Chapter Text
Usually, Don Lockwood liked the history attached to his room: it was sad to remember that his aunt had died there, of course, but it was a mature, noble sadness that seemed to elevate him somehow – just like the bright, painful warmth that filled his chest at the thought of his father fighting to avenge her death there, a mingling of familial pride and second-hand sorrow.
Today was different. Today the room felt hateful, and the memory of Aunt Jessica was oppressive. He sprawled on his bed and scowled at the ceiling. Who knew if his parents had even told him the truth about her? Who knew if she’d existed at all, he thought, and knew he was being unfair. But he hadn’t started it, had he?
Noises drifted up the stairs: thumping, raised voices. Dad yelling, Mum banging things around in the kitchen. His door clicked open and the sounds suddenly grew louder, as though the volume of a radio had been turned up. Cici stuck her dark head around the door, her eyes sparkling with all the glee a younger sibling could manage at a superior elder brother’s fall from grace.
“Nice going, genius,” she said.
Don didn’t bother trying to argue with her; even though she was younger, Cici had always had a sharper tongue, and he didn’t need any additional stings to his ego today. Instead he snatched up a book from his bedside table and hurled it at her. Her head vanished, and he heard her light footsteps pattering away to her own room. The book bounced harmlessly off the wall, miles from where her head had been.
His parents’ voices filtered into the room more clearly through the open door.
“– shouldn’t have left something like that somewhere he could find it –”
“It was marked private, Lockwood, he had no right –”
“As if that would have stopped either of us when we were his age –”
A door slammed downstairs and the voices cut off again. Don rolled over on the bed and pressed his face into his pillow. At least Dad was on his side. It was so typical of Mum to make this all his fault. He began making a mental catalogue of all the ways Mum was unfair: shouted at him yesterday for leaving his muddy boots in the hall, when he’d already been on his way back to pick them up; let Cici stay over at Uncle George’s last week, even though it was a school night and he’d never been allowed to do that when he was her age; and most of all, written those horrible, horrible things about Dad that he could never, ever unsee.
There was another bang from the kitchen, and light, hurried footsteps on the stairs. Dad then. Mhm clumped everywhere, just like Don. He burrowed further into the pillow, wishing it would swallow him entirely, so that he didn’t have to hear the light rap on the door.
“Donnie? Can I come in?”
He wished he could throw another book, but his father would only catch it. He was like Cici that way, impossible to put on the wrong foot – or so Don had always believed.
“Go away,” he said, aiming for a threatening growl and somehow managing a squeaky whine instead. His voice was always doing that lately, and at the worst possible moments: another one of life’s great injustices.
“I think you know I can’t do that, Don,” said his dad, coming into the room. His casual tone didn’t fool Don for a second; he could hear how forced it was, how the anger thrummed beneath the veneer of calm. Don put the pillow over his head.
There was a creak and a sigh as Dad lowered himself into the chair beside his bed.
“Well,” he said reflectively. “You’ve gone and done it this time, haven’t you, mate?”
Don pretended not to hear as hard as he could. He held himself totally still and imagined he were dead, that he was the one who’d been ghost-touched, and then they’d all be sorry, wouldn’t they?
“Donnie, stop acting the fool.” The mattress beneath him wobbled as though his father had jostled the bed with his foot. “You’re too old for this.”
It was hard to convince Dad that there were any excuses for immaturity, seeing as how he’d spent his teenage years building a successful business, fighting ghosts and outsmarting murderers. Sometimes it seemed to Don like his father had sprung from the earth fully formed, dressed in his suit and carrying his rapier from birth. It was that invincibility that Don had always worshipped, and it was particularly painful to be confronted with it today, on the day that his faith had been shaken. The images from his mother’s writing hovered insistently in his mind, as demons might have tormented some ancient desert ascetic: his father as ragged, sloppy, manipulative, desperate. It was beyond bearing.
“She shouldn’t have done it!”
The words burst out of him before he knew he’d thought them.
“Who shouldn’t have done what?”
He clamped his lips tightly shut, lest they betray him again. After a moment, he felt the mattress sink as his father came to sit beside him.
“Don. You went through your mother’s things and took an envelope marked ‘private’ from a sealed box, and read the contents. You don’t really have a leg to stand on here.”
“Neither does she,” whispered Don.
“What was that?”
There was another pause, and then his father’s patience ran out. The pillow was snatched away and Donald was suddenly looking up into an irate face that bore painfully little resemblance to his own. Another injustice for the list.
“Donnie, what in God’s name is the matter?”
Oh no. There was a squeezing in his throat and a hot prickling behind his eyes, because never in his life had Don had the right reaction at the right time. He clapped his hands over his face to hide the tears and held his breath against the sob building in his chest.
“Don,” said Dad again, his voice bleeding once more into sympathy. “You know it’s just a little spat. Your mum’s not going to stay angry.”
“But I am!” His thoughts were all slippery things today, using the unbearable pressure inside him to force themselves out.
“You’re angry?” Dad let out an incredulous laugh. “Did you forget the part where you raided Mum’s private stuff?”
But at the mention of Mum, Don’s anger choked him again and his shoulders began to heave with sobs of impotent rage. His father sighed and pulled his head into his lap, his long fingers stroking through Don’s hair. It soothed him and hurt him in equal measure, to be gentled and caressed like a baby.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” his father asked, once the worst of the storm had passed, and the sobs had subsided into the occasional hiccough.
Don screwed up his face and spoke into the soft texture of his father’s suit jacket.
“She had no right to do it,” he said between gritted teeth. “She had no right to say those things about you.”
The movement of Dad’s fingers on his scalp stopped abruptly, and he seemed to stiffen.
“You’re angry about… what Lucy wrote?” His father’s voice was careful, and once again, Don could hear the tension below the thin layer of control. He had a feeling that he was stepping very, very far across some line he hadn’t known was drawn in sand he’d never noticed – and yet having come so far, he was unwilling to give ground.
“She lied about you,” he insisted.
There was a long silence.
“I’m afraid she didn’t, Don. Everything she wrote about me was true.”
“Then she lied in the books. They can’t both be true.”
His father let out a short, weary laugh. “I’ll grant you, those books went through a little creative editing. But you have to remember, mate, I asked her to do that. If you read those scenes she cut, then you know that too.”
Don’s whole belief system was crumbling: his father the hero, his mother the heroine, and between the two of them, a love story he’d worn like a shield since he was old enough to be read to… was any of it true?
“Why should I believe that?”
“Come on, Donnie, surely you know Mum well enough to know she wouldn’t lie.”
“I thought I did.”
Dad sighed again, deeper and longer, and when Don looked up at him, he was pinching the bridge of his nose.
“You know,” he said. “I think I owe Barnes a drink.”
“What?” Don was baffled.
“Never mind.” Dad pushed his hair out of his eyes and gave him a tired, almost shy smile. “Look, Don, would it help if I told you my side of things? How I remember everything?”
Donald sat up, anger forgotten. Dad, actually volunteering information about his youth? This was virtually unprecedented.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Yeah, that would be good actually.”
“Well then.” His dad settled back against the headboard, and Don scooted up to rest beside him. “Where to start?”
* * *
It was hard to say where it started, actually. Like another, more famous idiot in love, Lockwood had found himself in the middle before he knew he’d begun. One day, Lucy had just been Lucy, and then the next, she’d been Lucy. Perhaps it had happened on one of those sleepy summer mornings where they sparred and joked together in the basement, flicking chalk dust at each other and fighting over who’d stolen whose towel. Or maybe it had come upon him on some long night in a haunted house, when Lucy made him and George stand around while she Listened, and there was nothing to do except watch her face and dream stupid dreams.
Whatever the cause, he’d become aware of something stirring as Lucy’s first year at the company had drawn to a close. There was some thought he was always holding at bay, some little niggle he knew he couldn’t look at directly, lest it insist on being named. Clichéd and all as it was, it was on the night of the big gala at Fittes that the idea had finally burst out into the light – when he saw her in that beautiful blue dress. Although, more specifically, the moment had come when he pressed Jessica’s necklace into Lucy’s hand and she looked at him with an expression of naked shock and gratitude, unlike anything he’d ever seen from her before. That was the first time the image flashed across his mind, hot and sharp: I’d like to kiss Lucy Carlyle.
Being Lockwood, he dismissed it, burying the thought under work and ghosts and interviews with newspapers. The hubbub around the Bickerstaff case helped and he experienced a few days of blissfully clear thinking. Maybe I’m better, he thought. Maybe it was just a temporary thing – a stress response.
(This was his first mistake.)
All the same, whispered a treacherous voice in his head, it would be good to be sure, wouldn’t it? To get it out of your system, once and for all?
(And this was his second. Obviously.)
Once the thought wormed its way back in, it took up residence. It made itself nice and cosy in the back of his mind, and prodded him with its sting every once in a while. Go on, it would jeer when Lucy drifted off to sleep on his shoulder in the back of a night cab. Just once, where’s the harm in that?
His arguments against it began to falter. He tried to present to it the impropriety, the foolishness of a man with an agency to run and bills to pay doing something that could so seriously offend his most talented employee. The worm answered with an image of Lucy’s shining eyes as he’d handed her the necklace. You really think she’ll be offended?
Well, maybe not. She was always looking at him. Then again, what if she thought it meant more than it did? That would be worse again.
Easy, said the worm. Be clear with her, be honest. Tell her it means nothing before ever you do it. And if she says no, then so much complication saved.
Right, right. But what if she said yes? Would he not be distracted by her all the time? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?
More distracted than you are now?
Oh, the trouble that weasel voice caused – so rational, so reasonable, and yet the more it spoke, the more his peace of mind trembled and shook.
* * *
One not particularly special night, Lockwood reached a fever pitch. He lay awake, which was not in itself abnormal, but for once, he didn’t brood over past losses or scheme for future success. Instead, he thought about cold showers, and cold drinks, and buckets of icy water. Outside, the worst of the summer heat had passed, but in here, his skin was crawling with it.
You can’t go on like this, said the voice of the worm, and it sounded more objective and reasonable than ever. You’ll have to do something.
All right, all right, he would do it. Lockwood made a deal with himself: he would ask Lucy if he could kiss her, just once, and he would put it to her as bluntly and honestly as he could – no charm, no flattery, nothing unfair. And then she would say no, of course, because she at least retained some modicum of sanity, and he would be mortified, and the sheer humiliation of it all would stamp out that soft, persuasive voice forever. Then he could go back to normal.
He spent the rest of the night turning the idea over and over in his mind, piecing together the words he would use and pulling them apart again, like a restless assassin assembling and dismantling his weapon. After sleeping the light, unsatisfying sleep of the insomniac for an hour between seven and eight, Lockwood got up, feeling surprisingly well rested. He supposed it was because he’d finally decided to stop fighting with that beastly part of himself; it had been promised a decent meal at last, and had stopped rattling the bars of its cage.
Dressing proved to be a problem. Lockwood put on a clean trousers and shirt, then took them off, ironed them, and put them back on again. He spent half an hour trying to choose a tie, only to decide not to wear one at all – this wasn’t a business meeting, and he didn’t want to barge in on her with his armour in place. That wouldn’t be fair.
Too soon and not soon enough, it was time to go up to her. She was surely awake by now, and besides, if he waited any longer, he’d never do it at all. He went and made her a cup of tea, partly for the sake of having an excuse to come into her room beyond propositioning her like a madman and partly out of some weird inner taboo against making a social call without bringing some sort of gift. In his defence, he hadn’t slept much.
“Morning Luce,” he called through her door. “Tea?”
At her sleepy, affirmative mumble, he let himself in, and then he really was there, watching Lucy shuffle upright against her pillows and reach for the cup he’d brought her. Lockwood stood at the foot of her bed with his hands in his pockets and gave himself a second to really look at her, a rare luxury. Her hair was matted on one side where she had slept on it and her eyes were still bleary with sleep. He wanted to kiss her so badly it nearly turned his bones to liquid.
“Look, Luce.” He’d begun, he’d started and there was no way back now, thank God. “I’d like to ask you something, but I want to be very clear that you can say no.”
“Sure,” she said, blinking over her tea as though she wasn’t quite seeing straight yet. “Go ahead.”
It felt wrong to ask her like this, towering over her when she was still half asleep.
“Can I sit?” he asked and she gave him one of her standard Lucy Carlyle™ looks, the one that said “you’re unbelievably thick, but I forgive you this time”.
“Is that all? ‘Course you can.”
“That’s not –” As usual, she’d managed to wrong-foot him entirely. Lockwood sighed and sat on the bed next to her. “Never mind. Look, what I wanted to say is – I mean, is there any way we could…”
“Spit it out,” she said, looking more and more impatient.
Only the thought that he couldn’t possibly survive another night like last night made him say it.
“Would you mind if I kissed you?”
Lucy spat tea all over the blanket his granny had crocheted. Well, that wasn’t exactly the response he’d hoped for.
“I’m sorry,” she sputtered, “but I could have sworn you said –”
“Don’t play dumb,” he pleaded. He’d had to claw through so many of his own layers of denial to get here and he really couldn’t handle hers too. “You heard what I said.”
“Yes, I suppose I did. Er, Lockwood, why?”
Because I can’t sleep at night for thinking of you. Because I think you’re gorgeous even when you have sleep in your eyes. Because I think I’ll go mad if I don’t.
The voice in the back of his head seemed to cackle shrilly. Idiot, you think Lucy wants to hear any of that from you? Be sensible, for God’s sake!
Lockwood smiled bitterly. “Because the thought keeps on occurring to me that I’d like to, and it’s getting rather wearing. I’d like to get it out of my system.”
Lucy hid her expression behind a large gulp of tea, and then winced as though it burned on the way down. She gazed into space for a long time, and Lockwood had a sudden intuition that she was going to refuse. It was an agony and a relief all at once.
“You really can say no,” he reminded her, as a condemned man might urge the executioner to hurry up and put him out of his misery. “If you don’t want to.”
“No!” she blurted. Hm. It turned out there were worse things than waiting for the axe to fall. Lockwood had no idea what he looked like in that moment, had no idea what he might have said if she hadn’t spoken again. “I mean, no, I do want to. That is yes, I do. If you want to.”
The sun came out from behind a cloud and bathed the attic with a joyous, golden light, or so it seemed to Lockwood. He felt himself smiling idiotically, and he couldn’t even bring himself to be embarrassed by it, as he leaned towards her – only for Lucy to yelp and jump away from him, spilling yet more tea. Somewhere, his granny was rolling in her grave.
“What, you mean now?” she demanded.
“What’s wrong with now?” he asked desperately.
“I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”
“Does that really matter?”
“You can’t taste the inside of my mouth right now!”
The inside of her mouth. Lockwood’s thoughts came to a halt with a cartoonish screeching noise and his ears filled with white noise. Distantly, he heard himself tell her to go brush her teeth if she must and then she was scrambling out of the bed and into her tiny bathroom. He sat there, staring at the shoes he’d polished to a shine that morning, and waited for her to come to her senses. She’d brush her teeth, splash some water on her face, realise the insanity of what they were doing and come storming out full of righteous anger. He’d slink downstairs with his tail between his legs, and after a few days, they’d both forget, and everything would go back to normal. Normal, normal, normal, he wanted normal.
“Um.” Lucy was back, practically squirming with discomfort. Her loose, threadbare pyjamas had slipped a little, leaving one of her shoulders half bare. “Do you want me to change?”
That was a funny way of saying “get out and never speak to me again”. Lockwood felt a spark of hope and his smile got away from him again.
“You’re fine as you are,” he said. Was he speaking too loudly? It was hard to hear anything over the sound of his pulse in his ears. He gestured towards the bed, projecting more confidence than he felt. “Come sit.”
She came and sat, her face blank as slate. But this time, when he leaned towards her, she didn’t shy away.
He wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing. He wasn’t even sure if he liked it. The world receded into a sort of nebulous fog, where Lucy was the one solid thing, and it was a little like the first time he’d had a beer and he’d been afraid to stand up and reveal how unsteady he was. The only certainty was that he didn’t want to stop, and when the clarity of that thought broke through the haze, he knew he had to.
Lockwood pulled back and there was a delicious moment where Lucy seemed to struggle to return to herself, her eyes still closed, her cheeks and lips a deep, deep red. Then she blinked and it was gone. He smiled at her again, helplessly, but she didn’t smile back. She was studying him like a specimen on a slide and it made something shrink away inside him.
“Thank you,” he said, for the sake of saying something.
“Don’t mention it,” she said in a polite, even tone. “Itch scratched, I hope?”
The shrinking thing shrivelled away to almost nothing. It was nothing more and nothing less than what he’d implied himself, but the coarseness of the expression, the confirmation of how little it meant to her hit him like a blast of cold air, finally achieving what no amount of late night appeals to his own conscience had managed. Icy shame welled up in the depths of his heart; he never wanted to think of this moment again.
“Very much so,” he answered firmly, a full stop at the end of this whole horrid sentence. It was time for normality again. “How about eggs for breakfast? Boiled or poached?”
“Scrambled,” she said, without missing a beat. It could have been any morning for all her tone told him. He could have been a waiter taking her order at a restaurant.
“As you wish,” Lockwood replied – a private joke, with himself as both the audience and the object.
* * *
Lockwood hated cooking like he hated every household chore, but he had offered Lucy eggs and eggs he would make her. Normal, normal, normal, this was all so normal.
“Good morning, Lucy,” he said when she finally came into the kitchen. “How did you sleep?”
“Fine. Yeah, yeah. Fine, thanks.” She was looking at him like he’d personally kicked every puppy in London, and he cringed internally. “How about you?”
“About the usual,” he said, which was a lie. An hour in one night was bad even by his standards. But to admit that was to admit to how disturbed his equilibrium had been, and he couldn’t do that when they were smoothly papering over his moment of insanity, could he? He handed her the plate of scrambled eggs and she started shovelling them down in her usual semi-feral manner. He didn’t find it cute or endearing, he did not.
* * *
The days that followed were unsatisfactory. At first, the stinging humiliation of Lucy’s dismissive words were enough to make him try and drive the memory of the kiss out of his head entirely. For a while, the embarrassment seemed to be too strong a force for even the insidious logic of his nagging voice to contend with, and he tried to be pleased about this. The purpose of the kiss had been achieved, although he wished it might have been achieved less painfully.
But then he started noticing Lucy behaving oddly; when she wasn’t staring out of windows with a secret, dreamy smile, she was watching him with an eager intensity that she tried to hide if anyone caught her eye. Was it possible that she wasn’t as unaffected as he’d thought? She could be as guarded as he was, in her own way, using her prickly gruffness just like he used his defensive layer of flippant charm. He wrestled with his uncertainty until his struggles opened a crack in his self-control, and in slithered the quiet, reasonable voice once again.
(This was another important milestone in the road map of his mistakes.)
The voice was at its most docile and unobtrusive. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as you imagined, it said mildly, and that was far too comforting a thought to dismiss out of hand. Lockwood cheered up for a few days: he had gotten that terrible, raging desire out of his system and Lucy didn’t seem to hate him. Everything was back to normal. He was glad. Really.
Really?
Yes, yes, really.
The voice subsided again and he congratulated himself on having defeated it. He was so confident in his success that he barely even blinked when he ended up alone with Lucy in the practice room one day. He’d been putting her and George through their paces until George cried off to make lunch. Lucy was struggling too, he could tell by the slight tremors in her legs, but being Lucy, she wouldn’t admit it. (Later, examining his conscience, he would ask himself how much of this was deliberate: had he trained them that hard because he knew George would get tired and leave, and Lucy would doggedly continue? He couldn’t deny the possibility. What a piece of work is man!)
Eventually, he called for a break, and she flopped instantly into a chair, sucking down big gulps of air. He passed her a water bottle and was mopping his sweaty face and neck with a towel when his skin prickled, warning him that he was being watched. He looked up to find Lucy staring at him, her pupils blown wide and her lips slightly parted. He felt like he was being carved up for dinner, and found it oddly enjoyable.
“Feeling all right, Luce?” he asked.
She swallowed and looked away.
“Never better,” she said, and even though she’d been sitting down for a couple of minutes, there was still a breathless note in her voice that made Lockwood toss the towel aside and stand up straighter. He dragged his eyes over her, allowing himself to take her in properly for the first time since they’d kissed and the sight of her, glowing with sweat and all her fierce vitality, hit him like a revelation. What a phenomenal capacity the human mind had for self-deception, he thought distantly. He had damn near convinced himself that he really could just kiss her once and forget about it. Unbelievable.
“I hope you don’t feel like anything’s changed between us, Lucy,” he said. “After what happened the other day.”
She started, but recovered well, sipping casually from her water bottle.
“Oh no,” she said easily. “Nothing at all.”
Funny how the decision that had taken him weeks of sleepless nights the first time could be made in an instant now; funny how all his carefully constructed progress, his distance, his newfound maturity came to nothing when faced with the reality of her.
“Then it wouldn’t change anything if we did it again,” he says, taking a step towards her. “Would it?”
Lucy rose, watching him warily, but without fear. It was more the look one predator might give another, if they encountered each other in a quiet wood at night: I could take you if I had to, the look said, so don’t make me have to.
“No,” she repeated. “Nothing at all.”
“Good,” he said, triumph welling up inside him. That helpless urge to smile overcame him again as he walked towards her, taking his time, savouring the moment.
“Wait, you mean now?”
He sighed, smile faltering and wondered if he should remind her again that she could say no if she wanted, rather than making up silly excuses. But he didn’t want her to say no.
“What’s wrong with now?” he asked, taking another step towards her. He was doing a poor job of hiding his impatience.
“I’m all sweaty,” she said, and it was true. It had formed gleaming beads on her neck and collar bones, like the fine chain she wore. If anything, it heightened her appeal, but he suspected she’d be disgusted if he said that.
“So am I,” he reminded her instead, still moving forward.
“That’s not the same thing!”
“I fail to see the difference,” he told her and was suddenly aware of her hands on him; in his desire to be close to her, he’d walked them right into the wall, and now Lucy was leaning back against it, her hands flat on his chest as though to push him away – but then she was reaching up instead, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him down, and down, and down. Lockwood fell a long way.
* * *
Sleep eluded him again that night – although elude was a misnomer, as it suggested he’d chased after it. In reality, Lockwood didn’t even try. He didn’t undress or sit on his bed, or do any of the things he’d been advised to do to fend off his insomnia. Instead, he paced his room like a tiger in an undersized enclosure, and tried to work his way out of the maze of his thoughts.
His desire for Lucy could no longer be shrugged off as a temporary fit of insanity that could be eased by cold showers and one or two small snippets of indulgence. That much had become apparent to him in the practice room earlier. No, it was a much stronger beast than that, and he’d have to rethink his situation accordingly. Obviously, he couldn’t afford to let it rule his life entirely – there was still an agency to run and bills to pay, and more importantly, a family legacy to establish. Lucy was crucial to all that, and he couldn’t let this monstrous want he had for her drive her away. Lockwood spun his father’s signet ring on his finger, brooding, considering.
How close would Lucy let him get to her, that was the question: how much was too much? Despite the mess he’d made of that first kiss, the last few days had shown that Lucy wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea in general. After that moment in the rapier room earlier, he’d jokingly suggested that Lucy would need to stand on something to save his neck in the future, and although she’d seemed shocked by the implication that their arrangement might become more regular, she hadn’t directly said no… That was encouraging. Then again, she hadn’t said yes either.
Like all things in life, it was a matter of balance, Lockwood told himself. He might not be able to squash his hunger completely out of sight anymore, but he would still need to keep it on a leash. The leash was just going to have to get a little longer, that was all. A strategy, that was what he needed: a strong set of rules to keep himself in line, stop him from trespassing too far on Lucy’s patience.
Seating himself at his desk, he grabbed a pen and began roughly scribbling on the back of an envelope:
1) Never more than five minutes at a time.
2) Never more than twice in one week.
3) No hands on bare skin.
4) Never in her room. Or mine.
5) Never mention feelings – remain professional.
The simplicity and practicality of the list satisfied him. If he could stick to that, a mere ten minutes of very restrained madness a week, he thought he would do very well. He would make sure to keep his interactions with her in those moments as formal and to the point as possible, so that there could be no risk of her thinking that he was asking for something she wasn’t interested in giving. And he would simply not allow himself to end up in a situation where he was tempted to go further than kissing her. All in all, it seemed very reasonable.
As ever, having a plan in place comforted him. Lockwood took a moment to memorise the items of the list, before shredding the envelope into tiny pieces (the possibility of George finding it and figuring it out didn’t bear thinking about). Then he went to bed, his conscience quiet, if not quite clear.
* * *
“Dad… you didn’t really think that would work, did you?”
“Listen, do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”
“… sorry.”