Chapter 18
Conrad
Keiran’s Irish Pub was every bit a raucous as I’d expected, given that the highly anticipated Armistice Games were back on.
More correctly, they were already won.
Through the crowds of people, I spotted her across the room.
Five-seven, bright brown eyes, impossibly shiny hair I wanted to run my fingers through.
Mal stood at the bar, a thin knit sweater over a dark skirt, her head craned up between the two guys vying for her attention.
It’d been all of two days since I last saw her in town—looking a little frazzled but completely adorable—and she was all I’d thought about.
“Apparently the juniors had a group chat monitoring the persons of interest,” Sage explained.
We’d slept together a few times, usually when I needed to clear my head, and she seemed cool with the arrangement, so I was hoping that was all this was.
She’d just spent ten minutes practically gushing about how the juniors had managed to pull off a victory this year.
And I’d spent that time trying not to stare at Malena.
“A few of the fraternity presidents, some athletes, the student body president, all were being surveilled. Can you believe it?” she said, sounding awestruck.
“The juniors knew their class schedules and texted each other whenever they spotted them at any particular spot. All of that data got run through some algorithm and popped out the most likely locations for where the pennant was hidden.”
Mal leaned her back against the bar while one of the guys hovered a little too close to her.
“Really…” I droned, hoping she wasn’t expecting more of my input.
“Yeah, the overlapping locations led them to the Arthur Winchester statue. The senior pennant was curled into his hand, completely hidden.”
The only rule when hiding the pennant was that it had to be somewhere on campus where any student could retrieve it. Given how large the campus was, most years, nobody found it. The games ended in a stalemate, and everyone partied just the same.
Except this year. And Mal was involved because of course she was. I was finding myself anticipating the next delightfully surprising thing I’d learn about her. She wasn’t kidding the other day when she said she liked games.
A frustrated huff cut across my thoughts as Sage bobbed her head in my line of vision. I met her gaze and smiled apologetically.
“Unbelievable, right?” she added.
“Yeah.” I tried to keep my focus on Sage. I really did. But the guy standing next to Mal was crowding her space, and his hand was moving down her back as he leaned in to say something in her ear. “Unbelievable.”
Mal smiled at him.
My molars ground together and I rolled a shoulder to loosen the uncomfortable tightness in my chest.
A brief shuffling pulled me back to the booth just in time to see Sage leaving. Good for her, honestly.
I stood, making no attempt to stop her, instead searching my mind for a good excuse to interrupt whatever flirting was happening at the bar. But my legs were moving before I could think of one.
I closed the space, weaving between hordes of mostly drunk juniors until I finally got to her. “Holmes.”
Her eyes raked over me, the corners of her mouth tipping up. “Watson.”
I relished that feeling—her eyes on me.
“‘Holmes’? ‘Watson’?” the guy—who was probably an athlete if the Winchester Athletics jacket draped over his shoulders was any indication—said in an impossibly slow drawl.
My gaze stayed fixed on Malena, ignoring the guy who I’d decided wasn’t worthy of her time. “I hear congratulations are in order.”
“My condolences to your class.” She feigned an apologetic pout. “Outmatched and outmanned. A shame.”
“You were finding a pennant,” I said dryly, “not performing a craniotomy.”
“And where is the junior class’s pennant, hmm? Since, apparently, it’s so easy to find, why didn’t the seniors find it?” She notched her chin up and looked around the crowded bar patronizingly. “Oh, right.”
I chuckled, and that familiar unsettling feeling I’d become used to in her presence was back, tapping rapidly alongside my heartbeat.
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe we didn’t bother looking for the junior pennant in the first place?
It was a nice little tradition we had going, a century of stalemates. ”
The seniors did look, and like every other year, they’d come up empty. Everyone assumed the juniors would too. And I wasn’t going to admit to her just how fucking cool it was that she found it.
She gave me a hard look.
“Tradition is a very nice way to phrase cycle of mediocrity.” She was shoved to the side a little from the moving crowd, and it brought her body even closer to mine. “Besides, games are fun and they make for a good story.”
“They do.” I leaned in a fraction of an inch, but just as I opened my mouth, the delicate tension snapped at the sound of a throat clearing.
Right. That guy.
“Oh. You’re still here.” I flicked a glance over to him for a millisecond before landing it back on her. “Sorry, was I interrupting?”
Her eyes narrowed in amusement and bounced between us. She crossed her arms. “No, you’re not.”
Dismissed, the guy huffed and walked off, leaving me to my delightful menace.
“And I don’t think you’re sorry either,” she added.
“You’re right,” I conceded. “But you don’t seem particularly devastated.”
“He was cute. Tall,” she stated, tilting her head to look past me in whatever direction he went. Indifference clung to her words, like she was explaining a math problem. “Plays rugby, probably has pretty decent—”
“Head injuries?”
Her lips curved up, and my pulse thrummed in anticipation.
“Not every sport is as tame as rowing.”
“Tame?” Excitement popped down my nerves. “The racing part? Or the strong current part?”
“How about the sitting down part?” She cocked her head to the side, leaning in a fraction.
“What we lack in cerebral trauma we make up for in stamina.” I could practically feel her breath on my lips we were so close. “I’d be happy to prove it to you.”
Crimson warmed the tops of her cheeks. She opened her mouth only to close it, and her eyes flickered, searching.
The realization hit me with the same shot of adrenaline I got every time I raced. I caught her off guard—whatever sparring match this was, I’d won.
I basked in the novelty.
“I was thinking about you the other day.” She took a half step back and hopped on the barstool that’d just freed up. The lines along the column of her throat shifted as she busied herself ordering a drink. “After seeing you outside the bookstore in town.”
“Oh yeah?”
It was only fair that I crossed her mind since she'd taken up residence in mine.
“Yeah, I wanted to ask you. That painting in the center of the mausoleum? It’s a Van Holden, right?”
By you she’d actually meant us. Scroll & Ivy.
Disappointment curdled in my stomach. “Yeah… I think so.”
I did know that, mostly because I’d been a little curious after all the evidence in front of me. An unsealed door in the catacombs. Rare paint that someone was using to make dozens of the same painting…
Those facts were more interesting than my paper on the effects of inflation on price stabilization in global markets.
And they served as the perfect distraction.
I’d spent an hour last night on a reverse image search hunting for information on any of those paintings we saw in the studio the night of the president’s dinner.
Nothing concrete, but Nicolas Van Holden’s work had come up as a potential match. I didn’t think much of it.
“How did it get there?” Malena asked.
“I dunno.” That painting was massive, spanning what was easily a twenty-foot wall. “The front doors?” I guessed, but the look on her face told me she was back to fixating. “You can’t seriously believe someone brought that giant painting in from the catacombs.”
“Maybe.” She chewed on her lip, and I tried not to stare.
“I don’t know why they would go through the effort…
” She sighed. “Or maybe I’m biased because I’ve always thought they were this cool myth and I’ve just discovered they’re very much real.
Either way, I’m going to go to the Amherst Building’s archives tomorrow to see if there’s a record of his pieces.
A lot of art from that time is lost and—”
“You didn’t have any luck matching the pieces we found in the studio on a reverse image search either?”
“No, I didn’t…” Her cheeks lifted in a teasing smirk. “Were you… helping?”
“My name’s on it too, remember? I’ll come with you and we can get through the archives faster.”
“You don’t have to, I know it’s boring,” she said, like she was trying to convince me of her disinterest. Which was impossible to believe because she practically glowed whenever it came up. “Filling in the missing pieces is the least interesting part of all this.”
No, it was quickly becoming the most interesting part.
A lifetime of having my last name and generally pleasing face be all I needed to gain entry to anything I wanted, this was new. I had to work for this—wanted to work for this.
“I want to help,” I answered plainly.
I could have pushed for her to finish the piece and call it a day. I could have insisted that we be done with this partnership and returned to focusing on crew and getting through my last year of undergrad.
But I wanted something else.
I wanted more.
The story, the work, the playful sniping, that candied lemon scent, the smile I couldn’t stop seeing in my head.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted more of everything.