Chapter 33

Julian is out of the office, visiting local electronics stores to see if they’ve recently had any big orders of the brand of surveillance devices that had been used at Schenley. It’s such a long shot that Charles thinks maybe Julian just needs to have something to do while letting the gears turn in his brain. He can relate. He’s in the front room of the detective agency, typing up some notes and drumming his fingers restlessly on his desk. He gets up, makes some coffee. Sits back down. Ten minutes later he’s up again, watering the wilting office plants. He can’t shake the feeling that he should be moving, that he should be doing something. It’s nagging at the back of his head: so many new developments, but how closer are they, really, to finding Lu? They’ve gotten sucked into the morass of Schenley’s English department, pulled deeper and deeper, and the farther they go the more mess they uncover—and yet it seems endless, this quicksand conflict. There seems to be, somehow, no bottom to it.

What are they missing? Charles paces across the room, then out into the hallway, hands jammed into his pockets as he makes a quick round from office to waiting room to little back hallway, past the closed, locked door that Charles has never opened. The one that leads to a room from which Julian, just yesterday, extracted The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

He pauses and turns back to look at the door. Cheap wood; a flimsy doorknob with a small keyhole. Maybe it’s a storage closet. That’s what Charles had always thought. Maybe inside that storage closet, amongst old files and tubes of lipstick and a dusty broom, is a box or two of books.

With a sense of illicit curiosity, he rattles the doorknob. Still locked. He bites his lip, thinking.

If it had been any other book—but Julian has always expressed disdain for detective fiction, for Holmes in particular. Despite this, he seems to know a lot about the Holmes canon; despite this, he keeps a copy of it in his closet.

Charles sweeps his hand along the top of the doorframe. A key falls to the ground. Heart giving a sudden jump, he bends to picks it up. It’s pretty clean; his fingertips are dusty from the doorframe, but the key itself, though cheap and not new, isn’t grimy. He tells himself to put it back. Instead, blood rushing in his ears, he slides it into the lock and turns it.

The door opens. It’s not a closet. It’s a small room, about the same size as Julian’s office. At first he thinks it is in fact another office: there’s a desk by the back wall. It’s a small desk, though, not quite full-sized, and it looks, Charles thinks, weirdly familiar.

His heart stops.

“He cracked his first case at the age of nine, and now Julian Ellsworth is living every boy’s dream, solving mysteries brought to him by you, his loyal fans and viewers. He didn’t earn his nickname for nothing: they call him…Young Sherlock!”

There’s a poster for the show on the wall behind the desk. The desk: the overly ornate, three-quarter-sized desk of dark wood with dozens of tiny drawers and cubbyholes, a rolltop, and two secret compartments that Julian used on the three years of his television show. In the corner of the room, there is a coatrack on which hangs a child-sized deerstalker cap. More framed posters line the other walls; Charles recognizes the one he had in his bedroom, a glossy image of Julian grinning with a magnifying glass raised to one eye that came folded up in the VHS set of season 1. Without realizing it, Charles has stepped into the room and up to this poster and is touching the glass, remembering vividly his childhood bedroom with the green-and-blue-striped bedsheets and the floor lamp with the crooked shade. The kernel of excitement is lodged in his belly again, that paradoxically hemmed-in yet expansive feeling of possibility just out of reach.

There’s a bookcase in this room, and Charles sees that two entire shelves are devoted to Sherlock Holmes. On either side of the gap left by The Complete Sherlock Holmes are several other editions of the complete Arthur Conan Doyle stories, plus the odd novel or two, some nonfiction, some criticism, and some contemporary Holmes spin-offs. Another shelf bears limited-edition show merchandise—the decoder ring from the cereal box, the magnifying glass you had to send away for, the copy of Time For Kids with the article about Julian inside—all of which Charles, mostly successfully, had begged his parents to help him obtain.

His head is spinning. The barrage of childhood memories continues, but more disorienting still is the fact of this room’s existence—Julian, who never mentions Young Sherlock, Julian, who seems to have disavowed his past entirely—Julian has this room set up behind a locked door, perfectly preserved, and reasonably clean. It hasn’t been sitting here untouched for years. There’s no thick layer of dust, no stuffy atmosphere of neglect. Julian has been in here recently, not just to grab the Conan Doyle book, but often.

Charles steps up to the desk, a lump rising to his throat. How many times did he daydream about sitting behind it, about pulling up a chair and poring over clues with Julian on the polished surface? How many times did he long to pull the dangling switch of the green lamp like Julian did at the end of every episode, sending the screen to black? Tentatively, he reaches out and runs his fingers along the top of the desk. It’s a weird piece of furniture in person; there are two towers of drawers rather than one big back, so that the camera could see Julian as he sat behind the desk. When he got something from the drawers, the camera angle would switch to over his shoulder and managed to hide the gap. Charles hadn’t worked it out as a kid, that the desk wouldn’t look right in real life. He looks at the chair—another overly decorated piece, dark wood with a plush red seat that had appeared fancier on TV—and, as if drawn magnetically towards it, moves behind the desk and pulls it out.

He sits. He sinks down into the too-small chair, heart in his throat, and looks straight up at an imaginary camera—and straight at Julian, standing in the doorway.

Their eyes lock. A flush starts to rise up from deep within Charles, a panicked bell ringing distantly in his ears: caught. He’s been caught.

Julian stares at him. Heat suffuses Charles’ cheeks. The top of his head turns hot. Fuck. Fuck.

Julian pulls the door shut behind him, strides across the room to Charles, bends over the desk through the gap meant for the camera’s gaze, and kisses Charles on the mouth.

A shocked gasp. Julian’s fingers grasp the back of Charles’ head. Charles, panic still swirling in him, kisses back before he understands what he is doing. Julian pushes forward, pushes his tongue into Charles’ mouth and his body farther across the desk. The wood creaks—the desk is ostentatious, but not very solidly built—and Julian breaks off to tug Charles up from the chair, to pull him around the desk, to kiss him again and run his hands up and down Charles’ back, desperate, rough.

Searing heat courses through Charles. He can’t catch his breath. He feels dizzy with it, the wanting, every part of him straining towards Julian, wanting to be closer, closer. Julian’s hands at the base of his spine: intimate, dangerous, pulsing with something hot and fierce; Charles’ chest pressed against his, hands scrabbling at his neck, lust sharp in his throat; fuck. Spit stringing between them as they pull away to breathe, then crash clumsily back together. The thing that is coming for them is fast and relentless, hitting them both at the same time, a gasp, a surge, their bodies clocking the realization that this is not going to ease up until it gets what it wants.

After that everything is skin and fingertips and clothes on the floor, Charles’ palms electric, like static, skidding up Julian’s chest, strange and alien as the landscape of another planet, down Julian’s hips and flanks, shockingly familiar as if from a comfortable dream, and they end up a tangle on the floor, the thin hard office carpeting, naked, swept up on the current and blown-pupil eyes meeting, frantic.

“Yeah?” Julian manages, between lungfuls of air.

“Yeah,” Charles says, “yeah, yeah, I—I want—”

He doesn’t know. He’s wild with wanting but the wanting won’t land, won’t settle, it fills the room, coursing through the bookshelves and posters and coatrack and that weird ugly desk, fizzing through the florescent ceiling bulbs, rocketing off the walls. Julian squeezes Charles’ waist, his upper thighs, says, “Can I—”

“Yes,” Charles says, though he doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, “yes, yes,” awash with unfulfilled need and the wild desire for somebody else to take that need and put it somewhere. Julian flips him over, on his belly, and Charles gasps in shock and terror as Julian’s hands prompt him awkwardly to his knees and Charles understands. Lu’s fic blooms bright and garish in his mind: frantic searches for kitchen oil, for petroleum jelly, or a drawer in the bedside table with a little glass jar—something overlays in his mind and the little secret drawers of the Young Sherlock desk seem for a moment to be the answer—and Julian exhales in frustration—“be right back I promise”—and Charles is alone on his hands and knees, Julian’s footsteps crashing up the stairs.

At the edge of his mind: open doors, un-curtained windows, potential clients, a looming reckoning; but Charles holds it all at bay, letting it hover there as he stares at Julian’s shelves, at the decoder bracelet he wore on his arm as a child, remembering the weight of the light plastic, the thrill of a secret. And then Julian is back, condom is one hand and bottle in the other, ready.

                   It is shockingly easy, really. The slick and slide of it, lessening the resistance, the strangeness so erotic that Charles barely feels discomfort. Fingers, one by one, and then Julian mounts him, and the push in is not quite like any sensation Charles has experienced before.

It ought to be significant. Bottoming. For another man. It ought to be proof, one way or the other.

Instead it is a chaotic whirlwind, a pinball machine of sweaty armpits, the itching sting of the rug on his knees, starbursts of arousal, Julian’s grunts, Charles propping himself up on his elbows, strings of thought unraveling and slipping through his fingers, and the stretch and heat and build, the wanting searing through him, still wanting more, more, just out of reach.

Out of reach—until all at once, Julian’s hand moving between his legs, it isn’t. Charles shakes with it, spasms, bursts of white light sizzling behind his shut eyes. His body holds onto the wanting for a split second longer, and then as he finishes the wanting dances out of his reach again, each jolt of his body lurching for it, again and again.

He manages not to collapse as Julian finishes, too. Then, one rough swift burning-hot slide, and Charles falls limp to the carpet, breathing hard.

Julian’s hot thigh pressed against his hip, neither of them looking at the other, Charles lets his head swim until things come into focus just enough for words to appear in his mouth again. The world is still removed, lurking outside the door Julian closed as he came back in.

“I’ve known who you were since I saw you,” Charles says, eyes on the ugly tiled ceiling. “Since the first day.”

Julian shifts. “I wondered,” he says quietly. “After that young woman came in, the one who recognized me. You were so quick to steer the conversation away so she wouldn’t mention my show. And I thought, maybe…”

Charles swallows. His skin is sticky with sweat. “I…loved your show. I’ve seen every episode. So many times.”

They’re still not looking at each other. Charles is waiting for Julian’s accusation or a revelation or something—something to explain this room, locked, full of his childhood.

“I had some of these posters. I had the decoder bracelet.”

Still, Julian says nothing.

“I worshiped you,” Charles says. It feels like ripping off a scab: satisfyingly self-sabotaging.

“It felt good,” Julian whispers. “The way you looked at me when I came in just now. When you were sitting at my desk. It felt—it feels…so good.”

Charles turns his head. Julian is looking at him. “But…” Waves of terror and exhilaration and something Charles can’t identify crash against him. “But I thought…” He swallows. It is hard to keep looking into Julian’s pale eyes. “I thought you hated it. The show. Being reminded of it.”

Julian exhales. “I do,” he says.

Charles is starting to feel his nakedness. He sits up, pulling his knees to his chest.

“Why…” he says slowly.

Julian is still flat on his back, gangly body flushed unevenly.

“What happened?” Charles asks finally.

A silence. “What do you mean?”

“With the show. With everything. Why…” Charles stares at his knees. “What happened to you? After you were on the show?”

He risks a glance at Julian. The detective is looking at him, frowning uncertainly.

“I mean…” Charles takes a breath. “You were famous. The talk shows, the articles…and then you just…disappeared. And now…” Now he is a shadow of his former self, quiet, inward, awkward. Hiding away in this depressing office. “You could be really successful. Big cases, not just—not just divorces and cheating and petty theft.” Charles’ heart is in his mouth. “What happened?”

For a long moment, Charles thinks Julian isn’t going to answer. Then he says, softly, “I grew up.”

Charles lets this sit for a moment, turning it over, trying to understand.

“Were you a precocious child?” Julian asks him.

Charles blinks. “Well…not like you. I wasn’t…special.”

“Teacher’s pet? Know-it-all?”

“Well. Probably, yeah. I used to correct my teachers’ pronunciation. And spelling.”

“How do you feel when you think about it now?”

Charles considers. He remembers a particularly obnoxious incident, when he was thirteen and should have known better, when he’d gone up to the whiteboard to complete a math problem and, while he was there, had corrected the spelling of Daily Anouncements in the corner, which had been written there, one N short, since the beginning of the year. When he finished the math problem, he looked up to find Mr. Sumner had gone quite pink. He’d replayed the incident over and over again, finding it more embarrassing the older he got, not wanting to imagine what eye-rolls and smirks his classmates had given him behind his back. Even now, a little hot bloom of shame flushes through him; poor Mr. Sumner.

“Yes,” says Julian, watching Charles grimace. “Now imagine that all of that, every know-it-all, smarter-than-you moment was broadcast for three years on national television, so when you got too old to be cute anymore and moved back to Minnesota to go to high school, everyone had seen it all. And everyone’s little siblings were now watching you in syndication.” He shrugs, eyes back on the ceiling. “It turns out that revealing to your classmates who’s cheating on tests and who’s cheating on their girlfriends isn’t actually something to endear you to them. I was used to praise and adoration when I figured things out. It didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t going to happen anymore. So I…got quiet. Just a quiet kid. Head down. And I made it through.”

“But…” Charles’ head is swimming. “But…no one thought it was cool you were on TV?”

Julian laughs. “Not that kind of TV. Not kids’ TV.”

“And after?” he persists. “Once you were actually becoming a detective. You could have—you could surely have…”

“Have what?” Julian asks. “Named my practice Older Young Sherlock’s Detective Agency? Advertised with photos of myself at ten with an oversized magnifying glass?”

“Well…”

“Charles,” Julian says, and Charles feels his heart stutter as Julian looks him in the eyes, “not everyone sees it how you do. Not everyone thinks I was really even solving cases when I was on TV.”

A twist of panic, startling and irrational. Charles tries to swallow it down. “But,” he says, trying not to sound too desperate, or eager, or naive, or pathetic, “you were, weren’t you?”

Julian is quiet for a moment. He is still lying flat on his back, naked, looking at Charles with a tilted head. “Yes,” he says eventually. “Mostly, anyway. The producers made sure there’d be something for me to find, when they picked which cases we’d do. A lot of my lines were scripted. But yeah, I actually looked for stuff, talked to people. It’s sort of ridiculous that I did, really. It’d have been a lot easier for them to just make it all up. But I wasn’t an actor so it probably wouldn’t have gone all that well if they had.” A smile flickers across his face. “They had to tell me to stop shouting all the time. I’d get so excited when I figured things out.”

This is it, the twin revelations Charles has been waiting for: whether it was all real, and why it had all stopped. Sort of, yeah. And, I was bullied in middle school.

They fall, muffled, onto the thin hard carpet and lie there naked. Charles had been expecting a gong, a cave echo: a boom that would resonate through empty chambers, vibrate in his bones. Some ripple spreading fast and far from a stone dropped into Julian’s life a long time ago, something that sank fast.

These are tepid answers, listless, lukewarm. They explain too little and too much.

Julian is smiling at him.

Charles, numb at the edges and heart fluttering a wave in his direction, smiles back.

But Julian’s smile flickers and goes out. Whatever is in Charles’ face is wrong. Not what Julian wanted to see.

And there’s that stone, sinking fast.