Page 14 of Oleander

The glasshouse was already airless and hot, but with him inside, it felt like a vacuum. Sweat pooled at the back of my neck and trickled down my spine, spider-soft.

“My uncle said this was my mother’s favourite room of the whole house,” he said.

I was so shocked that he’d spoken and that it wasn’t an insult, I was momentarily stunned.

Caspien continued, “He said she was obsessed with flowers and plants. Like Luke, I suppose.”

Was this...a conversation? It sounded like one, but the idea of it was so alien that I really wasn’t sure. My brain scrambled for something to say. Anything. Intelligent or otherwise.

Momentarily, I considered being as cruel to him as he had been to me. I should tell him I didn’t give a shit about his dead mother, that she could be nothing like Luke if she had given birth to the literal spawn of Satan. But I couldn’t do it. His voice was soft. Softer than I’d ever heard it, small and soft as a child’s.

I hated how it made me feel, hated that it made me feel anything at all. Because Ihatedhim.

But then, without conscious thought to the words, I was talking.

“Well, maybe when we’re done, you can plant something she’d have liked,” I said. My voice sounded dry and scratchy. It was from the heat.

Caspien blinked as though coming slowly out of a trance. He’d been lingering just inside the threshold of the glasshouse like he was afraid to come inside, but now he walked towards me in that strange way he did. Determined and precise. A predator, I thought suddenly, a predator stalking forward to me, the prey.Thatwas how he walked.

His hair was down about his face, one side tucked behind an ear. Ears that looked small and kind of girlish. I’d have to look at some more ears to decide if they were girly or not, but they looked delicate with their soft pink lobes. His nose was still the weirdest one I’d ever seen. A little flattened dip in its point that drew your eye.

Derailing my thoughts about ears and noses, he stopped, closer than he’d ever been to me by choice. I was still kneeling by the circular bed, so I glanced at his feet first. Golden pink toes peeking out of those slippers. They were fine-boned and dusted with faint golden hair. I stood, and the scent of something floral fluttered in the space between us. Something sweet and hot that wasn’t coming from the flowers but from him. That scent and his proximity caused my stomach to cartwheel wildly.

He stared at me for what must have been a whole minute; my eyes and then my mouth, the base of my throat and then back up to my eyes again. I felt peeled raw and exposed.

“Our uncles think that now that you will be living here on the estate, we should be friends.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What do you think about that?”

I thought about it for a moment. Or rather, how to reply to it. I already knew what I thought about it.

But he hadn’t said anything awful to me in about three minutes and I felt a little exhilarated from it. Hopeful and stupid.

“I’m pretty sure to be friends, we’d have to like each other.”

Some light went off in his eyes and his mouth tilted up very slightly.

He said, “Do you not like me, Judey?”

I considered telling him that no, I fucking hated him. But we were going to be living in his garden, working in his house, and if he was the reason his uncle had offered Luke and Beth the cottage, then perhaps he had the power to have the offer withdrawn too. And it would be my fault if he did.

“Don’t call me that.”

“What should I call you then?”

“My name,” I said, and he gave me an expectant look. “Jude.”

He gave a half shrug. “Fine. Answer my question,Jude. Do you not like me?”

“Why do you even care? You hate me too.”

He smiled at that. A cold, half-formed thing.

“I never said I cared. I asked if you did.”

This made something hot flare up inside me. Through clenched teeth, I said. “I think it’s pretty obvious we’re not going to be friends. We hate each other.”