Page 68 of Oleander

Cruelly, I wanted to forget it had happened at all. I hated how irreversible and permanent it felt. I hated that I spent every day checking my phone for contact from Caspien. I hated, too, that despite everything I felt about what I’d done and was doing to her, how much further I was prepared to hurt her the very moment he walked back into my life.

But still, I longed for that moment.

I rushed dinner down that night so quickly that I almost choked on it. Then I slung on my backpack and cycled the Cannondale to the big house. It was bitterly cold, the winter air sharp and glittering as a knife, but I never felt it. My blood was warm from nervous anticipation.

Elspeth was in the kitchen stirring a large pot of something that smelled delicious. She gave me a hug and offered me a bowl of soup.

“I’ve just eaten, but thank you, maybe later,” I told her.

She said she’d put a bowl aside with a dinner roll in case and told me Gideon was in the red sitting room if I wanted to say hello.

I found him reading on one of the armchairs, long graceful legs crossed at the knee and wearing his gold circular reading glasses. The light was low in the room; only the wall lights and a small glass reading lamp on a table beside him turned on. He sat up as soon as I came in. He placed a bookmark between the pages and closed it, set it on the side table, and stood.

“Jude, hello, there you are.”

“Hi, Gideon,” I said.

He paused and tilted his head, studying me. “You look different; what did you do?” He waved a hand in front of me. “Did you get taller?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hmmm, there’s definitely something different about you. I’ll figure it out.”

He gave me a small secret kind of smile, threw an arm around my shoulder and steered me out of the room. As we went towards the library, he twittered away about how London was dreadfully loud, dreadfully wet and dreadfully cold. I was trying to figure out how to ask him about Cas’s gift and not sound desperate but I didn’t have to, because when he opened the door to the library I saw the parcel. Large and flat and wrapped in dark blue paper with gold ribbon, it sat propped up on the table in the centre of the room.

There was a white envelope next to it.

“I’ll leave you to open it by yourself,” Gideon said with a serious sort of voice. He gave me another soft pat on the shoulder and shut me in the room with Caspien’s gift.

The fire had been lit and crackled softly behind the guard as I approached. I had an inkling of what Ithoughtmight be inside, but it didn’t prepare me for what I found when I peeled off the thick paper.

My own face, fey and dreamlike, stared up at me.

He’d filled it in with watercolour, a palette of pinks, greens, and blues. Light caught on my rosy lips and cheeks, and sunlight poured through the window. Behind me was a view out onto the estate, rolling dips and hills which I knew led all the way to the sea. He’d added something too, something that wasn’t in the room with us that day: a delicate pink flower that sprouted from deep green vines curled around the composition so that it stood in as a kind of frame. The art itself had been mounted inside a thick, white ornamental frame, giving it a sort of delicate grandeur. I stared at it for a long time, imagining his hands moving over the curves of my skull and the bone structure of my face. His delicate fingers tracing each eyelash and freckle. I thought about what I’d have said or done had he given me this in person, and I was suddenly glad he wasn’t here.

At the very bottom, in the smallest, most elegant script, it read:Jude in the window, by C.L.D.

Everything I’d tried to ignore suddenly fell away, and I wanted him, again, desperately, ferociously. It made every loose, easy, calm thing inside me turn hard and pointed and violent. I lost myself in that ocean of feeling for a few trembling moments before I tore open the envelope.

Jude,

Happy Birthday.

From,

Caspien.

Nineteen

"My first exam was at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. History. It was the one I was dreading most.

But a strange kind of focus came over me the second I sat down. I spent the next two and a half hours weaving a convincing argument about the three sources they’d given us, and their usefulness to a historian studying responses to religious change in the reign of Mary I. The Tudors were my least favourite monarchs. I preferred the Angevin kings; I’d always been drawn to Richard the Lionheart more than Henry VIII.

A couple of hours later, I walked out of the exam hall feeling dazed, as though coming out of a trance, relieved it was over. Ellie was waiting for me by the main entrance; her own chemistry exam had begun at the same time but finished fifteen minutes earlier. She kissed me quickly on the lips and slipped her arms around my waist.

“How’d it go?”

“Good, I think.”