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CHAPTER EIGHT

CHARLIE

The costume is still on the floor where I stepped out of it, and I’ve been pointedly ignoring it ever since we got back from brunch, mostly by lying flat on my bed with one arm thrown over my eyes while I digest approximately nine hundred pancakes. Jamie’s corset is draped over the back of my desk chair. One stocking made it as far as the radiator, and the other one is missing entirely, which is a problem I’m fully intending to leave for later.

The world’s longest shower took care of most of the evidence, in fairness, so there’s nothing left of last night on me at all, apart from an ache in my thighs I’m choosing not to examine too closely and a single false eyelash I apparently missed, which I only discover when I sit up and find it stuck to my pillowcase.

Marvellous.

I pick up the corset first, because it belongs to Jamie and she’ll want it back in one piece, given she has a strict lending policy and an even stricter policy on the condition of returns. There’s a smear on the boning near the top, dark and gone sticky, and I’m scratching at it with my thumbnail before my brain catches up with what it must be.

Chocolate. Of course it’s chocolate.

I sit down on the end of the bed with Jamie’s corset in both hands and allow myself a good thirty seconds of remembering, which is thirty seconds longer than is sensible.

The cloakroom.

The bowtie around my wrists.

His mouth at my throat, and that low voice of his telling me to keep quiet, then not caring in the slightest whether I managed it. By the time I come back to myself I’ve concluded two things: the first is that I’m never going to be able to look at a chocolate fountain again without blushing, and the second is that there’s no earthly way I can hand this corset back to its owner.

“Charlie, have you got my—” Jamie shoulders the door open with a laundry bag balanced on her hip, takes in the sight of me sitting on the bed clutching her costume to my chest, and promptly abandons whatever she came in for. “Oh, this is going to be good.”

“It isn’t going to be good. It’s going to be extremely boring and then you’re going to leave.”

“Your face says otherwise,” she informs me, dumping the bag, and she comes across the room with her hand already out for it, so I pass it over. She holds it up towards the window like a woman appraising a diamond, and it takes her perhaps two seconds to find the mark, and then another second to decide she’s going to enjoy herself thoroughly. “Charlotte.”

“Don’t.”

“Is this chocolate?”

“It could have come from the buffet,” I say, with as much dignity as I can gather.

“There was a chocolate fountain at the buffet,” Jamie agrees, pleasantly enough. “On the other side of the room. At hip height.” She holds the corset against her own body and taps the stain, which is nowhere remotely near her hip, and raises both eyebrows at me, and waits. She can wait a long time, Jamie. It’s one of her more frightening qualities. “Allie owes me twenty dollars.”

“You bet on me?”

“We bet on everything, you’ve met us.” She folds the thing over her arm with enormous care, the way you’d handle an artefact on loan from a museum. “I’m not washing it, either. It’s going in a frame.”

She’s out of the door before I can locate anything to throw at her, and I hear her shouting the news down the corridor to Allie, and I hear Allie’s shriek of delight in response, which means by dinner the entire floor will know that Britannia came home from the masquerade with somebody else’s chocolate on her borrowed corset. I lie back down and put both hands over my face.

The thing is, this is precisely the year I asked for. My dad wanted me to do my year abroad somewhere sensible, with a reliable transport link and a named contact at the university who could ring him directly in the event of a national emergency or a mild cold, and what I wanted was one single year somewhere nobody had known me since primary school. You don’t get the second thing without occasionally having to explain a stain to your flatmate—or roommate, as I’m meant to say here—so on balance I’d call that a fair trade.

The ears are on my desk, only slightly bent, which is frankly a miracle given everything they went through. The tail is not on my desk. It isn’t on the floor either, or under the bed, or in my bag, and I have a fairly strong suspicion about where it’s ended up and who currently has it, and I’m not going to dwell on that because I have a seminar reading to be getting on with.

I dwell on it.

Obviously, I’m going to dwell on it.

My phone buzzes against the pillow with a message from Steph that reads, in its entirety, don’t be cross with me, which has never once in the history of mobile telephones been a promising way to begin. I ring her immediately.

“Why would I be cross with you?”

“Okay, so.” There’s a pause while she arranges it, and I can hear Hogan somewhere behind her, asking her what she’s done. “I texted him.”

I sit up so fast my head swims. “You texted who, Stephanie?”

“Hogan’s friend. Batman. Don’t be cross, I only offered him your number, I didn’t actually give it to him, which I want noted.”