The Mary Shelley Club, Goldy Moldavsky [e ink ebook reader txt] 📗

was bound to a secret now. “No, just a friend from back home.”

My phone vibrated again. I quickly peeked down, avoiding Saundra’s searching gaze.

Don’t worry. No kidnapping this time.;-)

 14

IT WAS RAINING, and as I stood under my umbrella, looking up at the building at the address from Freddie’s text, I felt like I was about to enter the mansion in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I was on the Upper East Side, just a few blocks from Manchester. The closer you got to Central Park, the nicer the buildings became, with elegant awnings and doormen in gold-trimmed uniforms poised just beyond glass doors. But the buildings that were even fancier than that didn’t have doormen or lobbies. Some of them were small museums or the headquarters of societies, with crests next to their imposing double doors and ivy crawling up their walls; others were beautiful private residences. This place didn’t have any gold plaques, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t a museum. But it was still a beautiful limestone townhouse that probably cost more than my life.

I’d tried asking Freddie more questions by text, about who lived here and what we’d be doing tonight, but he’d remained evasive. So I rang the bell and waited.

Bram opened the door, looming large in the frame.

His usual oxford shirt and tie had been replaced by sweats and a black T-shirt with a skull snapping back its jaw. My brain seemed to glitch whenever I was alone with Bram and the first thing I said was “Is this your house?”

“Yes.”

If Saundra only knew I was here right now. She’d freak.

“Are you going to come inside?” Bram said. “You’re letting in the rain.”

I stepped over the threshold, shaking droplets off my umbrella.

“I’ll take it,” Bram said. He dropped it in a pewter bin next to the door and then held out his hand. I hesitated until I realized that he was reaching for my jacket. The whole exchange stretched on for an impossibly long and silent minute, with the only sound in the grand entryway the shuffle of my wet raincoat slipping off my shoulders and the clinking of hangers in the coat closet.

And all the while, I could smell the pine-and-lime scent of his shampoo.

“Hey. I’ve been meaning to apologize,” I said. “For what happened outside the house in Williamsburg?”

What happened outside the house in Williamsburg was my way of not saying when I foisted myself on you like a creep. I cleared my throat to offset the burning in my cheeks. “I was drunk and I thought you were somebody else, obviously. I know you’re with … with someone, and it was wrong and I feel horrible about it and it was a mistake.”

As I talked, Bram watched me with the disinterested look of a DMV employee, though the color in his cheeks seemed to deepen. Maybe it was a trick of the light.

“So, yeah,” I said finally. “Sorry.”

When Bram did speak, it was only to say, “Okay.”

It wasn’t much, but I took it as a sign that we could finally put that mortifying episode behind us. And maybe this quasi truce would extend to Lux. Maybe if Bram and I could be cool, then Lux and I could be civil toward each other.

Never had so much hope been squeezed out of a tiny “okay.”

“Everyone else is already in the study,” he said.

I nodded like all of this was normal. The conversation we’d just had. That this place had a study.

“Um, which way do I go?” Bram’s townhouse was huge, and as I glanced around I realized that the Wildings were rich. Like rich rich. This place must’ve been two townhouses put together. There were an impossible number of doorways, all leading to high-ceilinged rooms filled with oil paintings and lavish furniture. I could see myself quickly getting lost, and I didn’t want to be late for my first club meeting.

Bram gestured toward a winding grand staircase that sprouted from the foyer. As I started to climb it, I remembered the last night I’d spent at my friend Amy’s house back on Long Island, over a year before. I’d decided to walk the five blocks home, and the entire time I could’ve sworn someone was following me. On that quiet night with no cars on the street or people on the sidewalks, all I could sense was my pulse pounding in my ears and what I was sure was someone’s eyes boring into my back.

I felt that way now, the difference being that I wasn’t imagining someone behind me. I could feel Bram’s gaze like a hand brushing the back of my neck.

When we got to the second floor, we walked toward a light at the end of the hallway. The study was lit with warm lamplight and wall sconces and smelled faintly of the leather-bound books that crammed the bookcases along the walls. There were priceless accoutrements adorning the shelves—a Grecian urn glazed in turquoise, a charcoal sketch of an abstract nude figure, a brass ballerina being used as a bookend. I spotted a small painting of a blocky lady. I took a second to wonder if it was a Picasso before I realized that of course it was. You probably couldn’t own a place like this if you didn’t have a Picasso.

It turned out my mom had been right when she’d said private school would expand my world. Normally, I would have to go to the Met to see the things that Bram’s family used as paperweights.

There was a large rosewood desk in front of casement doors that opened onto a balcony, and in the center of the room were a couch, a chair, and a chaise longue. Freddie, Felicity, and Thayer were spread amongst the furniture, limbs splayed with the kind of informal ease that comes from being deeply familiar with a place. Like animals in their natural habitat.

“Hiya, New Girl,” Thayer said.

“You made it,” Freddie said, flashing me a smile from the chesterfield sofa. He