Eventually, of course, they had to move apart. They held hands on the short walk to the hotel. The doorman there said, to Julie, “Nice to have you back with us.”
“Thank you.”
On their way to the elevator, Will asked, “You’ve stayed here before?”
“Last time I was here,” she confirmed.
“When you were following me.”
She took a deep breath. “Yes.” They stepped into the elevator. “Will, I’m sorry about that, I …”
They were still holding hands. He wished they were closer, but he didn’t know how to manage it. Or even if he should. The promise had been dinner, no strings, no expectations. Still, he wouldn’t release her hand. “You saved my life. Don’t be sorry. It’s just … there’s so much I still don’t understand.”
“I know. And we can talk about all of it. I promise.”
Will nodded. “Are they okay with this? The people you work for? Are they … I don’t even know what I should ask.”
“I’m not sure they would approve.” Julie smiled wistfully. “But I don’t work for State anymore.”
“You quit?”
She shrugged. “It was quit or get fired. I broke a lot of rules.”
“I’m so sorry,” Will answered sincerely.
“After Joe, I didn’t really trust anybody anyhow. It would be hard to go back to it. Even if I was up to speed.”
The elevator stopped, and they stepped off onto the top floor. “God, I forgot to even ask how you are,” Will exclaimed. “So … how are you?” He inserted the key card and opened the door. And then, “Damn it, Uncle Harold still has my luggage in his car.”
Julie laughed out loud. “What makes you think that?”
“He was going to drive me to the airport …” He stopped, looking across the huge living room of the suite. At the far side of the room, next to the doors to two bedrooms, were two sets of luggage. One set was definitely his. He shook his head. “He thinks of everything.”
“I noticed. He booked the suite. I think it has four bedrooms.”
Will caught what she was saying immediately. “I don’t think we need four.”
“And yet the luggage is in the living room. Is there a message there?”
“No expectations,” he guessed. He turned, caught both of Julie’s hands in his. “That’s what we promised, right? No expectations. Just dinner. Except I’ve already had dinner. But we could go out, if you’re hungry, we could find someplace that’s still open …”
“I ate on the plane,” Julie answered simply.
“Oh.” He looked at her, confused. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. He couldn’t think straight when he looked at her. “I don’t know what I should do now. I don’t care what we do now. As long as I can be with you, I don’t care.”
She smiled nervously. “There is so much we should talk about.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“I’m sorry you lost your job because of me.”
She took a step toward him. “We should take this slow.”
“Absolutely.” He could barely speak. He could barely breathe.
“We should talk about things. Take our time. Actually get to know each other.”
“You already know me,” he pointed out.
“I do,” Julie admitted. “But you should get a chance to know me.”
“Yes.” He took a step toward her, and they were close enough then that their bodies nearly touched.
Julie hesitated. “I have all these awful scars.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know you don’t.”
She leaned, or he did. It didn’t matter. When the leaning stopped, their lips were all but touching. “We should talk,” Julie whispered, breathless.
“We’ll talk,” Will promised. He closed the last small distance and kissed her.
He had kissed her before, but it had been a long time ago. She’d had another name then, a false identity, designed to let her get close to him, to protect him. He barely knew this woman he had in his arms. The real woman. The real Julie Carson. She was right. They should talk.
She moved against him, put her arms around him. The kiss continued.
If we stop, the fast-vanishing threads of Will’s common sense said, if we stop and sit apart and talk, like we should, it won’t make any difference. Whatever we say, whatever I learn about her, I will love her.
He’d already known he loved her. The only astonishing thing was that she seemed to love him.
Although, the last gasp of sense said, she hadn’t said that. She hadn’t said anything of the sort.
It didn’t matter. He shifted his arms, cradled her head, kept on kissing her. She felt firm in his arms, solid. She’d been so broken the last time. His head was swimming, his pulse racing. Talk or no talk, he didn’t care anymore, as long as he could keep her in his arms.
“Will …” she murmured.
“Yes,” he answered, breathless.
“Yes,” she answered back.
***
Harold picked up Christine up in front of the café. It was crowded with loud, over-excited, over-caffeinated Doctor Who fans. He was glad he’d missed it.
She put the pet carrier in the back seat. Smokey growled fiercely. “Shush, you,” she said. The cat ignored her and continued to growl softly. “You have everything else?” she asked.
“I got everything on the list,” Finch promised.
She got in the front seat. “How’d it go with Will?”
“Exactly as planned.”
“Nice.” She raised the big Thermos she’d brought with her. “You have pie?”
“I have pie,” he promised.
They went to the library.
The lights were on and the gate was open; Reese was already there. Bear galloped out to greet them. He fussed around the cage insistently, but Christine kept the cat contained. She went to the little anteroom Finch had set up as cat habitat ” cat box in the corner, food and water on the counter, out of the dog’s reach ” opened the cage, and shut the door before Smokey could follow her out.
Bear whined. “Give her fifteen minutes,” Christine said.
He cocked his head, then sat down in front of the door and waited.
“That dog is too damn smart,” she said. She joined the men in the main room.
Finch barely heard her. He was staring at the bulletin board. The new board.
It wasn’t new, of course. It had been in the children’s section. It was still covered with bright yellow paper, and it had a scalloped border with badly-faded spring flowers on it. A printed banner across the top proclaimed, ‘Readers are Winners!’
The board was covered with printed pages of numbers. They started with 3.14159265358979323. Pi, of course. And it went on. Pages and pages of numbers covered the whole board. Ten thousand numbers, at least. Maybe more. There was a pencil cup taped to the side of the board. It held five different-colored highlighters. Scattered throughout the printed numbers were apparently random groups of five numbers that were highlighted in the various colors.
06062, highlighted in pink. Finch smiled, recognizing the end of Leon Tao’s Number. 07821 in green took him a minute longer. Sarah Jennings. 17863 in orange was easy: their own Detective Carter. He spotted Leila’s Number, Andrea Gutierrez, Judge Gates.
Not the entire number; that would be too easy to trace. Just the last five digits. Small splashes of color on a huge field of black and white numbers. Splashes that indicated every victim they’d saved, and every perpetrator they’d stopped.
It made his heart feel full and light at the same time.
He finally managed to look away from it. Reese was leaning against the edge of the desk, watching him. Patient. He became aware that he’d been staring at the board for a very long time. “Thank you,” he finally managed to say.
Reese shook his head, gestured with his shoulder toward the woman.
Finch didn’t even turn. He simply reached his hand back, and her fingers curled around his. He pulled her close, put his arm around her. But he looked to Reese again. “I told you she’d want to redecorate.”
His partner shrugged. “I can live with it.”
“Thank you,” he told Christine. He kissed her on the forehead, kept his arm around her shoulders. “What to the colors mean?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “They’re random. Let ‘em figure that one out.”
He nodded. Of course, if someone got this far into the library and recovered the board, it probably indicated that they had much bigger problems. And the board full of dead people’s names would only exacerbate those problems. But it amused him to imagine some hapless analyst spending months or years trying to decipher the pattern to the colors. It tweaked a little wicked part of his personality, one that he knew she shared.
“What to see your other surprise?” Christine asked.
“I don’t need anything else. Truly.”
“The point of Christmas is not to get gifts that you need,” she answered. “John?”
Reese smiled, the quirky little smile he had when he had a secret, and moved to the side of the room. He snapped the light on and gestured for Finch. Harold went, curious. It was the side room where he’d set up his audio equipment; there was nothing else of interest in there. Except …
He paused in the doorway and stared. The audio computer was still there, but everything else had been moved out. There were two long folding tables on each side of the room, covered neatly with white butcher paper. At the end of one was his red tool box. Otherwise the tables were empty.
But at the far end of the room was a … he wasn’t sure what to call it. A pile of boxes, arranged in a pyramid. Draped with colored lights. Not a pyramid, then, but a representation of a Christmas tree. There were two very large boxes at the bottom, three feet on a side. The rest were paper cases, the kind that ten reams of paper came in. Three on the second row, two on the third, one on the top. And on top of that, a big gold star.
He looked to Christine for an explanation. She gestured to Reese. “This is his,” she said.
“She helped.”
“I just crippled his web spiders.”
“My … what? But what is it?” Finch asked.
Reese walked over to the box tree and pulled off the gold star. He handed it to Harold, then brought down the top box and set it on one of the tables. “It’s a puzzle,” he said. “A sort of jigsaw puzzle.”
“A what?”
John gestured. Finch took the lid off the box. He looked at the jumble of parts and pieces. Computer parts. Wires, hardware, drivers. Plastic, metal. They looked oddly familiar. A hopeless mix of … “Oh, my God.”
Christine chuckled. “Yeah, I think you surprised him.”
“I think so,” Reese answered happily.
Finch looked at him. The op’s eyes were crinkled up, lit with a genuine smile. “These are pieces to a Xerox Alto,” he said.
“Some assembly required,” John answered. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s …” He started pulling pieces out of the box and putting them down on the paper. When he had half a dozen out, he started to re-arrange them, spread them out. The work tables suddenly made sense. Room to unpack everything, to see what he had and what he was missing. He looked at the stack of boxes again. “All of them?” he asked, breathless.
“The guy said he thought there were two or three in there, more or less. His father took them apart years ago to see how they worked and if he could fix them. He was kind of a tinkerer.”
“He was kind of a hoarder,” Christine corrected.
“But how …” Finch turned to look at her. “The web spiders. You shut down my notifications.”
“Only way to get them before you did. As soon as they came up for sale we jumped on them.”
“I have some notion I should scold you for that.”
“Eh. Google’s an easy hack. I put them back already, by the way.”
“Good girl.” But Finch was already looking back at the pile of boxes.
“More?” Reese offered.
“Please and thank you.” He tore his eyes away from his unexpected treasure and focused on his friend and partner. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, clearly.
Reese grinned, embarrassed, pleased. Then he unplugged the Christmas lights and brought down the top boxes for Finch. “Enjoy,” he said.
Finch was faintly aware that his companions had left the room. He opened the next box, and the next. The mythical Xerox Alto lay in pieces before him. More than one, yes, if all the parts were there. It would take days to assemble them, and even then they might not work …
Finch slipped off his jacket and hung it on a hook near the door. He undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Then he set about sorting the pieces.
He was looking forward to the task. More than he’d looked forward to anything in a very long time.
***
There was a quiet knock on the door.
Will jolted awake. Beside him, Julie scrambled for something ” her gun, he realized, and also that she didn’t have one.
There was the click of a lock, and then the sound of the outer suite door opening. Will sat up and looked toward the bedroom door. He remembered kicking it shut, but it hadn’t latched and stood open about three inches. Julie sat up beside him, and they both pulled the covers up.
There was a very soft rolling sound, a little clatter of china. Then retreating footsteps, and the outer door closed again.
Julie giggled. “Room service?” she asked quietly.
“Uncle Harold,” Will answered with certainty. He slid to the edge of the bed ” it took a while, it was a very big bed ”and put his feet on the floor. He looked around for his pants. There were clothes scattered all the way to the door, and beyond.
Julie had climbed out the other side of the bed and went to the closet. “Here,” she said. She handed him a big fluffy robe, and wrapped herself in another one.
He couldn’t help himself; he grabbed her around the waist and kissed her again. She didn’t resist.
Eventually, they made their way out to the living room. As expected, there was a silver room service cart standing near the couch. It had a silver coffee pot, two china cups, two plates, and two platters covered with silver domes. “I’m almost afraid,” Will said, reaching for the first one.
Under the first dome way a three-part dish with fresh strawberries, pineapple, and tangerine slices. Under the other was a beautiful tiramisu.
“Your uncle,” Julie said, “has insanely good taste.”
“He does,” Will agreed. “He always has.”
They got coffee and desserts and settled onto the couch. “He’s not actually my uncle, you know. He’s my godfather.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.” Will rubbed the little scar on his forehead. “We have to talk now, don’t we?”
“Or we could just go back to bed,” Julie offered.
He leaned to kiss her. She tasted like whipped cream. “Tempting. But I think I need a little nourishment first.”
“A few calories might be in order.”
He took a big bite of cake. “So … you don’t want me to meet your family.”
“You don’t want to meet my family. Believe me. They’re insane.”
“Tell me.”
“Okay. My dad’s not so bad. Stuffy, and he barks, but not much bite. Very into his businesses, and leaves all the household stuff to my mom. Stephanie is a control freak. She wants to know what everybody’s doing, all the time, and she wants it done her way. She didn’t grow up with money, and she’s freaked out about the idea of ever not having it. Or her kids not having it.” She shook her head. “If she had any idea I even knew you, much less that we were together, she’d go crazy. She would never let you out of her sight. Well, you know, except to …” She gestured back toward the bedroom. “But only in the devout hope that she could claim that her daughter had borne Nathan Ingram’s grandchildren.”
Will flinched. “Like that, huh?”
“I told you, it’ll be awful.”
“So you think you shouldn’t be with me because she’d be so happy you were with me?”
“I didn’t say that. Although it did cross my mind. But I guarantee you, the minute she hears your name you will become her favorite person in the whole world.”
“You’re right. That does sound terrible.” He bit into one of the enormous strawberries.
“You don’t get it.”
“I get it,” he assured her. “I just don’t care. I want you, and I’ll take any baggage you come with. But frankly, your mother liking me too much doesn’t sound like a huge obstacle.”
Julie shook her head. “She will smother you.”
He gestured to the cart. “Will she send room service to my hotel room at midnight?”
“That’s not smothering. That’s just sweet.”
“If your mother had done it, would it have been smothering?”
“Maybe,” Julie admitted. “But at least your uncle seems to actually like me.”
“He does.”
“My mother will just like your name and your money.”
Will shrugged. “Not like that’s never happened before.”
“It shouldn’t happen inside your own family.”
“So you’re planning on me becoming family, then?”
Julie froze with a piece of pineapple halfway to her mouth. “I might … be getting a little ahead of myself there,” she admitted quietly.
“Maybe, but I like the way you’re thinking.” Will smiled, but changed the subject to put her at ease again. “Does your mother have a decorator put up the Christmas decorations?”
“Yes. And how did you know that?”
“My mom’s the same way. I’ve got to take you to Chaos.”
Julie gestured toward the bedroom again. “Isn’t that what you just did?”
“Ahhh, no. Chaos is a bar. A coffee shop, actually. A cybercafé. The head barista is a nut for Christmas decorations. It’s like Santa’s workshop exploded in there. You have to see it. It’s the complete opposite of what my house used to be like.”
“Chaos.”
“The name fits, believe me. It’s crazy. The woman who owns it, Scotty, she’d kind of an anarchist. That Gerald Walsh thing the other day, did you see that?”
“It was all over the news.”
“She did that. The hack. At least I’m pretty sure she did. She’s some kind of computer genius. You’ll like her.”
“She’s a computer genius who owns a coffee shop?”
“Yep. She’s going to look at my dad’s stuff for me, all the documents from his estate, from the company. She was an intern for him one summer in high school. I think she’s a year, two years younger than I am.”
“Is she pretty?”
Will recognized the trap immediately. “Not as pretty as you,” he answered swiftly. “And besides, I think she’s sleeping with Uncle Harold. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve changed my mind about it like twenty times. After you meet her, maybe you can figure it out.”
Julie chuckled. “Okay. But if she’s younger than you, isn’t she way too young for him?”
“I guess. But she’s … it’s hard to explain. She’s been through some stuff, you know? It’s like she’s older somehow. If they are sleeping together, it wouldn’t freak me out. Much.”
“She’s an old soul?” Julie suggested.
“Yeah. And honestly, Harold’s alone so much, I wouldn’t care if she was some nineteen year old bimbo, if she made him happy. But like I said, I don’t know. One minute I can see it and the next it’s like she’s just a friend.” He shook his head. “I’m not very good at reading women.”
“Oooh, you do okay,” she assured him. She went and got more of everything from the cart, then sat back down and stretched her legs out.
Will leaned down and put his hand around her ankle. Very gently he lifted her injured leg onto the couch. It had healed, of course, but half a dozen surgical scars crossed it, front and back.
“I know it’s ugly,” Julie said quietly.
“No,” Will countered. “They did good work.” He ran his fingers lightly down the bones in her lower leg. He could tell where some of the plates were, and the pins. But her muscle tone was fantastic. She’d been very fit before she’d fallen out the window; rehab would have been much easier for her than someone less fit. “Really good. Does it bother you? Hurt?”
“No. But they don’t think I should run on it. Not distance, like I used to.”
“No.” Will leaned and planted small kisses along one of the scar lines. “I’m sorry. I know you loved to run.”
“Actually, it’s probably just as well. Me and my brothers and my cousins used to go free-running. This way I have an excuse to quit while I’m still better than all of them.”
Will smiled. “Everything’s a competition in your family.”
“Oh, God, yes. We’re still arguing about whether I hold the broken bone record, or whether breaking one bone in two places only counts as one. Seriously, Will, you have no idea. It’s awful.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Awful. Seriously. Anyhow, I’m swimming a lot more now. And that’s just as good as running. Almost.”
He rubbed her toes between his two hands. “My dad’s loft has a lap pool in it.”
“What?”
“My dad has a loft that has a lap pool in it. Well, I guess it’s mine, now. The loft. We’ve been trying to sell it for years, but I could keep it, if you want to stay there. I mean, it would be convenient, you don’t even have to change. Or wear a suit. I’ll take you over there tomorrow, if you want.” He stopped, laughed. “It’s so stupid. I always hated that place and now I can’t wait to show it to you.”
“Why do you hate it?”
Will shrugged. “It’s just really big and rich and empty … but it wouldn’t be, if you were there with me.”
“I think you’ll still hate it.” Julie pulled her foot back and moved over next to him. “And I think it will always be your father’s loft, in your head. But we can take a look. You think you want to stay in New York?”
“I don’t know,” Will admitted. “Maybe for a while. I’ve been working with MSF out on Staten Island, and they still need help. But I haven’t really thought much beyond tomorrow. Today, whatever. Just ‘get Julie back’ and then go from there.”
“I’m sorry. I just really thought we needed the time apart.”
“Don’t be sorry. You were absolutely right. I know you were. I just never want to be away from you again, okay?” He put down his plate and drew her closer in his arms. “And now I’m rushing things, aren’t I? This was supposed to be just dinner, no expectations.”
“Well, we skipped the dinner part, so I guess we can skip a lot of the rest.”
“Am I allowed to tell you I love you?”
Julie twisted around and kissed him lightly. “No. There’s a seventy-two hour waiting period on that.”
“Oh.” The kiss took the sting out of it.
“But you can be wildly infatuated until then.”
“Okay.” He kissed her again, more deeply. “I can live with that.”
She twisted around, and his hand slipped under her robe, across her warm bare skin. “And after that,” she murmured against his ear, “I can tell you I love you, too.”
***
q95;
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