Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,93

all of the stuff she thought was meant to be kept carefully bottled inside her own personal apothecary. Now someone wanted in, to take the lids off the vials, to peer at the contents. Stevie was unaware that people were even allowed to talk about emotions this frankly. This was not how things happened at home.

She shut the door. Her hand shook as she did it, but that didn’t matter. She took the few, nervous steps to the bed and sat gingerly on the edge. Sitting on his bed. This was new, dangerous territory.

He didn’t move.

“So?” she said. “What do we do?”

“What do you want to do?”

Her eyes were going in and out of focus. She moved over toward him and reached around, putting her hand on the back of his head and pulling him closer. She wondered if he would strain against her hand, if this was all wrong, but his head moved forward. She pressed her lips to his.

This time, the kissing was slow as they delicately balanced on the very knife edge of the bed. Their lips met and they would be together for a minute, then they would both stop and stay where they were for another few seconds, faces together, before doing it again. There was no pressure, no anxiety. It was like they were talking easily through the kisses. Her hand slid down his chest and she felt his heart beating hard. He was stroking her hair, running his fingers up the short strands. He leaned back against the bed, and Stevie rested on top of him gently.

And then, a knock.

“David?” Pix called.

Everything stopped dead. Reality came down with an audible thump. This could not happen again.

“Closet,” David whispered.

Stevie found her legs were wobbly when she went to stand. She stumbled over to the closet and climbed in with a pile of shoes and bags and ski equipment, all jumbled and smelling (not overpoweringly, but still) of use, pants and shirts crowding her head. She shut the door, closing herself in. David greeted Pix.

“You need to go over to the Great House,” she heard Pix say. “Nothing’s wrong, Charles just needs to talk to you about—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Sure. I’ll come now. My coat’s downstairs.”

Quiet. They seemed to have gone.

Stevie crouched in the closet, her heart thumping, rumpled and a bit overheated, her breath coming fast. She slowed it down, turned on her phone for light, and shone it around the closet space. She looked at his shoes, picking them up, giving them the once-over. All had relatively unworn soles. Stevie had sneakers that had worn straight through the bottoms, and most of her shoes had scuffing to the toes, to the sides, little imperfections she either tried to hide or just accepted. These were new shoes. Replaced regularly. And all name brands. There were dress shoes in here, made of soft leather, with the name inside: ELLIS, OF LONDON. Tennis gear. Skis. Everything confirmed the diagnosis of well off, and not the son of a pilot and the manager of a fertilizer plant, probably. When she heard nothing outside the door, she crawled out of the closet and went to the door. No noise.

She was just in David’s room. Alone.

There is a principle often discussed in murder mysteries. Agatha Christie even wrote a book with the title: Murder Is Easy. The idea is that the first time is the hardest, but once you transgress that barrier, once you take a life and get away with it, it becomes progressively easier each time. Stevie had yet to see anything in her reading that showed that this was necessarily true in real life, though it certainly seemed true that people may commit additional murders in a state of panic. Still, it logically held up. Murder is easy. And going through rooms is easy, especially if the owner of said room is someone who let you in and left you alone there.

And she had so many questions. Who was David, the David with no social media? The guy who kept telling weird lies about his family. The desire to know was like hunger, really—it rumbled, it demanded information.

Maybe she could just have a little look around? Just eyeball the place. There would be time. To walk over to the Great House, meet with Charles, come back—that was a minimum of twenty minutes, even if Charles said very little. And it was probably best she wait in here a minute or two anyway, just to make