Frenemies (9 page)

“Stay away from Helen!” Nate ordered me, leaning closer for emphasis. “I’m glad that you want to be friends, Gus, but ranting on about what good friends we are in some weird attempt to make Helen jealous isn’t going to make me anything but mad. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

He wasn’t making sense, of course, but I understood him anyway. I could see how it had gone. Realizing she’d overplayed her hand, Helen had no doubt taken advantage of the holiday week to let Nate drag this story out of her. She’d even gotten “mad” at him, the better to make him feel all self-righteous and furious with me.

“Let me guess,” I said dryly. Because I could practically see the scene unfold in my head like a movie. “Helen stopped by to extend an olive branch, I ranted alarmingly about my
close friendship
with you, and she wasn’t necessarily
threatened
but … ?”

Nate looked as if he pitied me.

“Yes,” he said. “She told me everything.”

It was genius, really. You had to appreciate the beautiful simplicity of it. She was so good, it was scary.

I almost regretted the fact that I was going to have to kill her.

Preferably with my bare hands.

chapter eleven

I
let my extreme, focused outrage take charge, and the next thing I knew I was standing in front of the grand house in Winchester, watching my breath form huge clouds in the frigid night air. I tucked myself a little deeper into my coat and wished passionately for a car.

A few minutes later—when I was reconsidering my burning need to race back into the city and confront Helen in her lair, mostly because my feet were turning into ice, and not metaphorically—Henry’s Jeep pulled into the driveway.

I was going to have to learn to be more specific about the wishes I made.

A million dollars in my pocket right now
, I thought fervently, but nothing happened. There were only my hands in my pockets, curled up in their mittens. It was very disappointing, and then there was Henry to contend with, too.

“And what to my wondering eyes did appear,” Henry intoned as he climbed the front steps toward me. He stopped on the step below mine and smirked. We were at eye level. “But Augusta Curtis, Boston’s own Christmas cheer.”

I wanted very much to fling something snarky right back at him, but I held myself in check. Not because I’d suddenly discovered my inner maturity, but because I’d had an idea. I looked at him for a long moment, considering it. It was flawed, that was for sure.

“What?” he asked, looking more amused than unnerved. “Is it because I said ‘Augusta’? I don’t know what your issue is with it, it’s a great old name. Of course I could be biased—”

“Is there any possibility at all that you would do me a huge favor?” I asked him.

Henry smiled, and rocked back on his heels.

“Gus,” he said, as if enjoying the shape of my name in his mouth. “There’s always the
possibility
.”

“How much of a possibility?”

“That would depend on a number of factors, obviously.” He was enjoying himself. “How much you wanted the favor versus how much fun it would be for me to do it, versus—of course—how much
more
fun it might be for me
not
to do it. It’s a tricky analysis that can only be performed on a case-by-case basis.”

I frowned, thinking it over.

I had been
on fire
with self-righteous indignation after Nate stalked away from me, true, but this inferno had not managed to persuade Amy Lee to leave the party.

“You need to let go of this,” she’d snapped, glaring at me. “Stalking your ex through his girlfriend is the kind of thing that never, ever ends well.”

“She needs to be taken down as a matter of
liberty
and
justice
!” I replied, outraged. “This has nothing to do with
stalking
!”

“It has to do with Nate, and I’m not driving you back into Boston so you can make the whole situation worse,” Amy Lee had told me. “End of discussion.”

“Just see if I’m ever available again for one of
your
hours of need,” I told her then, but she was already ignoring me.

In retrospect, I would have been better off concealing my motives. I could see that now. Amy Lee was very often prickly about the strangest things, and sometimes required careful handling.

It was too late now: I was freezing my ass off on a front porch in Winchester.

The front porch that now held Henry Farland. I gazed at him, thoughtfully.

“You’re trying to figure the best way to work this, aren’t you?” Henry asked.

“I might be.”

“Because you think a specific approach will somehow make me forget or overlook the past few weeks?” He shook his head. “I can only think of one that might work.” He considered. “No, two. But it’s a little bit too cold for either of them.”

I shook my head at him. “You’re—”

Just in time, I caught myself. Henry smiled.

“If I were you,” he advised me, “I’d just ask.”

Which was how I found myself bundled up in the front of Henry’s car, being chauffeured back into Boston. He had the heat turned up and the music low. I-93 spread out before us, the lights of Medford twinkling off to the right as we headed south toward home.

Henry drove like a benign lunatic—which was to say, he was better than most of the other drivers on the road. Massachusetts drivers weren’t called “Massholes” by accident.

“Why are you so quiet?” Henry asked, shifting in his seat.

I was quiet because I was suspended in the dark with him, racing down the highway, with nothing to do but realize how intimate it could be to find yourself cocooned in a car with someone else. Intimate and awkward. Particularly someone else with whom you had
a history.
I hunched down in my seat and kept my eyes on the red taillights dotting the road in front of us, wishing he would speed up.

(That one didn’t work, either. Apparently the wish thing was a one-shot deal.)

This was exactly why I’d gone to great lengths to keep from thinking about this situation in the first place. I avoided Henry for a reason.

I was so flushed in the face I was worried he might actually be able to see me glowing red in the darkness.

“I thought the point of this was for you to be more entertaining than that stupid party,” Henry said when I still hadn’t answered him. Because, obviously, despite his many nefarious powers, he still couldn’t read my mind. “If I wanted to sit in uncomfortable silence, I’d find myself a girlfriend.”

“Wow,” I said, knocked out of my discomfort, which, it occurred to me belatedly, might have been his intention. “Was that sexist or misogynistic? Or both?”

“Just the voice of sad experience.”

“I believe you,” I told him. “Where’s Ashley tonight?”

“I think we already talked about Ashley,” Henry said reprovingly, although his mouth was twitching. He was trying not to laugh.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Not your girlfriend, just your fuck-buddy.”

He actually laughed then. “I think that’s a glass house you’re standing in, Gus.”

He had a point. I felt myself flush again, even hotter and more ashamed, but for some reason he still seemed to be amused.

“Anyway,” he said after a moment of silence. “Ashley’s kind of crazy, it turns out.”

“I would be surprised if she’s even twenty—”

“She’s twenty-two! I think.”

“—So you shouldn’t be surprised. You were crazy at that age yourself. I was there, I remember.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Henry said, looking over at me. “I don’t know why or how, but I can pick out the raving lunatic lurking in a roomful of normal women. It’s like I have this homing device. Usually you can’t even tell when you look at her, but it’s there. Waiting. Everything’s fine for a while and then BOOM! She goes nuts.”

I considered that for a moment. “Maybe it’s you.”

“I figured that might be your take on it.”

“I don’t mean because you’re evil,” I hastened to assure him. “Although, of course—”

“Of course.” He let out a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. “Satan. Got it.”

“I just mean, maybe there’s something about the kind of boyfriend you are that lets the lunatic creep out.” I was warming to my topic. “I think everyone walks around with the
possibility
of crazy lurking around in them, but it takes certain circumstances for it to burst free.”

“Which you think I provide,” Henry said. “I’m like the conduit for craziness.”

“Maybe. It’s like how Georgia will date only men who are, essentially, genetically predetermined to be assholes.” This didn’t qualify as sharing personal information with the enemy. Henry had known Georgia as long as he’d known me. He knew the guys Georgia dated.

“And what about you?” he asked.

“Me?” I shot him a look, but he didn’t appear to notice. “I don’t really date that much.”

“Just disastrously,” Henry said, and let out a laugh.

Ha ha.

He ignored the scowl I sent his way easily enough, and before I knew it we were sitting outside my building. I wanted to flounce out of the car, slam the door behind me, and have that action garner the sort of response it would if I were a girl like Helen. If I were Helen, the faintest
hint
of disapproval would have the man groveling. A slammed car door would guarantee weeks of flower deliveries, I was sure of it.

I didn’t know what it said about me that I wanted that, but I suspected it was a moot point in any case, because I didn’t do it, because I wouldn’t
stoop
to Helen’s
level.
(And also because my disapproval had so far inspired Henry only to match my level of snideness and immaturity whenever possible. There was a decided lack of blossoms.)

“Thank you for driving me home,” I said very stiffly. “Um. Have a good night.”

“Oh, come on.” Henry had one arm propped up on the steering wheel, and leaned back against his door so he could face me. “What are you going to do now?”

I glared at him. He returned the glare mildly, with a hint of smile, as usual.

“Things,” I said coldly.

“Like what things?” He grinned. “I’m not driving all the way back out to Winchester. It’s Saturday night. You look like you want to kill somebody and I’m betting that’s the most entertainment I’m likely to see tonight. Bring it on.”

“I think, actually, that you’re the raving lunatic. That exposure to you makes people
feel
like they’re also crazy but, no, it’s really just you.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” Henry said. “Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

Which is how I found myself trudging up the stairs in my apartment building with Henry at my side. Not an eventuality I’d ever thought to plan for. I was actually struck dumb by the fact that it was happening.

“I just have to change,” I said when we got to my door.

“I heard you the first time,” he said, his eyes laughing at me as he stood over me. “I promise not to look.”

“The
point
is that my apartment is a mess,” I said. A little bit desperate.

“Because I care deeply about the state of your apartment?”

“I do!” Just flat-out desperate.

“Why does everything with you regress to the sixth grade?” Henry asked. Rhetorically, I assumed.

“Look, I don’t live in a historic town house, okay? It’s just the same crappy one-bedroom I’ve had for years,” I said—still just as desperate and also a bit too loud. It reverberated up and down the hall. Henry looked incredulous.

But he didn’t get a chance to respond, because the door next to mine flew open then, and Irwin the Irritating—clad, as ever, in that same tatty bathrobe—threw himself into the hall.

“Really, Miss Curtis!” he scolded me. “I must protest! Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s eleven-thirty,” Henry said. In an overly helpful sort of tone, as if he thought Irwin had ventured out to ask the time because he really wanted to know. I considered the fact that he was a wiseass for a moment, but then turned my attention to Irwin.

“It’s actually
Ms.
Curtis,” I interjected. Henry slid me a look that suggested he wished I would shut up.

“Your dog has been barking for hours!” Irwin snapped at me.

This was a complete lie. Linus the Wonder Watchdog wasn’t even barking as I stood there, talking, directly outside the door. The only things that Linus barked about were when he wanted to a) go outside while I was sleeping, b) eat while I was sleeping, or c) attack whoever was foolish enough to ring my buzzer. Otherwise, please. He was too lazy.

“He seems to have stopped,” Henry pointed out. Helpfully.

Irwin brandished his notebook at me. “I’ll be sending my complaints to the landlord! Just you wait!”

“Fine,” I snapped at him. “Go right ahead! I’m sure you’ve been doing it for months. The landlord doesn’t care what happens in this building unless it can turn into a lawsuit, though, just so you know.”

“I’ll be sure to note
that
remark as well,” Irwin huffed, and sure enough, rooted around in his pocket until he found a pen. He extracted it with a flick of his wrist. As Henry and I watched, he stuck his tongue between his teeth, opened the notebook, and began to write in absurdly tiny letters across the page.

Next to this, having Henry in my apartment seemed by far the lesser of two evils.

“So,” I said when the door had slammed behind us, Linus was leaping up to lick at Henry’s face, and Irwin was left out in the hallway to scribble in his journal all night long for all I cared, “this is home sweet home.” I eyed him as I flicked on the lights and saw him take in the towering mass of books. “Be careful. Some of the stacks are dangerous.”

“That’s what people used to say in college,” Henry murmured.

I decided not to answer that, and made for the bedroom. The bedroom door didn’t really close any longer, thanks to the closet’s worth of clothes on the wire rack that hung over it, but I tried to shove at it anyway.

I was aware of Henry inside my personal space in a way I really didn’t like. For a long moment I just stood in the middle of my room, picturing him standing in the living room with that superior smirk on his face, and it made me a little bit breathless. Was he judging me by my books? Because that’s what I would be doing.
Had done
, in fact, when in his library. He would be the sort to look down on romance novels, I fumed. And he would think I only had the latest eight-hundred-page literary tome out there to be trendy. Or maybe he would think the fat philosophy books were only displayed so guests would think I was an intellectual. I could practically
hear
his disparaging thoughts about my Nora Roberts hardcover collection, the snob!

I flung off my new dress and hurried into the nearest pair of clean jeans. It was way too cold out there, and I didn’t think I’d be able to confront Helen while suffering from hypothermia. I pulled on a turtleneck sweater and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. A pair of boots and I was done.

I burst out through the door, prepared to deliver a stinging defense of my reading choices, and found Henry lounging on the couch with my ecstatic—and traitorous—dog lying next to him to receive his petting. He looked completely at ease and not at all snobby or superior. It stopped me in my tracks.

“That was fast,” Henry observed.