Chapter 6: Xavier Voss

Lyra's POV

I was in Vivian's BMW convertible, headed out to her house. Her road manners are bad. She swore the whole way. She ran down the black SUV in front of us from the badge all the way to the driver's upbringing — new money like that wants the model number engraved on its forehead. The light went yellow, she hit the throttle and took it, and flipped off the car behind us on the way through.

Then Connecticut, deeper and deeper, and the car stopped at a wrought-iron gate. A brass plate set into the post. One word on it: MARLOWE. No street number, no guard post. The gravel drive ran in and I couldn't see where it ended.

My face didn't move. My fingertips went tight against my knee.

"This isn't the mansion I pictured." I've seen plenty of those. Fountains, floodlights, the price hung on the outside wall.

And the place I lived before I was ten had the same smell to it as this one.

Vivian turned in without looking, the way you drive into your own driveway, and said as she went, "I don't usually stay here. Just come back for a meal over break." Which I already knew. Her mother had set her up with a big flat a few weeks back, and she was still picking finishes for it.

A housekeeper came out to the step — an Irish woman, heavy accent, flour still on her apron — and she talked to Vivian the way family does. "Miss Vivian, finally. The stew's on. We were waiting on the two of you." She took the bags and patted Vivian's arm on the way past.

I followed her in. Dark oak underfoot. Solid dark wood, a landscape on the wall you couldn't date, plain gray cotton-linen on the couch. Not one label in that house you could put a name to. Only weight, and how solid everything was.

Mrs. Marlowe came through from the back, hair gathered at the nape with nothing out of place, warm smile, and looked me over head to foot before she said she hadn't expected anyone this pretty.

I handed her the fruit basket. "Mrs. Marlowe, thank you for having me. Vivian mentioned you like white cherries — I saw some fresh ones and brought a few."

She hurried me in to sit. Looking at that mother, all indulgence, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't envious. I thought about Elena. I thought about the word I hadn't been able to say out loud since I was ten.

The birthday dinner was a family dinner, really. One old childhood friend of Vivian's, and everybody else was a Marlowe.

I didn't see Mr. Marlowe all evening. The cake was cut and the song was sung before he came out at all, and he only came out then because a house doesn't leave a guest sitting there ungreeted. He made his way down the table saying hello. Somebody at the far end called him Judge, the way you'd use a first name.

When he got to me he asked, out of politeness, "Miss Valente, are your parents on faculty somewhere?"

My hand paused on my fork. Then I answered, smooth. They teach at a high school. A small town. Nothing like New York.

That answer has a fixed shape by now. It comes out without a seam in it — high school teachers, some town nobody's heard of, a scholarship, and no questions after that. None of it is false about the people I say it about. All of it is false about me.

I know the arithmetic. At schools like this one, the scholarship kids from poor families get fewer every year. In that dorm I was the only one who came up out of Brooklyn. Mr. Marlowe nodded and said Vivian and I should look out for each other, and that I should come for dinner more often. I smiled and agreed. When "a small town" came out of my mouth, what went off behind my eyes was the light in the Brooklyn public study room, and Elias's hands gone red with cold while he walked me through the math.

After dinner the relatives stayed in the living room. Vivian and her friend put their heads together and murmured. There was no gap in it for me, so I got up and went out to the balcony.

The Marlowes' balcony was unpretentious — flowers, and a few pots of vegetables along with them. I pulled out my phone to spend the spare minutes on prep for my last debate.

The money I'd had pinned from my first week of freshman year. What I never had was what it stood on. Vivian's father is a judge, and not the kind who hears traffic cases. A bored hour in the library during freshman year told me the rest: he sits on the state's appellate bench, and the Marlowe name has held a seat on a bench in this state for three generations. That's why the woman at the door called him Judge and meant it was his name. It's also why Vivian keeps saying law school — in that family it isn't a career, it's the family business. And spoiled as she is, she had never once let on who her father was. Nobody in that family wants you to know who they are.

The glass doors slid open behind me. I hadn't heard them over the noise from the living room.

"You left before dessert."

It wasn't a question. He said it the way you'd state a fact you'd already confirmed.

I turned and almost walked into him. He reached out on reflex to steady me; I had my own balance back first, so his hand turned into a handshake on the way. "Xavier Voss."

Vivian's cousin — and the one Mr. Marlowe had started his round of hellos with, on his own daughter's birthday. There was a lightness about him. You could tell at a glance he'd grown up in rooms like that one.

I'd had my eye on him at dinner, as it happened. That young, and Mr. Marlowe was careful with him when he spoke — careful the way he wasn't with his own guests. Vivian's voice had a restraint in it when she mentioned him, the kind she almost never has.

I judged it on the spot. His family sits above the Marlowes. Above, not beside — and between those two words there's a whole set of doors I've never been through.

Skin on skin, and my hand did the reaching. The ability opened.

A picture flicked through my head.

The long dining table. He's got everyone gathered around it. He pulls me in against his side, arm around me, smiling like he can't get enough of me. Then he turns on a dime and throws me to the floor.

And the whole table starts laughing.

Every alarm in my head went off at once, and my mind raced.The ones before him either wanted to sleep with me or just wanted a body. So what the hell is this?

But there's no time to think it through. He's talking to me.

He asked, "You're Vivian's roommate? What are you studying at St. Jude?" Casual, and every sentence was weighing something. I smiled and said a double major, art history and finance.

He asked what I had to prep for next Wednesday. My last debate tournament.

He suggested we exchange contacts, and the reason he gave was well turned. "Thank you for looking after Vivian."

I didn't reach for my phone right away. I hesitated, then handed the number over like I'd been talked into it. The pause was something I'd calculated. Too fast reads cheap. Too slow reads like airs.

That was when Vivian came through the doors behind us. "Xavier, don't you dare mess with her. She's never even had a boyfriend. Don't wreck her."

Xavier laughed and told her she had no manners, and looked at me again, and a flicker of surprise moved across his eyes. I looked down and colored just enough.

Vivian took it for shyness and pulled me aside to whisper. "You're my friend, he wouldn't dare do anything to you. Aren't you short on money? Get more out of him. My cousin's generous with women."

It was an uncomfortable thing to hear. But I knew there was nothing mean hiding in it.

"Adult relationships don't require perfection." I've said that to myself more than once, and I've never once believed it all the way.

Vivian didn't think anything of it. "That pretty and still a virgin — aren't you losing out?"

I had nothing to say to that.

Vivian has her own set of logic. More than once she's told me she doesn't understand why I tutor, why I work, and every time she lands on the same advice: find a rich boyfriend and be done with it.

She has a long history herself. When we first met, her ex-boyfriends' exploits alone took her more than a month to get through.

I shoved her. "Don't be ridiculous. It's late, I should get back."

She rolled her eyes at me and dropped onto the swing. "Then take a cab. I'm too tired today, I'm not driving you."

Xavier's voice came from the side. He'd gone back in with the others after the handshake, and now he was standing in the open doorway with one shoulder against the frame, pitched to carry across the yard.

"Heading back? I'll take you."