Page 52 of Oleander

“For kissing you, I guess,” I muttered, embarrassed. I was glad I couldn’t see him. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“Oh please,” he scoffed. “You did it because you wanted to. The real mystery iswhyyou wanted to. Given you purportedly hate me. Given you don’t like boys. And given you have a girlfriend.”

I did turn to look at him then. “Why are you like this?”

He lowered his pencil. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

I waved in his general direction. “Like that, this. You’re always so bloody...” I shoved myself off the seat and stood. “You make it so hard. You’re literally impossible to be around. No wonder you have no friends.”

“Who said I needed friends?” He shrugged. “Friends are useless.”

“Useless…”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever even had any? How would you know?”

He stared at me, and for once, it looked as though he had nothing smart to say in return. I thought about the night in his room again, where he’d said I was only there because Gideon and Luke had made me. I thought of how he’d hugged me when I’d said I wasn’t. How fragile he’d seemed that night. Where was that Caspien? Who was that bizarre version of Caspien? The craziest part was that I was a lot more comfortable around the one in front of me now.

He was just so bloody confusing to me. Toeverypart of me.

“I need the toilet.” My body was stiff and sore from sitting, and that weird, jangly feeling was back beneath my skin. Like the crackle of thunder before a lightning strike.

“You can’t run away every time something gets a little difficult, you know,” he snarked as I reached the door.

My cheeks were hot. Because I had run; I’d run to the bathroom the night I’d gotten hard, I’d run to the cottage after I kissed him, and now.

“I’m not running; I’m going to the bathroom.”

“Sure. But you’d better come back.”

I didn’t answer him, walking out of the bedroom without looking back. I took the stairs nearest this side of the house, an old servant stairwell, I assumed, which twisted down and along a dark stone corridor for a bit until I ended up on the far side of the kitchen. Elspeth was doing something violent with dough on the large wooden countertop, and she gasped in fright when she saw me.

“Jude! My god! I thought you were a ghost!”

“I am. I haunt this house on the weekends, didn’t you know?”

“Ha, oh, hush you,” she laughed. “What on earth are you doing coming from that way?”

I wasn’t sure what to tell her, wasn’t sure Caspien would want her to know we were in some unused bedroom while he drew me. “Um, we were studying in one of the other rooms today, the one on the other side of the house.” I pointed upwards in the general direction I thought the room was.

She gave me a sad kind of smile. “Ah, Seraphina’s...”

I froze, a chill prickling over my whole body. He’d taken me into his mother’s room? Hisdeadmother’s room. A shiver ran the length of my body.

Elspeth wiped her hands on her flour-dusted apron and came toward me, clearly concerned about what she saw on my face.

“He must think a lot of you to let you in there. He doesn’t let any of us in, not even to clean it or change the bedsheets after he’s slept in there.”

Hesleptin there?

“I didn’t know...”

She pressed her lips together and nodded sadly. “She was such a beauty, such a sweet, sweet girl.”

“You knew her?” I asked instead.

Another sad nod. She looked like she was about to burst into tears, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do if she did.