“Oh, you again,” he said. “Honestly, I’m disappointed. I hoped it was room service.”
He took to scrunching up his hair with the towel one-handed so he could gesture, in a vague unenthusiastic manner, for me to come in. I walked in slowly. The floor was black wood, polished to shine like jet, and on all the walls were cubist paintings in gray and red. The light fixtures were metallic, shaped like boxes and spaceships. The light in one had run out, so I wandered over to it and tapped the shiny red dome with two fingers, rings clicking against the metal, and the light blinked back on.
When I looked up, Carwyn was watching me, but that lasted only an instant before he was drying his hair again. It was both less and more strange, seeing the replica of Ethan’s body instead of Ethan’s face. A body was more anonymous, not as easily recognizable, but Carwyn’s was marked by the events of a life different from Ethan’s. Carwyn was thinner, with the leanness of someone used to less and worse food, muscles less impressive but possibly more functional. He had a long scar up his abdomen, a nipple piercing, and none of the tan or the dusting of freckles from Ethan’s days basking in the sun. It was reassuring to have dissimilarities to catalog, having it made clear they were different bodies rather than mirror images.
It was strange because I was the only one who knew Ethan’s body, the intimate details of it, well enough to know what was different about this one.
“I’m sorry for what they did,” I said.
Carwyn finished drying his hair and walked over, closer to me, to drop his towel in a damp heap on the bed. He retreated to a chair standing against the opposite wall, its carved wood painted black, and retrieved his shirt.
“What are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry they took your pass and sent you away.”
Carwyn snorted. “I know, right? I was so looking forward to playing a game of charades with good old Uncle Mark. I’m not their family. I didn’t expect anything better than this.”
“They owed you better than this,” I said. “They already owed you support. You saved Ethan. They owed you thanks, and not shipping you off as if you were someone engaged in a business dispute with the company.”
“So, what?” Carwyn asked. “You’re here to thank me?”
“I already thanked you,” I pointed out.
“You’re here to express your appreciation by proposing a kinky doppelganger ménage à trois? In which case, I’m going to have to turn you down. I’m sad to say it, but Ethan gives me the impression he’d be about as exciting in the sack as an eggplant.”
“You’re wrong, but you’re just going to have to trust me on that, because you’re never finding out firsthand,” I said. “He’s mine and I don’t share. You keep trying to make me angry or, failing that, uncomfortable.”
Carwyn’s eyes widened for a moment; startled, he looked more like Ethan. He walked across the room toward me again, stopping to sit on the bed, and shrugged and lowered his head as if conceding a point. Or, I realized a moment later, as if he was putting on his shoes.
“Doppelganger,” he said. “Created pitiless and soulless to wander the earth tormenting mortals. Sort of my thing.”
“You torment mortals with dumb sexual innuendo?”
“I’m also a teenage boy. You work with what you have.”
I went to another painted-black chair on my side of the room. I removed the small cushion, which was covered in beads for maximum discomfort, and sat on the chair cross-legged.
“You can’t torment me,” I said. “Not unless you try a lot harder than you currently are. You did something good for me instead.”
“Weren’t you listening to Ethan back on the train? I did something self-serving and cynical that only coincidentally benefited you.”
“Weren’t you listening to me back on the train? You did something good for me: I don’t really care what your reasons were. I haven’t had so many good things happen to me that I’m going to quibble, and I don’t care how much you try to insult me. Because I’m not going to listen.”
I leaned my weight against my drawn-up legs, fingers laced in the ties of my shoes, and met Carwyn’s gaze straight on. I couldn’t tell if it was challenging or suspicious, hateful or simply curious, but it didn’t matter what he thought of me, not really. It didn’t matter what he felt about me, if he could feel anything at all: my mother would have said he could, and the whole Light city would have told me it was impossible. None of that mattered. What mattered was that I had come to this hotel to do whatever I could for him.
Carwyn was silent for a while. I stretched my legs out, and curled my fingers around the arms of the chair.
I started a little when Carwyn kicked the side of my shoe with his own. When I looked up, he was smiling a bit: a small and not entirely reassuring grin, nothing like Ethan’s, but it looked genuine nonetheless.