The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) by Maureen Johnson

cobblestone road.
    “I’ll be able to see you all the way to the door from here,” he said. “It should be open. We unlocked the building and had someone stationed there to make sure no one got in until it was secure again. I’ll be here until you get inside.”
    It felt like we should have a more meaningful good-bye than that, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d already hugged him once tonight.
    “Sure,” I said, unfastening my seat belt. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll see you around, or?”
    “You can always reach me,” he said. “If you need me.”
    “Right. Okay. So…”
    I walked up the road alone. The door opened, just as promised, and I looked back down the lane and raised my hand as a final good-bye. I couldn’t really see him—the road was too dark at the end where the car was parked. But it was still there. I could see the headlights, two glowing eyes pointed at me, waiting for me to get to safety.

7
    “R IGHT,” MARK SAID, SWITCHING THE LIGHTS OUT IN ART history the next morning, “let’s get started. John Constable, English Romantic painter, lived from 1776 until 1837…”
    Art history was a long class—three hours, with two ten-minute breaks that were really more like fifteen minutes, but still. Long. I wrote down the names of paintings and stared at the slides, but my mind was completely elsewhere. It was on the platform at Charing Cross. It was in the car with Stephen and at the flat with Callum and Boo.
    I’d felt something last night, aside from nausea. Something real. Something…exciting? Something that made me feel complete again. Plus, Jerome was pressing his leg against mine—not hard. But it was there. John Constable, English Romantic painter, didn’t stand a chance. (Also, for the record, if someone is called a Romantic, it should mean some sexy times, I think. Instead, what it really means is people in puffy shirts who probably had a lot of real-life sexytimes, but producedalmost exclusively pictures of hillsides or people in dramatic poses, like pretending to be Ophelia dead in a swamp. I definitely call shenanigans on this.)
    We emerged, three hours later, our brains swollen with images of sky and damp and moping. Once we got outside, Jerome swayed side to side a bit, like he was standing on a teetering top.
    “What?” I said.
    “What were you going to do today?”
    “Work,” I said. “I guess…work. Because I’m kind of behind.”
    “I have things this afternoon as well, but I was thinking…we could go out? Properly? On a date. Tonight?”
    “A date?” I repeated.
    I’d never been on a real date. I’d ended up going places with people—guy people—but it was always kind of, well…kind of crap. “Dates” seemed to be something that existed in movies or television shows or a more domesticated past where you were wooed in high school and got married upon graduation and immediately gave birth to ten children. They were not something for people like me. But here I was, quasi-boyfriend saying he wanted to take me on an actual date, and I was just staring at him impassively, like a horse watching a mime pretending to walk against the wind.
    “Yes,” I said. “Date. Yes.”
    “Okay,” Jerome said. “Good. So, maybe, instead of dinner? We’ll go out?”
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    “Would you like to go to dinner, or to a film?”
    “Sure.”
    “Which one?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Whichever.”
    “Okay, well, we can figure it out.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Okay.”
    We shuffled apart, nodding.
    I was going on a date, a date, a date. I repeated the word in my head as I pressed my finger on the keypad, as I tripped up the steps of Hawthorne. The word beat in time to the creaking of the wood. A date, a date…I shoved open the first fire door and breathed in that strange, clinical carpety smell that lived only between the fire doors…open second fire door…a date. A date with my man. My boy. My guy. Boyfriend? Whatever. My future activity had a word,