Page 35 of Oleander

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t even like her, and she’ll get hurt.”

“But I need someone to play with, Jude. And since you’ve just taken my toy away...”

“Oh, stop being such a dick, will you?”

I was standing over him as he lay on my bed. His T-shirt was ruched up, and I could see the golden stretch of his stomach, hard and flat above the waistband of his shorts.

Suddenly, his legs shot out, and he hooked them around the back of my thighs, locking them together. He smirked as he held me there.

I didn’t know who this Caspien was. He wasn’t the cold, serpentine boy from the mansion. He wasn’t even the stiff, serious boy who’d washed my hands clean of Oleander plant. It wasn’t the boy at the beach or the boy who chatted warmly with Luke. This was someone else, maybe even the same person who kissed men in dark rooms and whispered provocative things to them down the phone.

There were so many sides to him. He was a kaleidoscope, one that I couldn’t look away from. I was entranced.

I tried to get loose, but his legs were strong. He rode a huge horse every day, I thought. Still, I pulled against them for a bit, trying to use my hands to prise his legs apart, but the angle was awkward. A shift and pull from him at the back of my knees had me tumbling forward onto his chest.

There was a moment, one strange, stretched-out moment, where I could do nothing but stare into the ice blue of his eyes. Then, at his mouth. And then back to his eyes again.

It came from nowhere, but I felt it everywhere. The need to kiss him. I imagined the soft, wet pink inside of his mouth, the taste of his lips, the shape of his tongue. It was an onslaught of want. Loud and hot and violent.

As my senses rushed back in, I felt something hard and warm between my legs. Whether he felt it too, and it’s what made him release me, I don’t know, but I practically threw myself backwards off him, staggering back into the desk.

Caspien sat up on his elbows and stared at me, his own breathing quick and his eyes alight with something dangerous. He was looking at me as though seeing me for the first time. As though, for the first time, I interested him. But it was a dangerous sort of interest –the sort he might give a bug he’d trapped under a glass.

Confused and terrified, I fled from the room, muttering over my shoulder that I was going to get the hot chocolate.

Nine

Our relationship – or whatever it was in those days – changed imperceptibly after that. I couldn’t quite say how, but I knew when, and it had been after that night in my room. The first night I’d felt turned on by a boy.

After leaping away from Caspien, I’d run to the toilet, opened my shorts, and looked at it. It was unmistakable in that bright overhead light. I was more turned on by a boy than I’d ever been when I kissed my girlfriend.

I didn’t know what to think about that. Though I suppose, as with most things, it was feeling that came first – my body knew what it felt and what it wanted – it was that my head hadn’t caught up yet.

Did I like boys now? Was I gay? Walking backwards through it, I tried to think about what exactly it was that had done it; had it been the play fight? I play-fought with Alfie and Josh all the time, and I’d never, not once, gotten hard from it. Nothing like it.

Had he just rubbed against me in a way that had caused something biological to happen? Had it been the conversation before? What he’d said about it – about sex with a boy – feeling like nothing else on earth.Completely overwhelming; like you might die. But then you don’t, and it’s...well...it’s very good.

I thought about Ellie. I liked kissing her. I’d definitely gotten hard from kissing her before, more than once, which surely meant I liked girls. Which did I like more?

I thought about the need I’d felt just moments before; that hot violent urge I’d had to kiss Caspien when I’d been inches from his mouth. There was no point in lying to myself that I’d ever wanted to kiss Ellie even half as much as that.

I’d returned to the room with our hot chocolate and avoided his eyes as I gave him it. He hadn’t said a word, but I’d felt something change in him.

I’d lain awake on the air bed for most of the night. Rigid, too hot, and very aware of the boy in my bed – a dangerous path because as soon as the thought entered my head, it consumed everything else in there, tearing through it like a forest fire. What would it feel like to go and lie next to him? To feel him go soft and pliant under me, just like he’d done for the man back at the house. The idea of him gripping onto me like that. The idea of him wanting me like that.

It didn’t take long until I was hard again. Uncomfortably so.

Caspien’s reaction to the night in my room was different. The jokes stopped; those suggestive comments he’d thrown at me since I found him on the phone, stopped. He was aloof again, distant again. He was the boy in the big sandals and oversized clothes who looked at me as though I was beneath him, again.

I hadn’t realised it, but somehow, with my eavesdropping and my agreement to ‘play-along’ for Gideon that afternoon, we’d taken some tentative steps close towards what might, under some lights, be considered a friendship.

Now, it was like we’d gone back to the way it had been before. He barely looked at me, he never called and invited me over again, and he never again came to the beach with us (I’d asked him twice more).

I didn’t like it. The awkwardness, the way he was careful not to touch me, the way he was extra careful not to look at me, and I felt ashamed and embarrassed that it was because I’d accidentally gotten hard while play-fighting with him and he knew about it. It did occur to me that this was the perfect sort of attack for him. My interest in him laid bare. And yet, for some reason, he hadn’t used it.

The difference now, though, was that I couldn’t avoid him, not now that we studied together twice a week in Gideon’s library. Caspien wrote lines of meticulous Latin and sketched from photos he’d taken on his phone while I copied Algebra equations from the online coursework site in my rough, sloppy handwriting.