that ridiculous list your father made you as to how to deal with . . . me.”
Watson had the grace to wince. His father had given him a strange little journal into which he had compiled a list of suggestions for how to handle one’s Holmes (as though I were a small-breed dog or similar), drawing not only from Dr. Watson’s own accounts but also from his own efforts with my uncle Leander back when they’d been flatmates. This was absurd on many levels. Leander was very easy to live with. He hardly ever stalked around anymore with a pistol in his bathrobe pocket.
I knew about this journal because my Watson had written about it, and we shared our accounts with each other, warts and all.
This wart was particularly large.
“For instance,” I said, running the curtain through my fingers, “I seem to remember an item along the lines of ‘Do not allow Holmes to cook your dinner unless you have a taste for cold, unseasoned broth.’”
Watson coughed delicately. “Holmes. Have you ever made . . . anything?”
“I have made you at least four cups of tea.”
“In the last two years.”
“I dislike cold, unseasoned broth, and my uncle Leander is quite a . . . foodie”—I despised that word—“and your father has quite the talent for hyperbole. I can’t believe that Leander once made him clear, tasteless soup. I will make you no broth. Verbum sap.”
“Noted,” Watson said. “I’m not proud of that journal, you know. I’m not proud of a lot of things my father has done.”
James Watson had a habit of boosting his son from class to go listen to his police scanner in the Walmart parking lot. He was a bit of a rogue, a bit of a bad influence, a bit of a silly suburban dad. The last I’d heard, he’d been fighting with Jamie’s stepmom, Abigail, over his friendship with Leander. They’d been gallivanting about together like schoolboys, leaving Abigail to take care of her and James’s kids and the minutiae of their lives.
“You’re still not answering his calls,” I ventured.
Watson sighed. “They’ve split up. For good this time, I think. He keeps leaving me messages . . . I think he’s been spending time with my mom and Shelby in London.”
“Interesting,” I said. It made a certain kind of sense. Jamie’s parents had a reasonably good relationship for a divorced couple, and Grace Watson had just gone through the harrowing, absurd experience of being duped into marriage by a Moriarty. I imagined they were both feeling somewhat fragile right now.
“Ten-year-old me would have died and gone to heaven at, like, the suggestion that my parents might get back together. But now . . .” He shrugged a bit too forcefully. “I don’t care.”
I touched his knee, and he put his hand over mine, and said, “You know, these aren’t . . . unreasonable things to ask for. The things you’re asking for.”
“Compared to your parents?” I asked.
“Compared to anyone.”
Generally speaking, I had no real basis by which to judge relationships as reasonable or unreasonable. My family was composed of a number of odd, sad adding machines who lived in a lonely house on the sea. They weren’t precisely role models. And as for Watson—we’d smashed our friendship into bits and rebuilt it from the ground up. It resembled nothing, now, other than itself.
“Good,” I said, for lack of a better response. “Well, then, I also take issue with the idea that I don’t give you compliments. Your father claimed that I would give them to you every ‘two to three years.’”
Watson bit his lip again. He was going to do himself an injury.
I ticked them off on my fingers. “For someone who does not style it, you have very good hair. You are better at French than you think, though your written syntax is appalling. And you have developed an excellent right hook.”
“Thank you,” Watson said gravely.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “That should tide us over for at least the next six months.”
He leaned back in his chair with a rueful expression. “Is there anything else? I know you said that you’d put together, like, twenty-three pages of this stuff, but I was sort of hoping we could walk around the college—”
“I want to date you,” I said in a rush. “I want to, and I have no idea how to do it, even if I am behaving as myself. Whoever that is. And now I’ve picked up this case, and so often in the past we’ve played at being together to extract information that I’m not sure where that fake relationship begins and our real one ends. Or vice versa.” I fidgeted, then forced my hands to relax. “What’s worse is that pretending . . . it makes it easier. It lets me try out things that I might want to do for real, and there aren’t the same sort of stakes. Because the stakes are very high. It’s you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Watson said in a low voice. “They’d have to drag me away from you. They’d have to put a gun to my head, and even then . . .” He made a helpless sort of shrug. “I mean, Holmes, the worst has already happened, and look. We’re here. We’re together.”
I reached out to take his hands, warm and calloused and gentle. “I don’t want to pretend about anything important. But is it okay, if sometimes . . . I pretend to be a girl who would want to go dancing at a disco?”
“Is that pretend, though?” Watson asked. “Because I remember a homecoming dance when—”
“Or,” I hurried on, “if I pretended I wanted to hold hands while walking to, say, play mini golf.”
“Mini golf,” he said, like it was a delicious, awful thing that he would lord over me for months. “Mini golf.”
“That is not the point.”
“You with a little putter, whacking away to get the ball through the tilting windmill—”
“Watson. Focus. Holding hands.”
“Like we are now?”
“Yes,” I said, and he brought them up between us.
“You can pretend whenever you like. But how do I know when you’re pretending, and when it’s real?”
“We’ll need some sort of code word,” I said. “Something we wouldn’t ever say otherwise. Like ‘kumquat.’ Or ‘asymptote.’”
“I can do that.” He regarded me over our clasped hands. “Can I add one term myself?”
“Of course,” I said, though I could feel myself tense.
“Once a week, we have to do something that cannot possibly kill us.” Then he smiled, a bit wickedly. “And once a week, we have to do something that probably will.”
In that moment, I loved him more than anything else.
“And that’s all right?” I asked. “All this is all right?”
Watson considered it. “I . . . I don’t have any agenda this summer. I feel like the last year has wiped me completely clean. I’m so tired of just surviving,” he said. “And in three months everything is going to start, the whole train ride straight into adulthood, and I just . . . I want to lay around on the couch in your flat, and watch dumb television, and write stories, and I want to solve this mystery you’ve got. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have a bloody Moriarty at the other end. So it’s a chance to try out solving a crime without our necks on the line. We can try our hands at being detectives for real.”