Page 25 of Holly & Hemlock
We’re silent again. The heat from the fire fills the room slowly, forcing the cold back into the corners. My hands begin to tingle, sensation returning like pins and needles. I rub them together, then fold them in my lap, feeling the imprint of his touch lingering inthe flesh.
I laugh in triumph as a log shifts and the fire roars now. I look at Lane and could swear I see a real a smile on his lips.
Lane’s posture relaxes as the fire takes. He leans back, propping himself against the brick of the hearth, legs stretched out in front of him. The light casts his features in strange relief—nose broken at some distant point, jaw dark with stubble, a scar slicing down from his temple to the edge of his beard. He is magnetic, and I find myself watching him from the corner of my eye.
He catches me at it, and for a moment neither of us looks away.
“You don’t ask a lot of questions,” he says, voice softer now. “Most city people never stop.”
I think of Larkin, of his endless interrogations, of my own compulsive need to fill every silence. “Maybe I’m tired of answers.”
Lane’s mouth quirks. “Or maybe you’re just listening.”
We sit like that for a long while, the storm receding into a distant thud. The house groans and settles around us, the timbers expanding with the new heat, the plaster creaking as if the walls themselves are exhaling.
After a while, Lane says, “My old man used to say this place was alive. Said the house remembered everyone who ever passed through.” He scratches at his jaw, the movement nervous. “Sometimes I think it’s just waiting for the last of us to give up, so it can finally rest.”
I hear the loneliness in his words, and it echoes in me.
“You never left,” I say, not a question.
He shrugs. “Somebody had to look after it.” He glances at me, expression unreadable in the flicker. “You plan to?”
“Leave?” I ask.
He nods.
“I don’t know,” I say, because it’strue.
He leans forward, elbows on knees, and the firelight paints his eyes in shades of steel and flint. “Don’t let it keep you if you don’t want to stay. There’s nothing here worth freezing for.”
I smile, a real one this time and nudge him with my shoulder. “Oh I don’t know about that.”
He huffs, almost a laugh.
We lapse into silence again but it’s comfortable. I want to ask him about his family, about his scars, about the reason he always looks as if he expects the ceiling to fall at any second. Instead, I just watch the flames climb higher, eating away at the cold.
At some point, Lane stands. He walks to the window, peers out into the storm. His silhouette is huge against the frost-rimed glass, the faintest edge of light tracing his shoulders and the thick cords of his neck.
He says, “Storm’s dying down. If the chimney holds, we’ll keep this place warm tonight.”
I nod, unable to look away from the imprint he’s left on the room.
The fire is alive now, greedily swallowing the offerings of bark and resin, leaping upward to lick at the ancient brick. The glass doors of the Blue Room’s fireplace are open, and the heat rolls out in uneven pulses. It lights the space with a glow that isn’t quite gold, more the red of late-afternoon sun. I sit as close as I can without burning, knees drawn up.
“Do you want me to go?” he asks, voice nearly drowned by the crackle and pop.
“No,” I say. “Stay.” The honesty is a surprise, even to me.
He crosses the room in three steps, each one slow, deliberate, as if pacing himself against some invisible current. He settles down on the rug beside me again, leaving an arm’swidth of distance—nothing, really, in a room this size. I can smell the pine resin from his shirt, the leftover ozone of snow.
We sit in silence. The logs snap and shift, throwing sparks up the flue. I hear the pop and creak of the house settling, the strange, underwater groans of old beams reacting to the sudden warmth. Lane watches the flames, jaw set, hands clasped between his knees.
I speak first. “Your father kept the fires going all night here?”
He nods. “Didn’t trust the boiler. Said he’d rather freeze to death on his own terms.”
“Was he always here?” I ask. “At Hemlock?”
