Page 77 of Oleander

If you lie, I’ll know. You’re a horrendous liar.

“Are we playing truth for a truth again?” I asked, stalling. “Because if I answer that, then I’ll be wanting one of my own.”

I thought I was being very clever. That I’d outsmarted him. But then he smiled that small cool smile of his and I knew even though I hadn’t said it out loud, I’d given him the answer.

“Never mind,” he said.

He never asked me again.

A few nights after that was the first time we did more than talk on the phone. I’m not sure how I was ever clear-headed enough to hold a conversation with him, given how desperately I longed for a repeat of what had happened the day before he left. But when we took things to that next stage, it felt so entirely natural and inevitable, that I could see it was always going to happen. This was the pre-determined destination.

It started quite innocently.

We hadn’t even been talking about Ellie and our sex life, there was no obvious warning for it at all, and so I didn’t even know that it would lead there until it was far too late to stop it.

It started like this:

“I had to fight him today,” Caspien said.

We’d been talking about Costa Rica before, and so I was confused. He did this, jumping from subject to subject like a gymnast across a spring floor—gracefully and with skill. My own skill was in keeping up with him.

Most of the time, I was only half-listening, hyper-focused on the side of his neck, the way his hair flopped over those smallgirlish ears, or that tormenting point at the end of his nose. I had decided that all noses should be shaped like this; I didn’t quite understand the biological engineering of a nose, but the end of it should have a maddening little divot on its point like Caspien’s did.

“Fight who?” I blinked, turning my attention fully to his words now.

“Hannes.”

I searched my brain. Had he told me about someone called Hannes before? Forgetting something we’d talked about was always a fear of mine because I never wanted him to think I didn’t listen. Then he’d stop calling. I’d never see him again.

All of my fears then led directly back to the same place: Never seeing Caspien again.

He put me out of my misery. “The Austrian ambassador’s son.”

I remembered. “The one whose nose you broke with the hockey stick.”

“Lacrosse. Yes, Hannes. Hannes Meier.”

“You fought him?”

“In Fence.”

Fence he’d told me about. Fence I’d only seen in movies. They wore masks and all-white clothing and held rounded-ended swords, which they thrust at each other in very specific moves with very specific names. I’d Googled it after he’d hung up that night.

“Making you fight him with a sword after you broke his face doesn’t seem like a very sensible idea.”

“No, probably not. Except I’m sure that was the point because he’s better at it than I am.”

“He beat you?” I couldn’t imagine Caspien being beaten at anything.

“Yes. He had me on the floor with his Épée at my throat, and the weirdest thing happened; I got hard.”

My cheeks burned, and I felt a low familiar thickening between my legs.

“I suppose it was something about being on my back on the mat with him standing over me. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But I liked the feeling of it.”

“Of being on your back?”

He smiled a little. “Of being on my back. Of being...bested. It doesn’t help that he has the nicest cock I’ve ever seen.”