The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,35

up.

I caught the tilted edge of his half smile. “Ah, then you are out of practice. Bet you a quarter I could beat you now.”

He’d always lost our races, probably because he’d had to help in his family’s store and lacked the endless summer afternoons I’d had to practice in. “A lady doesn’t bet,” I said primly. “But if I did, I’d be twenty-five cents richer.”

Samuel laughed—a boyish, immoderate sound I hadn’t heard since we were children—and I smiled rather foolishly back at him. And then somehow we were standing closer to one another, so that I had to tilt my head upward to see his face, and I could smell tobacco and sweat and something warm and green, like fresh-cut grass.

I thought a little wildly of The Ten Thousand Doors, of Adelaide kissing her ghost boy under the autumn constellations without a single heartbeat of doubt. I wished I were like her: feral and fearless, brave enough to steal a kiss.

Be a good girl.

… To hell with being good.

The thought was dizzying, intoxicating—I’d already broken so many rules tonight, left them smashed and glittering in my wake—what was one more?

Then I pictured Mr. Locke’s face as I’d swept from the smoking room—the stiff lines of outrage around his mouth, the disappointment in his chilled gray eyes—and my stomach went cold. My father was gone, and without Mr. Locke I would have nothing at all in the world.

I cast my eyes to the ground and stepped away, shivering a little in the cooling night. I thought I heard Samuel exhale.

There was a short silence while I relearned the trick of breathing. Then Samuel asked, lightly, “If you could go somewhere else right now, where would it be?”

“Anywhere. Another world.” I was thinking of the blue Door and the smell of the sea when I said it. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but Adelaide’s story had dragged it back to the surface of my memory.

Samuel didn’t laugh at me. “My family has a cabin on the north end of Champlain. We used to go every summer for a whole week, but my father’s health, and the shop… We have not gone in years.” I pictured Samuel as I’d known him before, young and wiry-armed and so tanned he seemed to emanate secondhand light. “It is not a very large or very nice cabin—just a cedar-shake box with a rusted stovepipe sticking out—but it is very alone, at the edge of its own island. When you look out the windows there is nothing but lake water and sky and pine trees.

“When I get sick of all this”—he waved his hand so widely it seemed to include not only Locke House, but everything inside it, every expensive bottle of imported wine, every stolen treasure, every trilling banker’s wife taking a glass from Samuel’s tray without ever seeing him—“I think of that cabin. Far away from bow ties and suit coats, from rich men and poor men and the space between them. That’s where I would go, if I could.” He smiled. “Another world.”

I was suddenly very certain he still read his story papers and adventure novels, still kept his eyes on the distant horizons.

It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.

I wasn’t. Then.

“It’s late. I’m going in,” I announced, and the harshness of it erased the miraculous circle we’d drawn around ourselves like a shoe smudging away a chalk line. Samuel stiffened. I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face—would I have seen regret or recrimination? Desire or desperation to match my own?—but merely whistled to Bad and turned away.

I hesitated at the door. “Good night, Samuel,” I whispered, and went in.

The room was dark. Moonlight drew pale edges around the ivory gown now crumpled on the floor, the burr of Jane’s hair against her pillow, the curve of Bad’s spine pressed against me.

I lay in bed, feeling the champagne tide retreating and leaving me beached, like some unfortunate sea creature. In its absence the Thing—heavy, black, suffocating—returned, as if it had been waiting all evening for the two of us to be alone. It slid oil-slick over my skin, filled my nostrils, pooled at the back