Chapter 49: The Trembling Big Bad Wolf
The Next Morning
Pain.
Real, specific, unambiguous pain.
Adam surfaced from sleep like someone being pulled up from deep water, awareness arriving before he was ready for it. His head was throbbing with the particular insistence of something that had actually happened to it, not just the general suffering of a hangover.
He reached up and touched the back of his head. His fingers came away with dried blood on them.
He opened his eyes.
He was on a couch that was not his couch, in a living room that was not his living room.
He sat up too fast, lost his balance, and went off the couch onto the floor.
"Okay," he said to the ceiling.
He lay there for a moment, then got up carefully, using the couch for support. He looked at his hand again. The dried blood was from the back of his head — a wound, already smaller than it should have been given how much had dried on his fingers, healing faster than it had any right to.
He had no memory of the last several hours.
He had a clear memory of the party. Of driving Juno and Lauren home. Of sitting in the truck outside. After that — static.
He was in Lauren's house.
He looked around the living room with the focused attention of someone doing a damage assessment. Everything seemed normal, except for a faint rust-colored smear on the edge of the couch cushion that looked like a partial handprint.
Not his.
"You're awake."
He turned. Juno was coming down the stairs in pajamas, yawning, looking entirely relaxed.
"What happened?" Adam asked. "My head—"
"Hangover, and you walked into the coffee table on the way down," Juno said. "You went out pretty fast after that. Karen and I got you onto the couch."
"The handprint?"
Juno glanced at the cushion. "We were pressing on your head. You bled more than you'd expect." She shrugged. "You're fine."
Adam looked at her expression. It was completely natural. Easy. The kind of ease that either meant nothing had happened or meant someone was very good at this.
He decided not to investigate further.
"Where's Lauren?"
"Still asleep," Juno said.
"I'll head out then."
"Drive carefully."
He went to the truck. Juno stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching him back out, and gave a small wave.
He drove two blocks, stopped at a light, and reached into his pocket.
He pulled out what his father had pressed into his hand before prom — still there, count confirmed, everything accounted for.
He sat at the green light for a moment.
Don't be the curious teenager who investigates the noise in the basement, he reminded himself. That never ends well.
He drove home.
The Duncan house received him with the warmth of people who had not been worried because they believed in him, and also possibly because they hadn't noticed what time he'd come home.
His mother thought he was the pride of the family. His father had a more informed and generous interpretation of events. His own assessment fell somewhere in the middle: a reasonably cautious person who had nonetheless spent the night unconscious on the floor of a situation he didn't fully understand.
Trembling Big Bad Wolf was probably accurate.
High school was officially behind him. Columbia started after summer. The task in front of him was the novel.
He poured himself into it.
Reading in the mornings — Victorian history, atmospheric reference, anything that built texture and authenticity into the world he was constructing. Writing in the evenings. The pace improved as his fluency built, and the genuine craft pleasure of the work surprised him. He'd expected it to feel like an obligation. It didn't.
Sheldon visited occasionally, unchanged in every meaningful way, which was somehow both exhausting and comforting.
Paige didn't come. Sheldon reported that she'd gone deep into advanced mathematics, apparently drawn to one of the major unsolved problems in the field. Adam believed it. She had the specific quality of focus that problems like that required.
Juno and Lauren came by regularly. Lauren's affect had shifted over the summer — lighter, more present, the specific frozen quality she'd had when she was still in Jennifer's orbit mostly gone. She remained cool toward Adam, but the active hostility had settled into something closer to neutral.
Juno read the manuscript as it developed and was immediately invested in it, which was gratifying and also meant she had opinions about the update schedule.
Adam's original plan had been to finish half the first volume over summer break. What actually happened was that whenever his daily output dropped below a certain threshold, he would look up from his desk and find two people sitting on either side of him in complete silence, watching him type with patient, unreadable expressions.
Under lamplight. Both of them. Not saying anything. Just present.
He found this significantly more motivating than any deadline.
The first volume was finished on the last day of summer break. Adam typed the final line, set down his pen, and looked at the two of them.
They looked back at him.
He smiled. It was a tired smile, genuine, slightly unhinged at the edges.
They smiled back.
Summer was over. New York was next.
End of Chapter 49
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