“For real,” I echoed. There was something to that idea: the last few years had felt like fiction. “I agree to your terms. I’d like to give these terms seven to ten days, then renegotiate if needed.”
“Or call the whole thing off?” He said it lightly, a cord of uneasiness just below.
I tried my best not to hurt Watson. I also tried my best not to hurt myself. “Yes,” I said. “Should we shake on it?”
Below us, a pair of taxis went by like racehorses loosed from their gates. A tangle of pedestrians were peering into the windows of the souvenir shop, their umbrellas up against the light rain. I knew they were tourists for that; the rest of the city threw up their hoods, or a newspaper, or simply squinted their eyes and pushed on forward as the clouds gathered and the wind picked up. And above it all were the towers and turrets of the university, rain-washed, sharp-edged against the sky, some commingled promise of what was past and what was to come.
It would start, it would start soon, and if Watson was hurt, he was also happy, and that was the way it always went, with us. “Shake on it?” he asked, disentangling our hands. “I sort of think we already have.”
Three
PRECOLLEGE PROGRAM ORIENTATION WAS SCHEDULED for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime.
My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy.
I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend.
2b. Loudly.
2c. He did this as often as he could.
2d. To wit: “A latte for my niece and her young man”; “Charlotte, wasn’t that your Jamie’s favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner’s later work—”; “Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren’t barbarians.” And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child.
By the time orientation rolled around, I was, in fact, feeling quite barbaric. Watson, true to form, was too delighted by the stack of paperbacks he’d bought and the pigeons on the corner and the raspberry cake he’d had with his tea to register any of the above as obnoxious.
It wasn’t that I was upset by the thought of Watson being my boyfriend. It was something else that bothered me. Whatever Watson and I were to each other was our business, no matter how the world leaned in and breathed against the glass, and Leander, my excellent all-knowing uncle-slash-guardian, should have known that. And not found it half as funny as he apparently did.
Even if his intentions were good (Watson was, emphatically, not “easy”; he was, however, someone who “made me happy”), I was still mad. This was a complex idea, but I was fairly certain I could convey it to Leander through a very extravagant sulk, and so I did my best.
I didn’t, of course, count on the collateral damage.
“You’re unhappy,” Watson said in the kitchen, that second evening after supper. He was pouring steaming water into a mug, avoiding my eyes. “Have I violated the terms? Or . . . if you haven’t had enough time to yourself, or something, just tell me. I’m not supposed to move into the dorms until tomorrow, but they might be able to let me in tonight—”
“Why would you do that? Don’t do that,” I said. In the other room, Leander rustled meaningfully. I cocked my head toward my bedroom, and Watson picked up his mug and followed.
After I arranged myself in my chair, legs over the armrest, he surprised me by dropping down to sit at my feet.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, shoulders tensed.
It took quite a bit to make me speak plainly about how I felt, but Watson in distress tended to provide that bit. “I’m nervous,” I admitted.
“Nervous?”
“Nervous. We’re starting up at a new place, and together,” I said. “We’ve never done that before.”
He sighed, considering. “Maybe I’m slow or something,” he said, “but why does that make you nervous? We have each other. We’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be fine, but we’ll be on display, a bit. We’ll be expected to do the whole Holmes-and-Watson dance, which neither of us likes doing. And on top of that, we’ll need to make new friends.”
“We will?”
“Yes,” I told him. “My therapist said so. So that we don’t go do our ‘folie à deux thing,’ as she calls it.”
“Folie à deux thing? As in . . . the shared private madness thing? You have a hyperbolic therapist.”
It had seemed fairly on the nose to me. “Still.”
“Holmes,” he said, tipping his head back to look at me. “I don’t mind it. There are worse things in the world than making new friends. Murder. Kidnapping. Scorpions.”
“I’d take scorpions over socializing any day.”
“You could take your mind off it by telling me about . . . I don’t know, this Dramatics Society situation. You still haven’t given me the details.”
“All in good time,” I said, because I was rather comfortable here, him looking up at me with his soft eyes, and the last thing I wanted to do was to bring a case into the room with us.
It was sudden, the sound of breaking glass, and before I heard the low roll of laughter that followed, I was already on my feet, Watson in a low crouch. It took a beat before we registered that the sound had come from the television in the next room.
I could hear the muffled sound of Leander cursing, the volume going down. Watson and I rearranged ourselves wordlessly, and after a moment, he laughed, dabbing at his front where he had spilled his tea. “I guess it’s either we rehash this mystery, or we go watch Friends with your uncle.”
“Friends, then,” I said, to Watson’s evident surprise. I rather liked the Joey character. “I think there’s ice cream in the freezer.”
ORIENTATION WAS A BIT MORE FORMAL THAN I’D ANTICIPATED, this being a precollege program. We were ushered into the sort of long, paneled, beautiful room that one would expect from a cocktail party in the eighteenth century, or as the setting of a trial.
Spaces like this reminded me of home. That wasn’t a good thing. I paused at the door.
“God, this is gorgeous.” Watson unwound his scarf from around his neck. “Like Hogwarts,” he said, and pulled me inside.
We’d moved him into his rooms that morning, just the two of us. He’d only had the two suitcases. He was sharing a stairwell with some other precollege students, but the only one there when we arrived was a cheerful brunet boy in a cardigan who shook both of our hands and asked straight off what we were studying and if we wanted to get a pint later, there was a pub nearby he loved, well, not a pub, a bit swankier, but we should go, it would be wicked—
Watson had cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” he said cautiously, as though the boy was about to whip off his mask, announce he was Tom Bradford’s twin brother, and then mug us for our wallets.