Oliver and Felipe froze at the sound of the doorknob rattling frantically. Men’s voices rose on the other side of the door as Felipe hissed a curse.
“Window,” he whispered, hauling Oliver with him.
Soundlessly raising it, Felipe waited for Oliver to stumble onto the fire escape before swinging out. The window had barely shut when the apartment door opened, and Peter Newman sauntered in. The breath caught in Oliver’s throat as he pressed his back to the brick and didn’t dare move. The wind whipped across the building and spurred his pounding heart. Felipe’s brows knit at the rumble of another voice within. Leaning closer, he slowly angled to see inside before drawing back.
It's Jed, he mouthed, still listening.
“Felipe, we can’t stay here. Gwen is going to worry about us,” Oliver whispered. “If we don’t come out, she may try to go in.”
Begrudgingly tearing himself away, Felipe crouched under the window to stand next to Oliver. “Fine, but I need to talk to Jed and warn him.”
After a harrowing climb down to the ground floor, Oliver took the inside steps as fast as his wobbly legs would carry him to the dormitory floor. The moment Gwen saw them across the hall, she trotted up to Oliver, her expression melting from tension to concern to relief. She let her head fall against his shoulder as he wrapped an arm around her.
“Thank god. I thought you two were trapped in there. Where did you go?”
“Down the fire escape. Never again.”
“Where’s Felipe?”
He had been beside him a second ago. Flinging a twang of panic across the tether, Oliver found Felipe down the hall talking to Jed Monroe. An easy smile crossed his lips as Jed patted him on the back, and they strode down the hall together.
“Are you going to join them?” Gwen asked, her eyes flickering from Felipe to Oliver’s face.
“No. I don’t think I was invited.”
***
Oliver’s bedroom hadbeen a place he loved for the solitude, but now, it felt too quiet, too empty. Despite waiting hours in the laboratory and taking several unnecessary trips up to his room, Felipe never returned. When Oliver passed through the lobby on the last trip, he spotted him at the bar in the dining room with Jed. Gwen had asked him to join her and her sister for dinner, but Oliver couldn’t bear the thought. If he sat in the same room as Felipe, he would spend his whole meal staring and trying to catch bits of conversation. He wasn’t a good conversationalist on the best of days, and Gwen’s sister, Ivy, didn’t need to be subjected to his pining and mutism.
Instead, he threw himself into studying Elizabeth Abbot’s bones, only pausing to pick at his dinner. When the light, even with the lamps, grew unreliable and his eyes blurred from the strain, Oliver finally stopped. Felipe wasn’t coming to find him, and if the vague sensations coming over the tether were any indication, he would be carousing long into the night. Felipe probably had a lot of friends he wanted to have one last hurrah with. Oliver couldn’t expect him to make do with only his bleak company.
This was the break he needed to avoid another breakdown, Oliver told himself as he gave up his vigil in the lab and changed into his nightclothes. Lying on his bed, Oliver reached for an old catalog, saw a pocket watch Felipe might like, and threw it back on the pile. He couldn’t think about the future right now. His life had been good. He had been content with his little hodgepodge of a room and just talking to Gwen and the corpses. It had only been a few days, but the thought of going back to that made his chest ache under his heart.
Oliver had never been good with words or lovers or pretending to be normal. One day the tether would be gone, Felipe would be gone, and he still didn’t know what to say to make Felipe stay. Lying down, Oliver pulled the covers up to his ears and shut his burning eyes. He would just have to get accustomed to the silence again.
Chapter Twenty-One
