Chapter Text
He killed her. Zoe. Her friend.
And he let Oscar take the blame.
One day on Coney Island doesn’t change that.
She kills him. Mabel. His…
His enemy? His friend? His acquaintance? His neighbor?
His…something.
He’s noticed her before, of course. The boy from 6B notices everything. Even the people who don’t want to be noticed.
Especially those people.
How could he have missed her, when the very air in the Arconia shifted whenever she returned for the summer? When she took it all away with her when she left? When he knew the day she’d moved into her aunt’s reno, because a breeze had blown through the courtyard and brought the scent of paint and charcoal along with it?
Only a fool could miss that.
The smell of her art still lingers in his nostrils—it clings to her clothes, no matter how much perfume she uses to try to cover it. It will fade in time, as it always does. For now, he does what he can to ignore it. Focuses instead of the smell of his leftover souvlaki, eaten alone. On the woody smell of his shampoo and body wash in the shower. The clean cotton of his bedsheets. It’s enough—almost—to clear his head of her and let him sleep.
Theo rolls over and shuts his eyes, waiting for the inevitable to happen—the movie-memory screening that plays in his head every night, that haunts his dreams, when he has them.
Zoe, at the edge of the Arconia roof, his hand on her shoulders, trying to get her to stop hitting him. He can feel the phantom muscle memory alight in his arms, feel his biceps tense as his fear and his anger and his frustration dart through his veins, until he can’t hold the feelings in anymore and his arm flies out of her grasp to…
Push.
Zoe, at the edge of the Arconia roof, his hand on her shoulders, trying to get her to stop hitting him. Her foot, trapped in a strappy stiletto, catches an unnoticed pebble. He can feel the phantom muscle memory alight in his arms, feels his biceps clench as she stumbles, feel his fear overtake his anger and frustration as the girl stumbles loose in his grasp, drunk and unwieldy, and already falling too fast for him to save her, and…
And…
He plays out the rest in his head—other possibilities, some where he is the clear and obvious villain. The murderer. Others, where he is the hero. Where he saves this young Robin Hood, this thief among thieves, from her inevitable end.
His memory takes him through the rest of the night—from the roof of the Arconia to the streets of the Upper West Side, the lights of New Year fireworks pairing beautifully with the red and blue sirens of New York’s finest.
He peers around his father’s heavy winter wool coat, terrified to see what he knows he will see. No one has bothered to put a sheet over her yet. When he finally takes her in, he is suddenly certain that the last vestige of Zoe is still somewhere on the roof of the Arconia, a drink in her hand and a ring on her finger and an obstinate boy on her arm. On the streets, she’s been caved in, a smattering of limbs in a broken pile of blood and guts. He only looks at her face for a moment, but that’s all it takes for him to remember that it had turned concave, that half her brain was splattered feet away.
Theo blinks in the darkness.
Zoe morphs into Mabel on the streets of Theo’s memory.
Mabel wears her Coney Island smile, the one she’d shared when he’d finally let her have a turn at the Whack-a-Mole. She clutches a plastic ring with a plastic green stone in her hand. Blood and brains, broken and bent.
Theo throws the covers off of him and stands, shaking his head back and forth, faster and faster, trying to knock the image of a dead Mabel out of his mind.
Zoe, he has learned to live without. But Mabel…Mabel he would like to learn to live with. He thinks, for some reason, that he needs her. That she might need him, too.
He glances at his phone, sitting temptingly on his nightstand.
She could text him. She has his number.
Just in case, she’d said, as they got back in his car after their Coney Island adventure.
But Zoe. Oscar. Tim.
She’d be betraying the memory of her Hardy Boys by becoming friends with Theo Dimas.
So why can’t she get him out of her head? Why, when she searches for a happy memory to cut through the gloom, does her mind keep showing her Theo’s smile? Why does the memory of that smile make her heart pick up its pace?
Did Zoe slip, or did I push her? I still don’t know.
Her memory has gaps—she knows it. There are things she can’t remember. Won’t remember. She’d like to forget the boy from 6B, but there’s something about him that she can’t manage to tuck away.
He texts her first. He makes up an excuse—she’d said this was just in case, and he isn’t sure if that means her number is to be use in emergencies only.
So he invents an emergency.
hey, sorry to bother you. making cookies and forgot eggs. you got any i could borrow?
A pit settles in his stomach as Theo realizes that, beside his father, Mabel is the only other Arconia resident who’s number he has. The pit is quickly replaced with a churning anxiety as he presses send, and texts Mabel Mora for the first time. She replies quickly—so much quicker than he thought she would. The surprise of her response is almost enough to clamp down on the anxiety.
borrow or take?
His heart sinks.
sorry couldn’t resist. you’re welcome to “borrow” however much you need as long as you share some cookies
i’m out right now but i’ll swing by in like an hour?
He smiles. Then he startles—he should probably start making actual cookies, if that’s his cover.
Fifty-two minutes later, he gets a text.
special delivery, open up
True to her word, Mabel is on the other side of his door, grocery bags slung over her shoulder and a full carton of eggs in her hands. She hands it to him with a sly grin.
“I was out,” she says.
His hands cover hers as he takes the eggs. He immediately wants to find a way to touch her again. Instead, he grips the carton tighter.
Thank you, he says.
You’re welcome. She peers around his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of what he might be making. He laughs, and blocks her view as he closes the door partway. She’s grinning as she adjusts her bags, then she waves and turns to the elevators.
Seconds later, he gets a text.
don’t forget, those eggs come with a price
Alone, he doesn’t bother to hide the smile that bubbles up from deep within him.
special delivery will arrive in an hour and a half
She indulges The Thought, one night.
She’s been skirting around it for days now.
She lets herself think it during the After. Once a murder is solved. Once her hands are clean. Once she can finally feel like her breath is her own again, and that she isn’t living on borrowed time.
She hasn’t seen him. Theo. Not since he gave her those Greek cookies. Which isn’t surprising. She’d never seen him often, in the Before. If anything, seeing Theo Dimas would have been unusual.
What bothers her, now, is that she wants to see him. Not only text. See.
But it isn’t like she can magically make that happen.
So, indulgence it is.
Mabel can see it all—sees herself grabbing one of the many celebratory splits of champagne she’s accumulated in recent months, sees herself boldly marching out to the elevators, punching the Down arrow until it finally dings.
She sees herself frantically pressing 6, willing the doors of the arcane Arconia elevator to close a little faster. When the elevator finally lets her off, she marches right out and right up to 6B.
And then…and then…
She holds up her hand to knock, and slowly lets her fist fall.
She hovers over the doorbell, and remembers it poses the same problem.
Theo won’t hear either.
She pats her pockets for her phone, absent in her rush to find the boy from 6B. As she turns to make her way back to the elevator, back to her aunt’s apartment, she hears a click. She turns back.
Theo Dimas. Earnest, shy, mysterious, and currently very surprised Theo Dimas.
She waves. He waves back.
She points to the champagne, then points inside his apartment.
Theo raises an eyebrow. He knows, she thinks. How could he not?
But he still steps aside and lets her in. He tosses his keys on a side table—he has on no hat, or a bag, so Mabel hopes he’d been off to run some odd late-night Arconia errand. Check the mail, or do his laundry, or something like that.
Mabel’s heart beats wildly at this part of The Thought—at the part she has allowed herself to think the least about.
She enters apartment 6B. She shuts the door behind her, trapped between it and Theo, who is altogether too close, too much. His cologne or his shampoo—salt and sandalwood—fills her nostrils. Theo takes the champagne from her hand and places it next to his keys on the entry table.
Blue eyes, a storm in their own right. She cannot stop looking at them, thinking about them. They haunt her, another Arconia ghost.
She reaches for Theo’s hands. He lets her take them.
Mabel—the real Mabel—can feel her pulse ringing in her ears as she slips a hand down her stomach, down beneath the waistband of her panties.
The Mabel of her own making tugs Theo closer, stands on her tiptoes, and presses a decidedly too-sober kiss to his lips. A decision too clearheaded to blame on anything other than want.
Theo is surprised, and they are still kissing, and she feels him wriggle his hands free of hers so he can grab her face and pull her closer. The kiss deepens, and she isn’t sure how, but she ends up pressed against the doorway of apartment 6B, held securely by the old oak and Theo Dimas, who kisses her like he may never kiss again, who inhales her like she is air.
For her part, she pours out an apology for her shortcomings in between each press of her lips, each swipe of her tongue against his, hoping that now, maybe now, he will understand her, feel what she wants to say to him. I’m sorry I never learned to speak your language. Promise me you’ll teach me how to know you. This, finally, is a language they both understand.
And in Mabel’s fantasy, they have a lot to say.
The details come in overwhelming, heart-pounding waves from there—her leg around Theo’s waist, his hand at the apex of her thighs, moans he cannot hear but delights in nonetheless, her hands removing layer after layer until she finds skin, champagne long forgotten as belt buckles come undone and pants hit the floor and finally, he is moving inside of her, again and again, until finally, finally, finally—
Sweat covers her skin as she comes back to her bed.
A fantasy she keeps to herself won’t harm anyone, Mabel thinks.
She does not dream of the dead that night. Instead, she dreams of the living—of her mother’s warm hugs, of Charles and Oliver giggling through the halls of the Arconia like young boys, of Theo Dimas, face lit up by the joys of Whack-a-Mole and the claw machine and the lights of New York City as he drove them home in the evening.
She wakes up with a stomachache. She wants to be sick.
Theo is the only thing that can keep her ghosts at bay, and the only reason she has ghosts in the first place.
He can’t keep going on like this, hoping every time he turns a corner, that he might run into her. He is going mad with it—three times now, he’s sworn he caught a whiff of the turpentine and vanilla scent that lingers on her. Three times now, he’s chased it to its inevitable end: outside of 12E, one solid oak door away from her. He could knock, or ring the doorbell…except he can’t, can he?
He could text her.
But what else is there to say? He has already told her that he carries a guilt he’s never completely sure he earned. She already knows what it’s like with his father. She has told him about her own father, about her own guilts.
He cannot come outright and say he wants to know her. To be her friend. Tell her that their day on Coney Island, for all the moments that were terrifying, was one of the best days of his entire life. That for once, he did not feel trapped in his father’s prison in the Arconia, or in the real prison of New York Penitentiary. He felt…he felt…
Like himself. Like Theo. Just Theo.
His heart skips a beat, reaches out to try to find the other heart beating on the other side of the door. He’s a fool for standing here, when she’s probably off making dinner or starting a bath or doing some other normal part of her day.
Theo takes a moment to be honest with himself. He knows why he is standing here, why he keeps taking detours on the elevator to stop on her floor, why he is chasing turpentine down the halls.
It is not to be Mabel Mora’s friend.
He has been haunted by ghosts for years. None have been so persistent as this woman who still lives and breathes.
He lets this three-inch thick oak door turn into a mile, and he leaves. Again. The ghost of the Arconia will haunt him another day.
The ghost of the Arconia, for her part, watches him leave through the peephole in her door.
She breathes a sigh—of relief? of disappointment?—when he finally turns away.
Her hand grips the handle of her door a little too tightly.
Turn the handle. Face whatever this is.
Stay inside. You’re safe here.
She cannot be having these feelings for a man who may or may not have killed her friend. Feelings for a man who stood by while another friend served time in jail for a crime that may or may not have ever occurred.
Mabel does not let go of the doorknob for some time.
Because who was she to judge?
She knows what it feels like to have blood on her hands.
She has a body count following her around, haunting her past. Guilt that may not be hers to carry.
So does Theo.
Mabel slides down her oak door, struck numb by the realization that no one—not even Oscar—knows how she feels as well as Theo.
Blood on their hands, and neither knows if it belongs there or not.
A decision is made in a moment, and Mabel stands to open her door.
The halls are empty, but she hears the elevator ding.
She turns to take the stairs, feeling glad that the Arconia elevators are painfully slow, then less glad when she remembers Theo lives six floors below.
When she reaches apartment 6B, she is empty-handed. She is Mabel, just Mabel.
The elevator dings. Three ghosts leave first. Theo Dimas follows.
He sees her.
She smiles.
It’s her Coney Island smile.
He smiles back. She doesn’t try to say anything. He doesn’t either.
He opens the door. Mabel eyes the old oak a little too closely, a faint blush rising on her cheeks as he closes it behind her.
Come on in.
“Thanks,” she says. Seconds later, she repeats it—thank you—her movement hesitant until he smiles at her.
She should hate him.
So how on earth did they end up here? Why does his heart feel like he’s run a marathon, when all he’s done is open the door?
Mabel takes out her phone, types up something quickly. His heart sinks a little—it’s probably her friends, calling after her about some lead in their next case.
He’s surprised when she turns the screen to him instead. Her notes app is open.
Can you teach me more ASL? he reads.
Now?
She nods. He nods back. Will they spend this entire afternoon as mirrors to each other, smiling and nodding all too pleasantly? Why is she here?
Why does he want her to stay?
He gestures to the couch, inviting her to sit. He’s not sure where to begin this impromptu lesson—with letters? with words?—until he remembers something. He tucks his chin toward his chest, trying to hide his smile.
Glitter, he says.
And it is worth every bit of confusion, of fear, of trepidation, to see Mabel’s face crack open with a laugh.
Glitter? she repeats with a smile.
He nods, reaches out to correct her placement. Her hands are soft. Hardly the hands of a killer, he thinks.
Her eyes widen as he puts her hands in the right spot. Theo lets himself look at her, really look at her. She is not the shadow he chases down the halls, the ghost just beyond his grasp. No. She is real. He is holding her. She is Mabel Mora, and she is so close and so soft, and this time, he is not going to be able to blame his rapid heartbeat on anything other than her presence.
She is no murderer, but she kills him.
“I should go.”
He understands her better than he’d like. He nods, pulling away from her.
Instead, her hands grip his tighter.
A war plays out on her face—anguish and confusion and…
Happiness.
He feels himself hold up the same mirror on his own face, shows her that he is fighting the same feelings.
Fingers curl around fingers. Theo leans back on the couch, taking Mabel with him. She curls too easily into his chest, settles against him like she’d done it thousands of times.
Some lesson this is turning out to be.
She shakes against him. Theo sees that she is crying, and his heart bleeds for her. He wraps an arm around her waist, curls a hand against the back of her head, and lets her cry into his sweater. He needs to do laundry soon anyway.
Theo isn’t sure when he starts crying, too. All he knows is that Mabel’s thumb grazes his cheek, and it comes away wet.
She’s the only one who gets it, he thinks.
The only one.
The thief in him wants to steal her for his own.
Mabel doesn’t know how much time passes, only that when she wakes up in Theo Dimas’ apartment, it is dark out, and she is next to a beautiful boy with protective arms wrapped around her.
She hasn’t slept like that—like she felt safe to do so—in a very, very long time.
His mouth lolls open, brow furrowed even in sleep. She hopes Theo does not dream. She reaches out her thumb to soothe the wrinkles out from between his eyebrows, her heart skipping a beat when he finally relaxes and there is a man, only a man, left beneath his guilt and his stress.
She’s so comfortable, here on his couch, in his arms, in his apartment.
So she leaves.
At her own apartment, in her own bed, she can’t manage to fall asleep again.
He wakes with a ghost in his arms.
Theo can still feel the lingering warmth she left behind, but there is no Mabel to be found.
He finds himself, surprisingly, disappointed.
And he doesn’t know what to make of that.