Page 78 of Oleander

I coughed, choking on my hot chocolate. I sat up. “You’ve seen his cock?”

“Of course. Communal showers. Not that I look, well, I mean I look in so far as I have to have my eyes open, but he struts around with it out constantly because he knows how nice it is.”

“There are nice ones?” I asked. I wasn’t aware until that moment that cocks were supposed to be anything other than utilitarian. That they were more than just appendages that fulfilled a variety of tasks. I didn’t know, beyond the usual discussions about size, that the aesthetics of cocks were even a thing.

He gave me a look as though I were the dumbest creature he’d ever known. “Do you consider all pairs of tits the same? Forget it; of course you do.” He rolled his eyes. “His cock is nice, yes. And he knows it. And this is exactly what I was thinking of when he was stood over me with his Épée pointed at my throat. If we’d been alone I’d have likely offered to suck him off, but we weren’t, and so it’s been on my mind all day.”

I felt a curl of something hot and sour in my stomach. The image was exciting and tormenting at the same time.

“But you hate him.”

“What has that got to do with sucking his cock?”

I remember feeling foolish for thinking that it had a lot to do with it.

“Oh, I suppose when she does it for you, she’s looking up at you with those big stupid loved-up eyes and telling you how much she loves you. But it is possible to have your mouth full of someone’s cock and loathe them with ninety-nine percent of your conscious brain. The other one percent is hard and ferally turned on.”

Ferally turned on.

At that moment, I could not have remembered a single instance of Ellie sucking my cock had any kind of sword been pointed at my throat.

I swallowed. “Right, well. I need to go.” I needed to go because things had gotten very serious down below, and I was in danger of embarrassing myself to a point I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come back from.

“Where are you going?” he asked, frowning.

“Um, nowhere. I just need to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Jude,” he said and it was in this quiet, weighty voice that froze me in place. “Are you hard?”

When I couldn’t respond, the very corner of his mouth softened, a light flicking on in his eyes. I let out a slow breath.

“Show me,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

There was a beat, and then another, and then Caspien was shifting. His dick appeared on the screen a few moments later and I sank back into my bed and stared. He wore black shorts but he’d pulled the waistband down and hooked them beneath his balls. He was half hard. He wrapped his hand around thebase of it and stroked it a few times. I kept staring. A moment later, it was gone, and his face was back.

“Now, your turn.”

It had been easy to convince myself that what Caspien and I did on those calls was no more than what other boys did when they compared each other’s dick sizes after P.E. It was also very like what I did when I was alone, and so having another person witness those things seemed no more than a novelty.

But after the second call, where Caspien and I watched each other stroke ourselves until we came on our stomachs, those moments we shared began to consume me.

Every time I looked at my dick I thought about how Caspien had seen it, and how he had told me, sounding quite impressed, that it was bigger and prettier than Hannes Meier’s. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was considered cheating on Ellie, but the idea of her finding out – of anyone finding out – what Caspien and I did together terrified me so much that I knew it couldn’t be entirely innocent.

Still, I made no move to put an end to them.

Twenty-two

It was the middle of March when Ellie asked me what I had planned for summer. We were all lying on blankets; it was an unusually hot day for March, the sort of day that made me lazy and tired and made the earth seem like it was inside a huge greenhouse, airless and stuffy.

Alfie and Josh had come over, and we’d kicked the ball around on the stretch of grass on the other side of the lake until it got too hot even for that. Josh had gone to meet some rugby friends, so the four of us were lying on the grass, half-dozing. Ellie was on her stomach, freckledshouldersexposedandpinked withapairofwhite-rimmed sunglasses perched onthe endofhernose.

“Are you guys going anywhere on holiday this year?” She said without looking up from her phone.

“They haven’t mentioned it. Doubt it.” I was reading an article about a movie adaptation ofAll Quiet on The Western Front. I wasn’t particularly paying attention. Not enough to have been prepared for what came next.

“You could come with us to Bergamo,” she said, turning to me. This got my attention. I looked over at her. Whatever she saw on my face had her saying, “I already asked my dad.”