Chapter 18 1964
I race out of my room, the memory of my mother’s white pumps in my dream so real that I think I’ll step into a gas station. But I’m in a Marmont corridor where the carpet is red like flames.
I hurtle into the lobby. Phillip is gone. No one at the piano. Nobody at the desk.
I run into the gardens, scan the windows, which are set like wide-open eyes into the facade of the chateau. Behind the windows of the largest penthouse is an orange glow.
Theo’s room is on fire.
I race back inside and whack the button for the elevator. The lights show that it’s on the seventh floor, exactly where I need to be. It crawls down, not stopping on any other floors, but still taking too long. The doors open and out walks Flitter.
“There’s a fire,” I shout. “Upstairs. Can’t you smell it?”
She sniffs and shakes her head. “I can’t smell anything. Are you sure—”
I don’t have time to debate. I need water. And I need to wake Theo. I push her aside, leap in, jab the button to close the doors, plead with the elevator to hurry.
Inside Theo’s suite, the curtains around the antique wooden bed are ablaze. Curled up, more peaceful in his smoke-infused stupor than I’ve ever seen him, is Theo.
“Wake up!”
He doesn’t move.
“Theo!” I say his name loud enough to wake him, I hope, but not loud enough to rouse the floor and fill the room with people who haven’t yet slept off their digestifs. The last thing this room needs is alcohol.
I grab the ice bucket from the dresser and a sculpture of a head, which is thankfully hollow, and run into the bathroom.
I fill both with water and toss it on Theo and the fire, rousing the first and dousing the second.
Then I grab a vase from the lowboy, throw the flowers onto the floor and hurl more water in Theo’s direction.
“What the fuck?” he shouts.
“Get up,” I hiss.
He finally jumps out of the bed as fast as if he were, in fact, on fire.
I push the ice bucket into his hands. “Fill it!”
But he doesn’t need to. The fire dies all by itself. The only thing left is an ash-colored swamp.
“What the fuck?” he repeats, then comes into full consciousness. “Aria?”
I drop into the nearest chair, the strange white head that I’ve used as a bucket still on my lap. “I need a drink.”
“You’ve come to the right place for that.” Theo’s voice is flat.
He disappears and returns with a glass of something brown and potent, undiluted by ice. When I grimace, he says, “This isn’t a mint julep occasion. What happened?”
It takes three sips and two grimaces before I can speak. “Why do you have whiskey in your suite?” I ask, like this is our biggest problem.
It’s his turn to grimace. “It’s like a hair shirt.”
I stare, sure that in the light of a day when I hadn’t just thrown water all over my boss to stop him from burning alive that would make sense. “What?”
“I have an unhealthy need, according to my counselor, to test myself. To have a bottle in reach, but to not reach for it. It’s how I prepare for parties.”
“Wow, most people just go buy a new dress,” I say, then cringe, hoping he doesn’t think I’m mocking him.
He crouches in front of me, giving me a thankfully unscalded face to focus on and asks again, “What happened?”
I tell him about the laugh, the attempt by someone to enter my room, the smell of smoke. Finding fire. “And then it just went out,” I conclude.
“Perhaps it was a dream.” He sits on the floor, elbows propped on bent knees, head inclined forward.
Suddenly, I’m furious. “You were about to catch on fire.” And what if I hadn’t locked my door? What then? He’s treating this the way everyone here treats everything—as if we’ve stepped off the set, never to look back at what won’t even be there because it was never real.
“Were you smoking?” I demand, advancing on the bed, searching for the ashtray.
But the nightstand’s empty.
He pushes himself to his feet. “Stay here,” he orders.
I study his face, try to see what he isn’t telling me.
But his eyes are opaque black, his expression the same as at his party when he looked weary with the flirtations aimed his way as well as bitterly aware that he’d laid his own trap by hosting the soiree in the first place—the expression of a tiger trying to remind itself not to eat you alive.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night…
“Where are you going?”
“To check on Adele and the hotel.” Theo opens the tallboy, pulls out sweatpants and a T-shirt. “You’re soaked. The shower’s through there. I’ll try not to be long.”
In an attempt not to imagine that same chilling laugh making threats outside the door while I wait here alone—or perhaps it’s because, even though someone just tried to burn Theo alive, he wants me to be dry and warm—I make myself useful in this situation that, even for the Marmont, is preternatural.
“Take this.” I pass him a pajama shirt that’s draped over a chair. “A half-dressed Win will be fair game to anyone who forgot to take their ’ludes tonight.”
“As practical as ever, Aria,” he mocks. He passes me a key. “Lock the door from the inside. Don’t open it to anyone.”
The first year after my parents died passed as slowly as the entire thirteen years previous. Then time regained its usual rhythm. But tonight, each minute refuses to give way to the next; the turn of an hour is as distant as the turn of a century.
A sound. I jump so high I just about hit the ceiling. But it’s just the executioner’s clock announcing 3:00 a.m.—time for the maiden to have her head chopped off.
I smoke five of Theo’s cigarettes. Interrogate myself: What are you so afraid of? It’s not as if frightening things haven’t happened at the Marmont before.
Not like this. I know what fires do, who they kill, and how lives are changed forever.
I refill my glass. Where was Theo going? He’d said, I’ll try not to be too long, almost as if he knew where he was headed. But how could he possibly know who’d set fire to his bed?
Then I remember my aunt.
Shit. Was it her?
I put down the glass. Move toward the door.
It opens by itself.
My scream is cut off by a hand.
Thankfully it’s Theo’s. As he pulls the door shut behind him and takes his hand away, I almost lose the admittedly tiny degree of professionalism Theo attributes to me by exhaling out my shit fuckerys in one long breath.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think you’d want everyone finding you in my room at four in the morning.
” He ushers me into the kitchen. “It was just one of the builders. They’re staying in the bungalow they’re renovating so they can start work early.
They had too much to drink, decided to play a prank and check out the penthouse while I was asleep, must have dropped a lit cigarette somewhere…
” He stops. “I never thought this was something I’d say about you, but you look like you might pass out. ”
I shudder. Another fire. Almost another burned body too.
Theo frowns. “Sit down.”
I drink the water he passes me, and whisper, “Just like you have dead wives in your wake, I have burned people. My parents…” I swallow more water. “They died in a fire at a gas station.”
Theo drops onto the stool opposite. “That’s a terrible thing to have to live with.”
The second hand on the executioner’s clock speeds up.
No, it’s my heart racketing into the room.
For a moment I think I can hear Theo’s heartbeat too, making music with mine.
Then I forget about hearts entirely because Theo’s eyes are supernovas, swallowing time and space, compressing the two-foot gap between his chair and mine to inches.
I can almost feel the tips of his beautiful eyelashes brushing against my thigh like flames.
I push myself up. “Goodnight.”
“Aria?”
I want to turn around. But Aria Joneses don’t sit in rooms and dream about Theo’s eyelashes and her thighs. They do not make similes that involve heat—not unless they want to be burned.
Theo steps in front of me. “You saved my life.” His voice is quiet. His eyes are not.
His hand stretches out.
And every single part of me wants to go wherever that hand will take me.
But no, stupid Aria. He means for me to shake it, like an employee would upon accepting her boss’s gratitude for performing a task in an exemplary manner.
I place my hand inside his. We stand there, hands clasped, eyes too, and suddenly I want to wish for things I’ve never even imagined I could have.
I withdraw my hand, recover myself. “You’d better make sure your life was worth saving.”
He’s laughing as I close the door.
Find me a woman in the world who could go to sleep after that.
I haunt the night, perched in the armchair in the turret, unable to stop thinking about Theo’s laugh, how it always sounds surprised—as if he’d been worried he’d never laugh again and is delighted to discover that he can.
Or—as if he’s delighted that I’m the one who makes him laugh.
God. What kind of idiot am I to have a crush on Theo?
But it’s worse than that.
I like Theo Winchester. As in, I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss him, wondering whether it would be the same as the way he just held my hand—gentle at first, but then not, because neither of us would want it to be gentle anymore.
I’m ridiculous. A stupid, stupid girl.
My face is hot, my collarbone damp, and I can’t stop thinking about Theo’s eyelashes and now, in my mind, his lashes aren’t stopping when they reach my thigh.
Whatever I’m dreaming has taken hold of me and I can’t quite rise up out of it, my body warm, limbs like whiskey, the quilt embracing me. But the sound comes again and I startle awake, unsure where I am. Then I remember—I went up to the turret.
After the fire.
Vroom! Theo’s motorbike. That’s what roused me. I cross over to the window, see him pull out of the driveway and onto Sunset Boulevard.
It’s about 5 a.m. There’s a blonde woman on the back of his bike. A woman who has the same haircut as Flitter.
Flitter, who was leaving the seventh floor—Theo’s floor—last night, right before the fire.