The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [5]
But as the elevator doors part like our old bright red curtains, as I anxiously dart into the lobby, trying with every element of my being to look like I’m not darting at all, I search through the morning crowd of guests and researchers playing bumper cars in their winter coats as they line up to go through the metal detector at security.
For two months now, we’ve been chatting via email, but I haven’t seen Clementine in nearly fifteen years. How do I even know what she…?
“Nice tie,” Orlando calls from the sign-in desk. He points to the far right corner, by the lobby’s Christmas tree, which is (Archives tradition) decorated with shredded paper. “Look.”
Standing apart from the crowd, a woman with short dyed black hair—dyed even darker than Joan Jett—raises her chin, watching me as carefully as I watch her. Her eye makeup is thick, her skin is pale, and she’s got silver rings on her pinkies and thumbs, making her appear far more New York than D.C. But what catches me off guard is that she looks… somehow… older than me. Like her ginger brown eyes have seen two lifetimes. But that’s always been who she was. She may’ve been my first kiss, but I know I wasn’t hers. She was the girl who dated the guys two grades above us. More experienced. More advanced.
The exact opposite of Iris.
“Clemmi…” I mouth, not saying a word.
“Benjy…” she mouths back, her cheeks rising in a smile as she uses the nickname my mom used to call me.
Synapses fire in my brain and I’m right back in church, when I first found out that Clementine had never met her dad (her mom was nineteen and never said who the boy was). My dad died when I was three years old.
Back then, when combined with the kiss, I thought that made Clementine Kaye my destiny—especially for the three-week period when she was home with mono and I was the one picked to bring her assignments home for her. I was going to be in her room—near her guitar and her bra (Me. Puberty.)—and the excitement was so overwhelming, as I knocked on her front door, right there, my nose began to bleed.
Really.
Clementine saw the whole thing—even helped me get the tissues that I rolled into the nerd plugs that I stuffed in my nostrils. I was the short kid. Easy pickings. But she never made fun—never laughed—never told the story of my nosebleed to anyone.
Today, I don’t believe in destiny. But I do believe in history. That’s what Orlando will never understand. There’s nothing more powerful than history, which is the one thing I have with this woman.
“Lookatyou,” she hums in a soulful but lilting voice that sounds like she’s singing even when she’s just talking. It’s the same voice I remember from high school—just scratchier and more worn. For the past few years, she’s been working at a small jazz radio station out in Virginia. I can see why. In just her opening note, a familiar tingly exhilaration crawls below my skin. A feeling like anything’s possible.
A crush.
For the past year, I’d forgotten what it felt like.
“Beecher, you’re so… You’re handsome!”
My heart reinflates, nearly bursting a hole in my chest. Did she just—?
“You are, Beecher! You turned out great!”
My line. That’s my line, I tell myself, already searching for a new one. Pick something good. Something kind. And genuine. This is your chance. Give her something so perfect, she’ll dream about it.
“So… er… Clemmi,” I finally say, rolling back and forth from my big toes to my heels as I notice her nose piercing, a sparkling silver stud that winks right at me. “Wanna go see the Declaration of Independence?”
Kill me now.
She lowers her head, and I wait for her to laugh.
“I wish I could, but—” She reaches into her purse and pulls out a folded-up sheet of paper. Around her wrist, two vintage wooden bracelets click-clack together. I