28. Silver Raindrop
Silver Raindrop
Elias
As we emerge onto the glistening central London street, Desdemona seems almost incandescent with inner light. She’s restless, practically vibrating, a strange energy trapped inside her skin that makes her seem almost supernatural.
Her appearance remains flawless: her blue dress taking on an azure tint under the night sky and gold lamplight, her hair still swept and curved into its elegant shell-like updo.
But her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright.
She drags me forward by my hand, out of the hotel lobby and through the gilded doors, down the street.
“Your coat—” I start saying.
“I’m not cold.”
I open my mouth to speak, but Desdemona throws an arm around my neck, dragging my mouth down to hers. She kisses me deep and hard, sweetness and hunger all mingled. Her mouth is hot, and when I press a thumb into her jaw, she obeys the silent command, opening her mouth to my deepening kiss.
By the time we pull away, we’re both breathless and shivering. The night is crisp with cold, and there’s a heaviness in the air heralding a coming storm. Beneath our feet, the pavement is glossy with fresh rainfall, black cabs splashing noisily past.
“You didn’t need to ask your parents to make a donation, you know.”
My voice comes out hoarse, but Desdemona shakes her head imperiously. “It was my choice to ask them, and their choice to do it. Nothing at all to do with you.”
Beautiful liar. “No?”
“No. Come on.”
She turns and tries to walk away, but I tug on her hand, stopping her.
“We should probably go back, love.”
She turns to throw me a defiant look over her shoulder. “I would rather die than let you go back to those people.”
Something lurches inside me, like her words somehow reached into my chest and grabbed my red, bloody heart.
“Those people pay my school tuition fees,” I point out with a light laugh.
“So?” She whips around, stopping dead in her tracks so that I almost bump into her. She gazes furiously up into my eyes. “That doesn’t give them the right to use you, or control you. You don’t belong to them. You’re—”
She cuts herself off abruptly, clamping her mouth shut.
I pull closer, half-smiling. “I’m what?”
“You’re nobody’s,” she says, with renewed fervour.
“Not even yours?” I ask, smile blossoming fuller now, wider.
The lurching sensation in my chest has metastasised, evolved into an inexplicable elation.
It’s coursing through me, making me feel suddenly reckless, invincible, ecstatic.
I have the crazy urge to grab Desdemona in my arms, to spin her around, to kiss her mouth again, and then again, until my kiss is tattooed onto her mouth, my existence indelibly inked into her skin.
“If you were mine,” Desdemona says, “it still wouldn’t make it okay for me to use you.”
But I’d still let you.
The thought hangs, unspoken, between us. We’re facing one another in the middle of the street, London’s noisy nightlife blurring by with us frozen in its centre, a moment suspended in time, and our future whirling, a distant tornado slowly closing in.
The Pearsons, the Harvard scholarship, our fake relationship, Birnam Hastings, my future, the inevitable point of separation when Desdemona will go back to her perfect, blameless life, and I’ll fall backwards into the darkness to take the fall for a crime I didn’t commit.
It all exists, it’s all coming—but not right now.
Right now, a gust of wind gasps through the city, shoving my hair into my face and flapping Desdemona’s skirt so high I catch a glimpse of her long thighs. Rain flickers in the air, light as a sea-tossed spray.
This time, it’s my turn to reach forward and grab Desdemona’s hand in mine.
“Come on,” I call through the rush of wind and traffic and rain. “I know where to go.”
The hardest thing about growing up in foster care is that there’s almost never any privacy.
You might be lucky enough to not share a room for a night or two, but spaces in children’s homes fill up fast. Most people would be shocked how clogged the foster system is, how many kids end up unwanted, cast away or removed from their families.
Most of us end up finding our own ways of carving out spaces for ourselves, like dents in a dense wall.
Some kids would pick up art in school, just so they could spend a couple of hours a week in a cramped secondary school art studio.
Some kids found small nooks in busy places: a windowsill broad enough to sit behind a curtain, the bottom of a closet to sit in with a pair of staticky headphones.
Some kids even found their privacy inwards: disappearing between the pages of a book, or shutting themselves away behind a barrier of music.
I used to come here.
St Dominic House Observatory isn’t really supposed to be open to the public at night—hasn’t been for years.
It was built a century ago, when the Navy thought they could map the world by measuring the stars, but the last proper astronomer packed up sometime in the 1950s.
Now it’s just another London heritage site that they wheel out for fundraising events and school trips.
I got in the first time when I was thirteen.
My foster placement at the time was in a council flat in Lambeth—I first saw the building by chance, having taken a different path back from school to avoid two boys who used to hunt me for sport.
The sight of the dome, sticking out over the London skyline, a washed-out white that looks almost green with half-faded lichen, ridged and slightly cracked at the top like a broken egg in a carton, had stopped me in my tracks.
Later, much later, I found the side door to the observatory wing. It wasn’t locked properly—old bolt, swollen frame. I slipped inside and climbed the spiral stairs, and when I reached the top, it felt like I’d stepped into the ribcage of some massive beast, and found another world contained within.
The dome was half open, the metal ribs catching what little light there was.
The air smelled of rust, stone, and rain.
The old-fashioned telescope stood in the middle, its brass dulled to the colour of honey that’s been left, abandoned, at the bottom of a jar.
All around, the walls were mapped with constellations, the paint long faded to powder-blue and dull gold.
I remember thinking it was the first room I’d ever been in that didn’t belong to anyone. Not a carer’s, not a teacher’s, not a family’s. An enclosed space—looking outward.
That first night, I just sat on the floor beneath the dome, my coat spread like a blanket under me, watching the slice of sky through the open hatch.
It was February, still cold enough that I could see my breath steam from my mouth, but it didn’t matter.
I watched until I couldn’t feel my fingers, and fell asleep for a few hours, and awoke shocked to find a cloudless sky filled with stars.
“What is this place?”
Desdemona’s murmured question brings me back to the present.
She was frowning but silent when I snuck us in through the rusted side door, like she was certain I was about to get her into trouble but willing to trust me anyway.
As I led her through the darkened corridors, I could feel her press closer to me, as if for safety, and it sent a shimmering burst of emotions through my chest.
I want to keep her safe, I realise. Like being entrusted with a beautiful, precious object, I want to keep her close and protect her from anything that could damage her.
A dangerous feeling. I try to push it aside, focus on the moment.
“St Dominic House Observatory,” I answer, leading her up the spiral staircase. “Watch where you’re going, some of these are a little uneven.”
“I’ve never heard of this place,” Desdemona mutters.
But she doesn’t complain about the damp air, the cold, the lingering smell of mouldy paper and dust and rust.
“It used to be part of the old Navy Board’s astronomical and navigational offices, in the early 1800s, when sailors used to calculate longitude by the stars.”
We’ve reached the top of the stairs, where Desdemona stops and stares at me through the gloom.
“Why do you sound like you used to work here?”
I laugh.
“I did, actually.”
Not the way she’s thinking, though. When I was sixteen, over the summer, I worked part-time sweeping floors after closing—scrubbing coffee stains, emptying bins full of programmes and crumpled flyers. The money wasn’t great—but the time alone was priceless.
We emerge into my favourite part of the building: the top floor, where an old auditorium sits beneath the domed ceiling.
I’d tried working out how to open the dome wider, or how to operate the telescope, but both are too old.
Even hours of research couldn’t help me find a way of operating the equipment.
For a moment, looking at the moth-eaten velvet seats, the sliver of sky through the dome allowing a ribbon of rain that tinkles over the worn metal of the astronomical equipment, I wonder if I made a mistake bringing Desdemona here.
But when I turn to look at her, she’s already drifted towards the telescope.
I watch her, heart suddenly constricted, as she brushes her fingertips over the length of the optical tube, feeling the alternating smooth bronze and the patches of encroaching rust. She leans down and presses her face to the eyepiece, then moves away with a frown.
Raindrops tinted silver by the faint light coming from outside scatter over her hair, her shoulders, her arms, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She walks along the walls, peering at the astronomical maps, and then, finally, she turns back to me.
“Well?” she says. “Where should we sit, then?”
Mutely, I gesture towards the auditorium part, and we make our way through the rows of seats to the centre, right beneath the crack in the dome. The seats are slightly damp, but that doesn’t seem to bother Desdemona either. She sits at my side, leaning back against the headrest.
I do the same and gaze up into a night sky choked with clouds, every star completely obscured.
With a sharp sigh, I roll my head to peer at Desdemona.
“Shit. So much for showing you the stars, huh?”
She rolls her head, imitating my movement and gazing back at me.
“But it would have been very impressive, if it wasn’t raining.” She smiles, that now familiar edge of cruelty tilting the corners of her mouth. “This is where you bring all the girls, Lennox?”
For a while, I say nothing at all, soaking it all in: the sight of her smiling face in the darkened auditorium, raindrops glittering on her eyelashes like tiny crystal pearls, the gold of her hair dyed almost silver in the darkness, her expression, so unusually open.
I realise, suddenly, with devastating clarity, that I missed her.
Those weeks when I was too scared to go near her, when I avoided her for the sake of self-preservation. They didn’t make me feel less attached to her. They didn’t make the emotions between us fade or become less real.
They just made me miss her.
Maybe that’s what makes me answer with the truth, for once.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever brought here.”
I look away, facing the ceiling once more, the rolling clouds, the droplets of abating rain, so light they dance through the air even as they fall.
Desdemona says nothing at all.
When she finally responds, it’s in a thoughtful whisper.
“I like it.”
I smile to myself. “Yea?”
“Yes.”
“Despite the rain and the rust and the fact that you can’t even see the stars?”
“I don’t care about any of those things.”
I reach out to take her hand in mine.
“You’re freezing cold, love.”
“So?” Desdemona whispers. “Then warm me up.”
This time, I do look at her, turning my head slowly. Even in the gloom I can see that her cheeks are flushed and that there’s a spark in her eyes that’s unfamiliar, almost feverish. She’s being utterly sincere, and it makes my breath catch in my throat.
If this is pretend, my mind asks itself, then why does it feel real?
Is it still a performance if there’s no audience?
“Be careful what you wish for,” I whisper back. My voice comes out gravelly, like I have a cold. “You might actually get it.”
She smiles. And then Desdemona, the perfect golden girl, rises from her seat and lowers herself onto my lap. I settle her with my hands on her hips, gazing up at her. She gazes back at me and reaches between us, fingers tugging at my belt, the buckle opening with a soft clink.
I let out a breathless laugh.
“Really?” I rasp. “A perfect girl like you—in a place like this?”
She stops for a split second, and there’s something in her gaze that pierces through my chest.
“I’m not perfect. I don’t even want to be perfect.”
“No?” My voice is barely sound. “Then what do you want?”
And the truth tumbles like a silver raindrop from Desdemona’s mouth.
“To fall.”