Page 104 of Oleander

I ran faster.

When he wasn’t in the kitchen, I went straight to the library, and when he wasn’t there, I went to the music room. I went to the blue and the red sitting rooms next, though he rarely spent any time in either before deciding he must be sleeping. Cas liked to sleep in the afternoons; he’d curl up on the sofa or window seat in the library, close his eyes, and sleep as deeply as a cat.

The bedroom door had been closed.

I imagined sneaking inside and watching him asleep for a few moments before waking him. He looked different when he was asleep, the perfect symmetry of his features still and ethereal as water.

Whenever I watched him sleep, I wanted to be an artist like him. I’d taken some pictures of him on my phone, but Idreamt of being able to cast him against a page out of pencil or watercolour. The rosebud mouth and the delicate veined silk of his eyelids. Dark gold lashes against the arch of his cheekbones.

The bedroom door had been closed.

I snicked it open as quietly as I could. The smell hit me first. Sweet and pungent as death in the heat of the early summer. Heat which had already begun sinking into the walls of the old house.

It was the smell of heartbreak. The smell of dreams crashing down around me. The death of first love.

The bedroom door had been closed. And had it been open, maybe I wouldn’t have seen. I would have heard and understood, but I wouldn’t have seen.

I’d not registered the strange car in the courtyard outside. Expensive and grey and with a personalised registration, I would still be able to recite from memory even years later. I’d look for it everywhere for years to come.

I saw the elegant arch of Caspien’s back first, butter gold in the late afternoon sun.

A dark hand gripped his waist, firm enough to bruise.

“Don’t you dare come yet,” Caspien ordered, voice a taut desperate whisper. “I’ve waited toofuckinglong for this.”

“I missed you too, sweetheart...” A low breathy laugh.

I knew who it belonged to. That voice. That laugh. That hand. I knew, and I felt a gasping suffocating pain sear through my chest, a hole opening impossibly wide.

No.

No.

Please no.

“I missedthisterribly,” Caspien panted, hips rolling.

“No,” I said. Not loudly, not loudly enough that they would hear me through that.

But he did. Caspien turned, looking at me over his shoulder. There was nothing in his eyes. No life. Nothing at all. But as our eyes held, I saw everything in them I would never have; hopes and dreams of a life shattering.

“Jude,” he said.

“What?” Blackwell said.

I staggered backwards out of the room, along the hall and down the stairs. At the foot of them, I fell, pain shooting through my knee. I ignored it. In the kitchen, Elspeth was taking off her coat, just arriving.

“Jude, sweetheart, are you hungry? There’s leftover—”

I bolted past without looking at her, past the stable and Falstaff, around the side of the house and on toward the trees on the other side of the estate. I don’t remember what thoughts were careening through my head as I ran. I remember only the noise in my ears and the pain in my chest, the burning in my legs.

The hut was the same as it always was: air warm and wood-soaked and close against my skin. I thought about the last time I’d been here. The last time he’d been here with me. He’d been colder, almost like he used to be.

I’d ignored it, pretended it was just his way of making going back to school a little easier. Christ, I was an idiot.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, curled up in one corner of that hut, fists clenched and tears rolling down my cheeks, but the light had begun to change outside. The refractions from the observation holes tilting lower and lower on the wood surfaces.

Then, I heard it.