Page 22 of Again with Feeling

Kiefer wasn’t looking at me. He dabbed at his nose with the tissues and gave an experimental sniffle. “Our new apartment.”

I didn’t remember sitting down, but my butt was on the floor, and I was staring at him, watching him study the bloody tissues as though they contained some kind of mystery. The crash of the waves was distant and rhythmic. Goose bumps broke out on my arms, and from a long way off, I remembered that Hemlock House could feel cold even at the height of summer.

A door shut in the distance, and then familiar footsteps rang out on the stairs. I sat where I was. It was like a horror movie. Or like a nightmare. All I could do was listen as the steps came closer: firm, confident, measured. Move, I thought. Or tried to think. But my head felt empty except for the crash and sigh of the waves.

The door opened, and Bobby stood there. He was dressed in his uniform. His black hair was in its usual perfect part. That first moment was one of the rare times I’d seen Bobby off balance, and I thought I glimpsed something in his expression that I didn’t know how to read. And then his face closed again, and he crouched next to Kiefer.

“What happened?” he asked.

Kiefer launched into an explanation that didn’t really explain anything. It mostly consisted of grabbing Bobby’s arm and struggling with tears as he lurched back and forth through the sequence of events.

When he’d finished, Bobby looked at me.

“I thought someone had broken in,” I said. And a nasty little voice inside my head said that someonehadbroken in—and that someone was right here. “I checked—” I gave a wave toward the still-open mirror door that I hoped would explain, nonverbally, the concept ofsecret passage. “—and I thought he was stealing your stuff.”

Bobby’s gaze moved to the fallen box and his personal items strewn across the floor.

“I thought it would be cute—” Kiefer began.

“He thought it would be cute,” I said over him, “if you spent your first night together at your new apartment.”

If you didn’t know Bobby, you wouldn’t have noticed his flinch.

“Please don’t be mad,” Kiefer babbled. “It was a stupid idea, and I thought it would be fun, and I never should have done anything without asking you. I know I shouldn’t have touched your stuff—”

Bobby shushed him and spoke into the flow of words, stopping them with his usual calm. “I’m going to get you some ice for your nose.” And then he paused, as though to give the next sentence its own weight, and said, “I’m not angry.”

Kiefer was crying again, trying to catch the tears with the bloody tissues. Bobby let out a controlled breath and plucked clean ones from the box.

“I’ll get it,” I said. Somehow, my legs were still working, and I got to my feet. “I’ll get the ice.”

“No,” Bobby said.

But too late.

He caught up with me on the stairs. “I’ll take care of this,” he said. “I’m sorry he interrupted your writing.” He let out another of those controlled breaths. “And I’m sorry he frightened you. I know you’ve had bad experiences with people breaking into the house—”

“I wasn’t frightened. I was concerned.” At the bottom of the stairs, I made a sharp left. “And I took care of it.”

“I’m sorry—”

“He seems sweet.” And a vicious part of me wanted to say,Just like West. Somehow, though, I managed to say, “I’m sorry about all of this. Typical Dash, right? I botched the whole thing.”

“You didn’t botch anything. His nose isn’t broken and—”

Another of those sharp little turns took me into the servants’ dining room, and I shut the door behind me.

Bobby, of course, just kept coming. “—he’s fine,” he said as he came after me. “Would you slow down for a second? I’m trying to—”

But I was already passing into the kitchen, and I shut that door behind me too. Hard.

And Bobby barreled after me. At the refrigerator, he caught my arm. He didn’t pull. He didn’t even grip me particularly tightly. I stared at the refrigerator.

“I’m trying to talk to you,” he said again. And then all that control began to unravel, and he said, “Really? You’re not even going to look at me?”

I spun around, and in the process, I freed my arm and spoke in clipped, detached fragments. “I’m trying to get ice. For your boyfriend. Who’s got a bloody nose. Because I startled him when he was packing up all your belongings so you could move into your new apartment!” The sentence had started off at a normal volume, but by the end it was a full-on shout. I kept shouting. “Were you going to tell me you were moving out? Or was I just going to get the last month’s rent in the mail?”

“I don’t pay you rent,” Bobby said. “And of course I was going to tell you.”

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