Page 145 of Oleander

I’d told him that aside from my high school girlfriend (this he’d found unsurprising and very cute), there’d been one other person I’d been serious about. He understood that this person had taken some part of me I wasn’t sure I would ever get back.

But patience had its limits. And I was reaching my own: I wanted him. We’d discussed preferences, what I did and didn’t think I could do, what he was able to teach me.Everything,he’d whispered one night.We’ll find out what you like and what you don’t, and we’ll work everything out together. Please don’t worry, baby.

And there was that. The nickname.

It seemed ridiculous to me that I could be anyone’s ‘baby’. And yet, when he said it in that lazy American accent, I didn’t feelridiculous. It made my cheeks heat whenever he said it, but I didn’t hate it. Not at all. I liked how it made me feel. I liked how Nathan made me feel.

“Have you?” he asked again.

“I’ve thought about it, yeah,” I admitted. “But can we wait until I see you to talk about it?” I didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. Not because I was embarrassed, but because talking like this over the phone, especially while lying here, was too close to a reminder of what I’d once had with someone else. And I was thinking about him less and less each day that went by. Nathan had begun filling some of the empty spaces he’d left behind.

“Sure, we can, baby,” he said easily. “Everything okay? How’s your sister?”

“She’s okay, busy with work, I guess. But Luke’s glad I’m home.”

“Are you going to tell him about me?”

Nathan knew that Luke knew I was into men. And I’d wondered about how to tell Luke – whether to tell Luke – that one of my professors was coming to the island for three weeks, and that I was going to be spending a lot of time with him. I considered leaving the professor part out and just saying he was someone I’d met in Oxford, without any specifics, but it felt too much like lying.

“Would you be okay with that?”

“Of course, I would. I’d like to meet him if you’d want that.”

That idea filled me with a thin thread of horror. Luke and Nathan face to face, man to man, trying to have a conversation. About what? Luke didn’t watch pretentious films, didn’t read, didn’t know anything about New York. And Nathan knew nothing about gardening or the natural world and hated action films. But then I remembered that Cas and Luke had gottenon very well despite all of the reasons they shouldn’t have. Everyone liked Luke, and Luke liked most people.

“Let’s see how the telling him I’m seeing my professor goes down first.”

“Ex-professor.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing.”

“It will be on Saturday.”

On Saturday night, Luke invited me out to the pub. It was one of those warm summer nights when the air felt baked and fragrant and the birds were lazing in trees too tired to fly. We walked down the long drive to the bus stop and took the bus down towards the beach.

Luke’s local was the friendly little gastro pub that sat halfway down the main road to the beach. The manager was a client of his, and he brought over two pints on the house after we’d found a table outside in a shaded section of the beer garden.

“Can’t beat it,” Luke said as he wiped the foam from the head away from his lip.

He looked older, I thought. Lines dug deeper into the weathered grooves of his forehead and sides of his eyes, new lines that hadn’t been there when I saw him at Christmas. He was still handsome though, suntanned skin bright against the dark of his hair.

“It’s good,” I agreed.

The beer was satisfying, cool and fizzing against my dry throat. I normally went for something stronger – I was normally trying to get drunk – but the last few months, I’d been drinkingfar less to get drunk and more to enjoy the warm mellowing it offered to my muscles. A glass after dinner with Nathan, a single, cool beer as I read in my dorm. Maybe I was growing up.

The silence swelled between us, and I knew it would be as good a time as any to tell him about Nathan. But Luke spoke first, ripping out the ground from beneath my feet as he did.

“So Judey, I wasn’t sure the best way to do this, to tell you this, but I figured it was best to just come out and say it.” He took a large deep breath, resigned and tired sounding. When he met my eye, I could see his own shimmering with something I recognised. Pain. Heartache. “Beth and I, well we’re gonna be getting a divorce.”

Fourteen

It turned out that my sister had met someone else – someone at work. Daniel, his name was – it had ‘just happened’.

Luke said she’d been ‘different’ for the last eight months or so, though I knew things had been different between them since before that. Since the baby, I think. Though deep down I wondered (and feared) if maybe they’d been different since I came along.

A few months ago, he’d seen a message on her phone and confronted her, and it had all come tumbling out. I could tell he was devastated. A gloominess in him that had never been there before, like a light had gone out.

I should have been sitting there while my sister explained this to me, but Luke and I had always been closer, so I listened as he explained how she would be moving out, away from Jersey, in fact, in the next couple of weeks.