Chapter Nine
NINE
Mold threads between the porcelain cracks in the bathtub like black veins.
Evander has stared so long that one has curved into a gangrenous smile, its lips cracked to show moss grown between its teeth.
The tub is empty. He is mostly clothed. His sweater puddles on the dark tiles like a shed exoskeleton, clover and snapped twigs still caught in the unraveling knit, and his slender fingers grip each side of the clawfoot tub as if he is about to be sucked under.
Like that day in the garden, the grave, the soil, the blood—
Evander looks down at his bare torso, at the surgery scars that map his ribs in white puckers and the ropey line that runs from hip to hip. A severing. As if someone tried to chop him in half.
Not Laurie.
The memory has an indistinct quality to it, fogged like breath on a cold windowpane.
He’s trying to remember how long it’s been since Laurie strolled out of his room without a care, as if he didn’t just riffle fingers through Evander’s head and then leave him with the cleanup.
He doesn’t remember taking off his shirt.
Or getting in the tub. If he touches the empty space in his head like a tongue to a sore molar, it throbs, and his stomach turns over with a sick slosh.
He lost time.
An episode.
He should expect it when he hasn’t had his meds in days, when he’s overwhelmed and overtired.
He’s abused the fragile limits of his ill body, spent his energy like gold coins and demanded too much of muscles that had been close to atrophy.
Judging from the shadows hounding the deep green walls of his tiny bathroom, he has lost the rest of the day.
Fretful unease splays heavy across his lungs until he’s breathing too fast, his chest straining as scar tissue stretches. He hates looking at himself. Hates the catastrophe of fused skin. Hates the way he is marked by a history of indelible pain and cratered like an ugly expanse of the moon.
Hates that he doesn’t know if he finally relived a memory. Or if he made it up.
Memories have always been loose things, his past full of holes and his long years of recovery fuzzy thanks to pain and meds, and he’s wound up from trying to piece together clues and not freak out over the way his life has been upended.
He needs to calm down.
But when he touches the tips of his fingers to his lips, he can almost feel the slippery tendon, pinned like a wriggling worm against his incisors.
His mouth waters.
Disgust sweeps across him in a roar and he swallows saliva tinged with bile. He did not just think that. His brain is still soupy from the episode, that’s all.
Footsteps sound outside his cracked open bathroom door and his head snaps up.
No. He can’t be seen like this, can’t let his scars be viewed with revulsion.
Scrabbling against the smooth curve of the tub, he lunges for his discarded shirt and clutches it over his chest just as the door swings the rest of the way and dim light from his bedroom lamp smears across the tiles.
Laurie leans against the doorframe with that maddening smirk, his arms folded as he takes in the deep green walls, the unlit bronze sconces, the clawfoot tub.
He looks elegantly lawless in a deep black suit, a black turtleneck beneath his dinner jacket, his hair artistically swept back.
This is a glossy brochure image of a smug boy who feels entitled to the whole world.
But Laurie’s words swirl sickeningly through Evander’s mind: Grandfather would beat the living shit out of me as a kid. Maybe he’s reading Laurie all wrong. Maybe he’s misunderstanding everything.
Laurie raises an eyebrow. “Did you know you’re meant to turn the faucet on if you want a bath?”
Evander decides he still hates this boy.
“Go away,” he mutters.
“You’ve been cordially invited to dinner,” Laurie says. “And by ‘invited,’ I mean the delight that is Great-Aunt Oleander told me to make you presentable. Good news is she brought along a private chef, so we’re upgrading from frozen pizza. Bad news is, well, Great-Aunt Oleander exists.”
Evander slumps back against the tub with a low moan, his body feeling trod over and wrung out.
These are usual aftereffects of an episode—except he doesn’t usually lose so much time.
Carrington should be hovering over him with meds, ushering him into bed and drawing the curtains so Evander can sink into the velvet oblivion of darkness to sleep it off.
But hunger has the audacity to rear its ugly head and he thinks, perhaps, if he’s going to find real evidence against Oleander, he needs to observe her.
“It’s semiformal by decree of the self-appointed lady of the house.” Laurie drums fingertips on the bathroom doorknob. “I took the liberty of going through your wardrobe and shaking the mothballs out of a suit.”
“Well, un-take the liberty. I don’t want you in my things.” Evander hugs his shirt tighter to his chest.
“Too bad.” Laurie pushes away from the door and disappears, returning with his arms full of a disassembled suit and shiny oxfords. He dumps everything unceremoniously on the grimy tiles and then eyes Evander, calculating. “That’s quite the commitment to modesty.”
Evander tries to breathe very shallowly, his fingers curled hard into the cotton. There must be something murderous in his eyes, because Laurie doesn’t press.
“Try to be quick with the bath,” is all he says. “I’ll wait.”
“You can leave,” Evander snaps. “You’re not lurking in my room while—”
But Laurie slams the bathroom door and Evander is left glowering into the silence.
A crawling sensation walks fingers up his throat: the idea of Laurie in his room unattended, continuing to mess with his things.
He could storm out there and demand Laurie get out, but his energy couldn’t fill a thimble right now.
Surviving dinner needs to be his priority.
Bathing is not the quick task he assumes it will be, due to the fact he’s never run one before and can’t get the temperature right.
Carrington would usually do this, would pick out his clothes, return his cleaned laundry, collect his dirty dishes.
It feels inaccurate to say he misses Carrington’s terse ministrations and dispassionate care, especially when he still suspects the old butler poisoned the tea, but Evander hates that he struggles with every little task.
A growing jittery unease floods his bloodstream as he dresses and slips on the dinner jacket. He leaves his curls loose and wet.
Stop acting out for attention.
Stop—stop being like this.
Be goddamn normal for once.
He pinches himself, hard, and then leaves the bathroom in a cloud of saffron soap and steam to see what damage Laurie has inflicted on his room.
It’s worse than he imagined.
Laurie is currently lying on his bed, ankles crossed, humming to himself, while he tosses the photo frame of Evander’s parents up in the air and catches it.
Evander storms toward him and snatches the photo frame. He slams it on his side table and seethes down at Laurie. “Don’t touch them. Don’t ever touch them.”
“Okaaaaay.” Laurie looks unfazed as he gives Evander a cool once-over. “You look nice. Shall we frolic to our dinner of torment?”
Evander tugs wretchedly at his cuffs, feeling small and drowned instead of gentlemanly and professional.
Laid out on his bed like that, Laurie is the image of suave perfection, smelling of oak and thyme and summer.
Evander thinks for a moment of what it would be to unbutton that shirt and fit both his hands around Laurie’s bare ribs, to squeeze and squeeze until he felt the give of bone, the collapse of lungs, Laurie’s soft mouth shaped into a whimper.
That would wipe the insufferable smirk off his face.
It’s in Evander’s head again, this sharp-edged memory of his teeth sunk so deep into Laurie’s wrist they hit bone.
He cuts a cautious, sideways glance at Laurie’s brace, but it’s covered by the dinner jacket. Seven years later and their falling-out still haunts his skin.
Evander blinks hard. “Get off my bed. Did you mess with my papers?”
Laurie tosses an idle glance at the scattered notepads and torn paper all over the bed as if it hadn’t even occurred to him to snoop. “Nope. Already told you I don’t care.”
“You’re lying.” Evander deepens his scowl. “You read my notes, didn’t you?”
Laurie makes a mocking show of dragging a finger over his heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die, I would never tell a lie.”
As if. Evander points to the door. “Get off my bed and get out.”
Laurie levers himself up and drifts toward the door while Evander takes a few seconds to settle his parents’ photo back in place. He touches their faces reverently before he snatches up the field guide and hides it under his pillow.
If he survives dinner with a potential poisoner, he’ll finish studying it.
To make sure their mutual disdain is obvious, Evander trails several feet behind Laurie as they wind their way through Hazelthorn.
By night, the halls transform into catacombs of gloom, black tar coating the gilded paintings and turning the heavy, velvet drapes into cascades of sooty wax.
They walk through parlors of floral wingback chaises and dark cherrywood sideboards, the clutter making every room seem cramped yet vast as if Hazelthorn is proving it could devour everything and still feel hollow.