Page 30 of Oleander

It was strange then that I abandoned Ellie’s back and reached over to get my backpack, pulling out one of the towels Beth had packed for us.

When he was finished drying himself, he laid it out on the sand next to me and fell on top of it. He’d wrapped up my copy ofDraculain his clothes before going into the water, pulled the book out, and started reading it.

“So, Cas, Jude says you used to go to school in Switzerland?” Ellie asked, sitting up. She hooked a hand over my shoulder and perched on it, looking over at him.

“I did,” he said without glancing up.

“And now you’re home-schooled?”

“Now I’m home-schooled.”

“So what do you do for, like, fun?”

“I guess I come to the beach and hang out with Jude’s friends.”

Ellie snorted at this, but Caspien didn’t. His expression didn’t change. He kept his eyes focused on his book – my book – and his head turned away from the sun. When he didn’t say anything else, she turned her gaze to me and shrugged.

“You coming in?”

There was no reason not to, though part of me felt bad for abandoning him, despite the fact he’d been in there with the others while I’d sat here. He’d be completely fine here on his own. His body language practically screamed for us to leave him alone anyway. I’d been staring at him too long because Ellie nudged me.

“Yeah, let’s go,” I said and let her pull me towards the water.

Luke picked us up at 6:30 p.m. We shook out our shoes and towels of sand and bunged everything into the boot of the Kia before climbing in.

After asking if we’d had fun, Luke launched into the work he’d done on the south-facing gardens, which included some landscaping and levelling off the lower patio, removing and reinstalling the stepping stones which led from the water fountain and under the arch to the covered walkway. Caspien looked and sounded interested, asking all the right questions and validating Luke’s work, but I could see him furiously texting someone on his phone. His knee bounced rapidly, too, and his teeth chewed at his lower lip furiously. I’d never seen him so tense.

“You wanna stay for dinner, Cas?” Luke called over his shoulder as we turned into the long drive of Deveraux House. “We’re doing a barbecue.”

“Oh?”

I was certain he’d say no. He was like a coiled spring, as though the second the car stopped, he was going to bolt off. Whoever was holding his attention on the phone had him completely on edge. It had to be the person he’d been speaking to on the phone last week. My insides felt twisted and pulled tight, a knot of anxiety I couldn’t think past.

“Yeah, you have to try Beth’s potato sweetcorn salad. It’s something else, isn’t it, Judey?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” I managed.

“Sure, I’ll come. I just have to nip back to the house really quick to change, and then I’ll come back. If that’s okay, Luke?”

“Sure it is. We’ll drive up there first and wait for you; how’s that?”

Caspien pressed the lock button on his phone, turned it screen down on his knee, and nodded to Luke.

He did bolt from the car when we stopped, saying he’d be as quick as he could before disappearing inside the kitchen door of the large house.

Staring after him, curiosity licking like flames up my spine, I told Luke I really needed to pee and followed Caspien inside. He might have to change, but I was certain that the reason he had to go back to the house had something to do with whomever he had been texting furiously on the drive back from the beach.

The house was relatively dark. Only the lamps in the hallway were lit, and they didn’t offer much illumination, given the height of the ceilings. I passed the arboretum, then the music room where I’d watched Caspien play piano, and then the library, where the door was slightly ajar. I leaned into the gap and listened, but it was deathly silent inside it.

Then I heard it. A soft muffled cry that sent my pulse thundering.

I turned my head in the direction it came; the large reception room off the front entryway, and hurried toward it. The doors were closed but not all the way, and when I pushed it open, I could barely breathe. My eyes took a moment to interpret the scene.

A tall male knelt with his arms wrapped tightly around Caspien’s middle, his head buried against his stomach as he nosed and rubbed his face against the skin beneath Caspien’s t-shirt. With a gentle tug, he pulled him into his lap, forcing Caspien to straddle him as they embraced. I watched transfixed for a moment, the tenderness with which the figure held him, the desperate way he kissed and sniffed at his throat and his hair. There was something almost...fatherly in the way he held him, but then the man made a noise which caused something sickening to twist in my chest and something hot to flood my cheeks. I looked at Caspien’s face, hoping to see something I understood there.

He looked...unsettled. But still distant and removed from the situation in the way he often did.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Caspien said.