“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a happy camper. Want to sit down and tell me how your night went?”
He stretched out a hand; his fingers trailed down my cheek, my throat, slipped along the neckline of my top. I saw Abby’s eyes widen behind him, heard a quick rustle from Justin’s carrel. “God, you’re so sweet,” Rafe said. “You’re not as delicate as you look, are you? Sometimes I think the rest of us are the other way around.”
One of the Goon Squad had dug up Attila, who is the narkiest security guard in the known universe. He obviously went into the job in the hope of getting to crack the heads of dangerous criminals, but since these are thin on the ground in your average college library, he gets his kicks by making lost freshers cry. “Is this fella giving you any bother?” he asked me. He was trying to loom over Rafe, but the height difference was giving him trouble.
The wall went up straight away: Daniel and Abby and Justin snapped into attitudes of cool, poised ease, even Rafe straightened up and whipped his hand away from me and managed to look instantly, effortlessly sober. “Everything’s fine,” Abby said.
“I didn’t ask you,” Attila told her. “Do you know this fella?”
He was talking to me. I gave him an angelic smile and said, “Actually, Officer, he’s my husband. I did have a barring order against him, but now I’ve changed my mind and we’re off to shag deliriously in the Ladies.” Rafe started to snicker.
“There’s no fellas allowed in the Ladies,” said Attila ominously. “And yous are causing a disturbance.”
“It’s all right,” Daniel said. He stood up and took Rafe by the upper arm-the grip looked casual, but I could see his fingers digging in hard. “We were just leaving. All of us.”
“Get off me,” Rafe snapped, trying to shrug off Daniel’s hand. Daniel steered him briskly past Attila and down the long aisle of books, without looking back to see if the rest of us were following.
We gathered up our stuff, left in a hurry through Attila’s awful warnings, and found Daniel and Rafe in the foyer. Daniel was swinging his car keys from one finger; Rafe was leaning lopsidedly against a pillar and sulking.
“Well done,” Abby said to Rafe. “Really. That was classy.”
“Don’t start.”
“But what are we doing?” Justin asked Daniel. He was carrying Daniel’s stuff, as well as his own; he looked worried and overloaded. “We can’t just leave.”
“Why not?”
There was a brief, taken-aback silence. Our routine was so ingrained, I think it had stopped occurring to any of us that it wasn’t actually a law of nature, that we could break it if we wanted to. “What’ll we do instead?” I asked.
Daniel threw the car keys into the air and caught them. “We’re going to go home and paint the sitting room,” he said. “We’ve been spending far too much time in that library. A bit of work on the house will do us all good.”
To any outsider this would have sounded deeply weird-I could hear Frank in my head, God, they’re rock ’n’ roll, how do you stand the pace? But everyone nodded, even, after a moment, Rafe. I had already noticed that the house was their safe zone: whenever things got tense, one of them would steer the conversation onto something that needed fixing or rearranging, and everyone would settle down again. We were going to be in big trouble once the house was all sorted out and we didn’t have grouting or floor stains to use as our Happy Place.
It worked, too. Old sheets thrown over the furniture and cold bright air flooding through the open windows, crap clothes and hard work and the smell of paint, ragtime playing in the background, the naughty buzz of ditching college and the house swelling like an approving cat under the attention: it was exactly what we needed. By the time we finished the room, Rafe was starting to look sheepish instead of belligerent, Abby and Justin had relaxed enough to have a long comfortable argument about whether Scott Joplin sucked, and we were all in a much better mood.
“First dibs on the shower,” I said.
“Let Rafe have it,” said Abby. “To each according to his need.” Rafe made a face at her. We were sprawled on the dust sheets, admiring our work and trying to get up the energy to move.
“Once this dries,” Daniel said, “we’ll need to decide what, if anything, we’re putting on the walls.”
“I saw these really old tin signs,” said Abby, “up in the top spare room-”
“I am not living in a 1980s pub,” said Rafe. He had sobered up along the way, or else the paint fumes had got the rest of us high enough that we didn’t notice. “Aren’t there paintings, or something normal?”
“The ones that are left are all horrible,” Daniel said. He was leaning back against the edge of the sofa, with spatters of white paint in his hair and on his old plaid shirt, looking happier and more at ease than he had in days. “Landscape with Stag and Hounds, that kind of thing, and not particularly well done, either. Some great-great-aunt with artistic pretensions, I think.”
