Rose all but threw her hands in the air. “Are you telling me you haven’t been?”
“I haven’t been in town long,” Landon countered.
“This is why you asked, ‘why here,’” Rose said. “You haven’t felt it in your bones yet.”
It wasn’t at all why. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
Nothing tomorrow, the next day, or the next until his visa was up in six months. “Oh, just a few errands.”
“You’ll want to leave right now and get in bed as soon as you can.”
“Are you kicking me out?”
Rose laughed. “You’re going to catch your first sunrise from the top of Arthur’s Seat. You know your way around Old Town, yeah?”
He did not. “Pretty much.”
“Good. Meet me at the Tesco’s on Holyrood at six a.m. If you get lost, just walk toward the enormous hill. You can see it from almost any second-story window.”
Holyrood. The letter. Rose’s flat: 39 Holyrood Road. He wondered whether she would head back there that evening, and realized in the same heartbeat that she wouldn’t. She and Graham would do what he and Rose used to do at the end of long dinner parties and lose themselves in each other. The thought was enough to guarantee he wouldn’t sleep a wink. “Okay,” he said. “That sounds great.”
“This city is going to win you over,” Rose said, then drained the rest of her wine in one long sip.
“Sure,” he said. He searched her eyes a moment longer than he should have for that grit that had grown in his Rose with every setback, disappointment, and redirection she’d faced. All he saw were two remarkably bloodshot eyes—whites that he could have sworn were clear only minutes ago now cracked red. He wondered if she was feeling well. Perhaps she’d had too much to drink. He thought about asking her, but instead, he said, “I trust you.”
Landon pulled the scratchy wool covers up to his neck and tried to heed Rose’s advice to get as much sleep as possible. But, as he’d predicted, the image of Rose’s hand on Graham’s shoulder wasburned into his retinas with such clarity it was all but impossible. He’d resorted to counting breaths when an angry pair of hands pounded on his door. Someone had stumbled home drunk, he figured, and didn’t realize they had the wrong room. It was an easy mistake to make at Kick Ass Greyfriars, where the upstairs was as nondescript as the downstairs was eclectic.
“Wrong room!” he yelled, pulling the covers a touch higher.
The hands banged again. Now he was annoyed. Landon pulled on his slippers and ambled to the door. He opened the door a crack. “Wrong—”
“What were you thinking!” Poppy yelled, eyes blazing.
He was rattled, but knew better than to show it. “Hey, hey!” Landon shout whispered. “These walls are thin!”
“That should be the last thing you’re worried about right now,” Poppy said, though she did, in fact, lower her voice. “I thought you were leaving.”
Landon opened the door to his room all the way and waved her in. “I never said that.” He was fairly sure that, if anything, he’d said the opposite.
Poppy brushed him out of the way with her shoulder and stood in the center of the sparse room, arms crossed. “I told you to.”
He rubbed his eyes and tried very hard not to roll them as far back into his skull as they could go. “I hope I’m not the first person to tell you that your words don’t actually carry more weight than the average person’s.”
Poppy’s nostrils flared. “Rose told you not to come.”
“You made it very clear that Rose didn’t say anything at all to me.”
“Implicitly.”
Landon didn’t want to think about it like that. If he did, thenwhat he was doing would feel more loaded than it was. “So you’ve tracked me down and barged into my room in the middle of the night to tell me to go home, is that right?”
“First of all,” Poppy said, scowling, “it’s not even ten. Second of all, this hardly counts as ‘tracking you down.’ Rose told me about you.”
It made Landon’s heart flutter like a teenager with a crush. “She talked about me?”
She pulled her lips into a line. “I asked Rose how she was feeling, and she mentioned a new member of her and Graham’s group. A prospective student who looked like, and I’m quoting her here, ‘someone who has a complicated relationship with ceiling fans.’”