Chapter 66
The library was closed this late, but Sebastian had a borrowed staff key.
In the silence, my body still rang with the Primal Scream.
I took off my jacket and helped him remove his. “You weren’t always Sebastian, were you?”
“I used to be Remy,” he said.
I tried to imagine calling that name in the dark. “It’s embarrassing, but I thought you just happened to have an available Morton name.”
He laughed. “My mothers let me choose. We went to the Little Graveyard. Sebastian seemed the least doomed. Erasmus, Chester, and Wendell are clearly never going to make it out.”
“You were always going to make it out. I thought you appeared from nowhere. Just for us.”
“Not nowhere,” he said. “Southern California.”
A memory came over me, us kids spilling out of the Great House on a crisp winter day. “The first time you saw snow—you went wild. But little me decided it was the first time you’d seen snow as a Morton.”
Sebastian laughed properly at that. I hoped no janitors were still cleaning down here.
His befuddlement about snow, his clumsiness on skis. He’d been bad at archery and Muay Thai too, at first. But ordinaries were bad at everything, and after he’d lived with us awhile, he became good at everything. Like me.
Proof that he belonged.
“Remy…and your twin was Desiree. Are you French?”
“Respectable Haitian grandparents,” he said.
“Remy,” I repeated, looking at him closely in the dim light. “Sebastian. They both suit you. But you could make any name your own.”
“Flattery,” he said, and I wondered who he would’ve been if the Mortons hadn’t found him.
“Why did you want me? Back when I was a true Morton?”
“Because you were so certain,” he said, kissing me. “Unafraid.” He kissed me again. “You didn’t flinch. You didn’t cry.” And again. “You didn’t speak unless you had something to say.” Another, deeper, kiss.
The same sentiments as Xavier. “My certainty’s gone. Why do you still love me?”
We pulled away a little, surprised.
Neither of us had said the word love before. I wasn’t sure I loved him. This wasn’t what I’d felt for Hiromi. Sebastian felt more necessary—like air.
I no longer made my own oxygen.
“You’re still you, Jess. Different, but you.”
“What if it’s just your memory of the old Jessica?”
He kissed me. “She’s gone. Have you noticed I’m taller than you now? You were taller than me the whole time we were little. And now, finally, I win.”
“Delusional. I’m still taller.” I pressed my nose against the top of his cheekbone. “See? My nose is higher than yours.”
“Cheating—your chin is raised. I’ve got a solid inch on you.”
“You do not.”
“Gertie will adjudicate, in her coat of quilts.”
I laughed at that image and started to unbutton my shirt. “I’m taller and faster and smarter and—”
“More boastful.” He reached into my shirt, touched the silver chain that held the key he’d given me. Our safe house. Our revolution of two.
“A Morton never boasts,” I said, my skin on fire where his fingers brushed. “Which is, in itself, a boast.”
Sebastian laughed, softly for once.
I began to unbutton his jeans, to slide them down, to press him against the rippled leather spines of books, to kiss his stomach. To forget everything that had brought us here.
Push it under your feet.
We’re just meat.
Sebastian tried to say something, but his voice was gone, missing in the echoes of the empty library, lost to the silence around us. We became unmoored, adrift on the slow tide of touch.
When I looked up, the shore was gone.
Later, still in the darkened stacks, I glanced at my phone.
A text from Faraday, twenty minutes old.
There’s a man outside my house.
Then nothing more.
I sat up, buttoning my shirt. On the gray industrial carpet beside me, Sebastian grumbled.
When Faraday didn’t answer, I called Salinger.
“It’s Jessica. Is she there?”
“I knew it—this is because of you, isn’t it!”
“Put her on,” I said.
“She won’t let me take her to Campus Health. Her finger won’t stop bleeding. They stole her phone!”
“Put. Her. On.”
The line went quiet for a long moment, but at last Faraday’s sobbing was in my ear. “Jessica.”
“Who was it?”
“The man who picked us up, at the funeral.”
“Orrin. What did he do?”
“My fingernail. It hurts so much!”
“Wash it, put some Vaseline on it, and cover it up. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” I started to put on my pants one-handed.
“Jessica, why did they do this?”
Fucking Xavier. Once Crystal’s case was closed, my family had moved up Faraday’s punishment—without telling me.
“Because of what you did to Oscar Junior,” I said. “For taking matters into your own hands. But you’re paid up now.”
“No, I don’t think I am.” Her voice broke again. “I think we’re in trouble, dear.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I saw Uncle Orrin out there, I went to talk to him. When he grabbed me, I yelled, ‘It was an accident! I only meant to push her down the stairs!’ ”
My whole body flinched. Sebastian was sitting up now, staring at me.
“I told him how it wasn’t on purpose, and how you and Bazzy got rid of the body. And he said not to tell you he was here, and took my phone. Are we in trouble?”
Not so much in trouble as dead. Sebastian had told me not to protect Faraday. Gertie warned me not to hide my failures.
Hendrik Wolvaardt had put it best: We may not all survive.
“Stay put. Sebastian and I will be there soon.” I hung up before she could reply. “We have to go.”
Sebastian pulled on his shirt. “My place?”
“No,” I said, checking the key on the silver chain around my neck. “The other side of Albany. The family knows we lied about Crystal.”