Page 69 of Holly & Hemlock
I kick off my shoes and curl into the corner of a chesterfield sofa so vast it might have been designed as a fortification. The fire is already going, though I can’t imagine who lit it—no one was in here since morning. Whitby again, probably, always a step ahead, always setting the table for the ghosts she expects to return.
I don’t have to wait long. Lane is first, his steps heavy, but less so than usual. He enters with the awkwardness of a bear invited to a formal sitting room. He stands at the fire for a moment, hands knotted behind his back, then grabs a decanter and two heavy glasses from the bar cart.
I expect him to claim one end of the couch, but instead hesets both glasses in front of me, as if uncertain which I will choose, and settles in at my right.
Larkin follows, but he’s changed out of his dinner jacket, wearing instead a sweater I haven’t seen before—a dark merino with a v-neck that sits perfectly at the collarbone. The effect is studied nonchalance, but there’s a tension in the way he moves, as if he’s expecting someone to leap out and scare him.
He doesn’t sit right away, but prowls the perimeter, pausing at the bookshelves, at the table where the chessboard waits in perpetual mid-game.
“So,” he says, turning at last. “Is this the part where we get roaring drunk and confess our deepest regrets?”
I take the bait. “Are you even capable of regret?”
He grins, his mouth sharp and wolfish, but the effect is softened by exhaustion. “I regret not betting heavier against Lane in the third course. I was sure he’d fold after the fish.”
Lane’s only response is a low rumble, somewhere between a laugh and a growl, but he pours out three fingers of whiskey and slides a glass to Larkin as he passes.
Larkin takes the chair opposite, stretches out his legs, and gives me a long, appraising look. “How’s the head? I’d say you held your own.”
I don’t ask how he knows about my headache. I sip from Lane’s glass and let the heat spider through my chest. “I’m better than I look,” I say, which is only partly true.
The conversation at first feels like a continuation of the dinner: Lane and Larkin in their familiar orbit, me the accidental satellite. But as the minutes wear on, something shifts. Maybe it’s the whiskey, or the storm still beating its fists against the glass, or maybe we are just too tired to keep up the barricades.
Larkin’s sarcasm sloughs off in layers. Lane, who so often defaults to silence, becomes almost chatty, telling a story about a fight he broke up between two feral cats in the hedge maze, describing the yowling, the blur of claws, the way he had to wrap one in his jacket to keep it from tearing itself open.
Larkin counters with a story of his own, a childhood escapade in which he tried to impress the estate’s former cook by raiding the root cellar for truffles and nearly got locked inside for a weekend. “The punchline,” he says, “is that there were no truffles. Just thirty pounds of carrots and a wheel of cheese older than I was.” He glances sidelong at Lane. “I think the cook enjoyed the silence.”
Lane shrugs. “Hard not to.”
I notice, gradually, that we have closed the distance between us. The chesterfield is wide enough for three, but Lane is pressed in at my right, shoulder solid against mine, and Larkin, though in the chair, has angled his body so his knees almost brush against my calves. It’s a geometry of proximity, a new equation that would have been unthinkable even two days ago.
We drink. We tell more stories. I offer up one about my first—and only—gallery opening in Chicago, how the local critic spent the whole night chatting up my intern and then eviscerated my work in the Tribune the next day. “She called it derivative,” I say. “Which I guess is true, but still.”
Larkin is the one who asks, “Do you ever want to go back? To the art world? To the city?”
I think about it, and am surprised by my answer. “Sometimes. But not tonight. And not tomorrow, either.” The admission sits warm and heavy in my stomach.
Lane taps his on hand mine. “Good,” he says.
There is a lull, as if the house itself is recalibrating. Thewind slaps at the windows, rattles the lead in the stained glass, but inside it is almost obscene how safe I feel.
I close my eyes for a moment and lean my head back against Lane’s shoulder. He doesn’t flinch or tense; instead, he shifts just enough to make a pillow of himself. Larkin watches, but without his usual blade of envy or arousal. For once, he seems content just to witness, to take part.
When I open my eyes again, Larkin is staring into the fire. His profile is sharp against the flames, the light carving new lines into his face.
“It’s strange,” he says. “I spent my whole life thinking of this place as a prison. But tonight it feels different.”
“Maybe prisons aren’t so bad if you pick your cellmates,” I say.
He smiles, but there’s a seriousness underneath. “Maybe.”
Lane stands up, pours another round, and as he does, his hand brushes over my shoulder, down the line of my arm. The contact is accidental, or at least plausibly deniable, but the shiver it sends through me is not. Larkin’s eyes catch the motion. For a moment, I expect him to needle Lane, to toss out some barb about possessiveness, but instead he only lifts his glass.
“To new arrangements,” he says.
I echo it, and Lane—never one for toasts—just downs his whiskey in a single, savage swallow.
The house settles. The fire burns lower. I find myself drifting, but not away from them—toward them, into the orbit they have created, the gravity of shared disaster and mutual rescue.
