Chapter Eleven #2
It takes him a full minute to notice Laurie hasn’t responded, and frustration makes him stomp closer to the bed and look down at the loose tangle of limbs and lazy, half-lidded nonchalance that is Laurie.
He is elegant against white sheets; his skin is milk-smooth, his stomach slim.
This is a body carved for summers and carelessness.
No knobby rib bones. No mottled scabs and random bruising.
Evander pretends he isn’t jealous, pretends he doesn’t wish he looked like that.
He has looked too long.
Laurie doesn’t seem to notice. He lets his phone rest on his chest and starts pulling at his lower lip, looking very steadily at the roof of his musty canopy bed.
“Evander,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that’s caught between wariness and resignation.
“What?” Evander snaps.
“There were no business trips.” Laurie sighs and rubs the corner of his eye.
Evander scoffs. “You were at boarding school, how would you know—”
Laurie sits up very suddenly and Evander has to take a step away from the bed so they don’t touch.
“Because I do know,” he says, low and urgent.
“You’re the one always locked in your room.
And, sorry—but you’re the only one who was told there were business trips.
Grandfather was a massive paranoid recluse.
He never left the estate. He was too scared someone would sneak in here and—” He cuts off.
“Well, mess with Hazelthorn when he wasn’t looking. ”
A low, sick pounding has started up behind Evander’s eyes, and a sweet, coppery tang fills his mouth that he can’t swallow back.
“You’re lying.” His teeth clench.
Laurie levels a careful look at him. “I don’t have any reason to lie.”
“But then why wouldn’t he—” The words feel too sour to let out, too whiny and needy and sad.
Why wouldn’t he visit me more? Why wouldn’t he let me out if he was home? Why did he need to lock—
But he can’t let himself fall down that rabbit hole, so he sets his jaw and pretends to flick through his notepad of messy scrawls as if a new clue will materialize out of nothing. All he’s uncovering are more questions.
“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” Laurie adds, his voice returning to the usual indifference.
“Is the interrogation over? I need to get dressed and find food before Oleander bans me from the kitchen forever because she likes to see me suffer.” He heads for one of his suitcases, rummaging around before he has to stop with a wince, his left arm curving into his chest to protect his brace from being jolted.
He doesn’t need Oleander to make him suffer. He’s always hurting.
Evander firmly redirects himself away from softening toward this merciless boy. The pendulum swing of emotions is making him ill.
“I need to talk to Carrington,” Evander says. “He knows everything there is to know about the estate.” And then he can demand to know if it was true; if Byron Lennox-Hall left Evander to decay simply because he didn’t care.
no one cares and you know it, you’ve always known it, you’re here because you’re a legal liability and they probably don’t want you to sue them for nearly dying in their garden, and sure they keep you but they don’t love you because who would love an odd, sickly, crazy boy like—
“I’ll call the hospital for you,” Laurie says, still picking through his suitcase. “But you only get one favor. And try to question the old man delicately so he doesn’t have a stroke.”
“I’m delicate—”
“Only in looks, Thumbelina,” Laurie says.
Evander straightens to glare at him. “I am not that short.”
“You’re barely pushing five three.”
“I could still grow.”
Laurie says nothing, and Evander watches carefully at the way his breathing has picked up, how the tips of his fingers are white as they press hard against the confines of the brace. He must be in agony right now, forcing those shrunken ligaments to stretch.
Evander makes a wild effort to shove everything aside and focus, again, on his case. “So. Why did you get thrown out of your old school?”
“Call it academic probation,” Laurie says flatly.
“So you were too lazy to go to class?”
A muscle ticks in Laurie’s jaw, but his voice doesn’t change. “Something like that. Wickwood is a shit school anyway and it’s in the middle of godforsaken nowhere. Weird, creepy stuff kept happening and every time I asked Grandfather if I could transfer, he said no because he hates me.”
“When’s your birthday?” Evander says.
“Two weeks ago.”
“What’s your full name?”
“Laurence Evan…” There’s a pause, Laurie finally finished selecting his clothes. He sighs and then says, “Alexander Lennox-Hall.”
“Did you get tired in the middle of your pretentiously long name?” Evander knows he’s being snippy, but he doesn’t care.
“I did, actually, thanks for asking.”
Evander glances at his notes. “What would you save in a fire?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“How would you describe your relationship with your grandfather?”
Laurie hurls his clothes on the bed, his mouth a flat line. “Yeah, I’m over the Sherlock production now.”
Evander jots a note on his pad.
“What did you just write?” Laurie has an edge to his voice.
“Just logging every time you avoid a question,” Evander says calmly. “And how suspicious it is.”
“Jesus Christ,” Laurie mutters. “I’m changing. Close your eyes or don’t. I couldn’t care less.”
Evander has exactly half a second to process this before Laurie has hooked a thumb into the waistband of his pajama pants and started pulling them down.
Panic roars to life in Evander’s chest and he hurls himself across the bed to plummet to the floor on the other side.
He sits there, his eyes squeezed shut and notepad crushed to his chest, and listens to the soft thump of fabric hitting the floor.
Laurie is unclothed. He’s definitely doing this to make Evander uncomfortable enough to flee for good.
Evander starts doing deep, measured breathing, as he survives these panicky minutes of torture.
A lump of cloth smacks him in the side of the head.
He looks up startled to see Laurie smirking down at him, wearing tight red shorts and an expensive loose linen shirt. Only two buttons are done up, a deep V gaping to show the curve of his chest. Either he can’t do buttons one-handed or he’s continuing his reign of casual menace.
In Evander’s lap now lies the still-warm pair of pajama pants.
He hurls them off as if they’re alive.
“You’re a hilarious little man,” Laurie says.
“And you’re—you’re annoying,” Evander shoots back hotly.
“Iconic rebuttal. Good job.”
Evander tries to flatten his bent notepad. “Were you this mean to me when we were younger?”
No answer comes, and it takes him a moment of sorting out scrunched pages to realize Laurie isn’t going to say anything.
Evander casts a scowl up at him, but Laurie has an odd look on his face.
It vanishes and he flops backward onto the mattress to grab his phone, nearly kicking Evander in the head in the process.
“You sure are missing a lot of memories,” he says, unfazed.
Only half his life. Evander snaps his pen cap a few times to center himself. “They might come back. Some are.”
“Remember faster,” Laurie says. “Then you could answer a lot of your own questions.”
“Or you could just tell me.”
“Ask the right ones and I might.”
He is infuriating and insufferable and he knows it.
His smile is sudden and self-satisfied, and heat flares across Evander’s ears for unexplainable reasons.
If he gets to his feet, he isn’t sure what he might do—to himself or to Laurie—but he’s saved the temptation by Laurie telling his phone to call the hospital, which fascinates Evander, though he’d rather die than admit he is so inexperienced about most technology.
He picks himself up carefully and moves to hover at the end of the bed. Nervous energy has him feeling twitchy, though he doesn’t know why. This is Carrington, the one everyday constant in his life.
He could be a killer.
But he has absolutely no motive. He’s literally in the hospital, unable to cope with the shock of Byron’s death.
Laurie clears his throat. “Hi. Yeah. I’d like to inquire about a patient.
An old family friend. We’ve just been through a tragic shock in the family and he was admitted a few days ago …
Yes. Oh, of course. His name is…” He frowns at Evander and pulls the phone from his ear.
“What the hell is Carrington’s first name? ”
“William?” Evander says. “I think.”
“William Carrington,” Laurie says back to the phone. There’s a lengthy pause as his mouth pulls down at the corners. “Oh … Okay.”
Evander is clicking his pen cap on and off, faster and faster, until Laurie ends the call.
“What?” Evander demands. “Didn’t he want to talk to you? Because I—I need to ask him what medications I should be taking.” He doesn’t want any more episodes, is what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t want to relapse.
“Well,” Laurie says slowly, “I can’t talk to William Carrington because they have never heard of him. He was never admitted.”
Evander’s stomach does an odd lurch.
“So the next question is,” Laurie says, “where is our definitely totally innocent old butler?”