Page 144 of Oleander

For the last few years, home had felt like a memory I didn’t want. A series of reminders of something I wanted back so intensely that it was painful. But those reminders had followed me onto Oxford, too, and that was because Cas didn’t live in a place, he lived inside me.

But as I headed home that summer, Cas was barely even on my mind.

I got home on a Thursday night, the last week in June, and sensed the atmosphere between Beth and Luke the moment I stepped inside the cottage. Luke had picked me up at the airport, his mood light and animated, but which disappeared the second he walked through the door. Beth was at the dining table on her laptop, surrounded by piles of paper and with her phone in her hand, glancing between both screens. I knew she’d got a big promotion at work in April, and it was more demanding of her time and attention than her middle management sales job had ever been before.

“He’s home, Beth,” Luke said when Beth didn’t look up from her phone. His voice was strangely cold. Not a tone I’d ever heard him use on her before. I looked at him, but he was turned and peering into the fridge.

“Hey,” she said, standing to throw her arms around me for a quick hug.

“Alright? Still working?” I gestured at the table.

“End of the month performance.” Beth sighed. “There’s a management meeting tomorrow.”

“I see.” I gave her an apologetic look.

“You hungry, Judey?” Luke was asking as he took something out of the fridge that looked like leftovers.

“I’m okay, actually, had a burger at the airport.”

I wanted to get out of the kitchen, where the air felt precarious and tense. Upstairs, I made a half-hearted attempt at unpacking before giving up and lying down on my bed. Nathan was arriving on Monday evening; he was currently packing up the flat in Oxford, and the last of his boxes were being picked up on Monday morning to be shipped back to New York.

He wasn’t a great texter. He preferred to talk on the phone, which I, expressly, did not, but I dialled his number anyway, and he answered on the fourth ring.

“Hey, you,” he said. “How was your propeller flight across the channel?”

“Loud. Creaky. Very bumpy.”

“Fuck,” he groaned.

I’d discovered about a week prior that he hated flying. So much so that he’d only been back to New York once in two years, and that was because his favourite aunt had died. He’d considered not going home for this either, but there was a reading of a will he’d had to be present for after. He’d planned to take the ferry across to Jersey until I told him it was a ten-hour journey. The plane was an hour. ‘Yes, but not a real plane’, he’d argued. I’d then shown him a picture of the plane’s engine, which seemed to relax him a little.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “They don’t even fly that high, so if it comes down in the sea, it won’t make too much of a splash.”

“I’m hanging up on you now.”

“I’m joking,” I laughed. “It was fine. Smoothest hour I’ve ever spent in the air.”

“Okay, I’m going to choose to believe that.”

He told me about the dinner he had with some of the faculty the following night, which he was quietly dreading. He didn’t socialise much with the rest of the department, I knew. They’d been stand-offish with him when he’d first arrived: he was convinced they saw him as a young American upstart with nothing to commend him but a shiny statuette. The fact he wasn’t even thirty yet only made it worse.

“They’ll be bricking it. The loss of the hot, prodigious Oscar–winning lecturer is going to be quite the loss to the teaching body,” I said. “Speaking of which, did you remember to pack it?”

“It’s already gone. Wait a minute, you said hot.”

“You know I think you’re hot.”

“Yeah, but I worried it was because I was your professor. And since I haven’t technically been that for two whole days...”

“I thinktechnicallyyou’re still my professor until the last day of term, which is Saturday, so...”

“Oh, you’re right, which means Monday you’ll be seeing me man to man for the first time.”

I snorted at this. “Man to man?”

“Yes, what? It will be.” He was laughing, too. I could hear him settling, as though getting into bed or stretching his body out on the grey sofa of his living room. “Have you been thinking about it?” he asked, voice low and rough.

It had been almost six weeks since the night we first kissed, and we still hadn’t had sex. It had been everything except sex, and he’d never pushed or pressured for anything more. Though I could tell how much he wanted it, he’d never done anything to make me feel uncomfortable.