Thirteen

Though I was pretty sure I was going to be doing more murdering than studying, I shoved my biology textbook and my laptop into my bag and headed out of the house. Luke and Beth had gone out earlier to some farmer’s market on the other side of the island and wouldn’t be back until later.

I dumped my bike at the back door, noting that Gideon’s car was in its space, and made my way to the library. It was empty. I was passing the sunroom when I spotted Gideon standing at the far end, where the Oleander plant had been before Luke’s specialist contractor had ripped it out. He was staring at the one we’d put in its place; a Brugmansia Aurea. It took calling his name twice before he turned around, blinking as though coming awake.

I noticed then that he wasn’t dressed properly, wearing a smart shirt and what looked like striped pyjama bottoms. He looked out of it – like he was drunk. His hair was mussed, and a light stubble coated his jaw.

“Oh, Jude, hi. You’ll be here to work, I’ll get out of your way.” He brushed a hand through his hair, dishevelling it further.

“No, I’m here for Caspien,” I told him. “Have you seen him?”

“Who?”

Concern rose in me. “Caspien. He wasn’t in the library.”

“I’m here,” Caspien’s voice sounded from behind me. I turned to see him sitting on the top step of the staircase. It looked like he’d been there a while watching Gideon.

As Gideon came toward me, he smiled. On his feet, he wore outdoor shoes.

“Christ, every day you look more and more like him…” he whispered, looking at Caspien. I felt his hand on my shoulder.

His voice was even quieter when he spoke, a whisper meant only for us. “I am certain he was sent here to torture me until the end of my days,” he said before wandering down the hallway into one of the sitting rooms, the door closing with a gentle snick behind him.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s in one of his moods.” Caspien didn’t sound particularly concerned.

I rounded the stairwell so that I stood at its foot. He still sat on the top step. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, his feet bare, and his hair a sleep-rumpled mess. At the sight of him, all the anger that had carried me here disappeared like a fog in the sun’s warmth.

“And what sort of mood is that?”

Caspien studied me. “Have you ever had your heart broken?”

I never had any clue what he was about to say, ever, but this was completely beyond anything I could have expected. I had no clue how to answer. Whether I even should. What would he do with that kind of information? But then I was thinking about my parents. About how much I’d cried and how alone I’d felt in the weeks and months after. Was that heartbreak? It had felt like something inside me had broken, never to be fixed again.

I didn’t feel it as intensely now, not with any consistency, but there were still moments when the longing for them was so strong and fierce it would suffocate me.

“Yes.”

His gaze sharpened as if my answer intrigued him.

He considered something for what felt like a long time. Then he said, “I think it’s easier for hearts to heal when they’re still young. Gideon’s was fully grown and weaker than most when it was broken. It will never heal.”

Something hung unsaid in the air between us for a moment before I glanced again in the direction Gideon had gone. I returned my gaze to Caspien.

“Well,” I asked him in a firmer voice. “What did you need my help with?”

Caspien stood, let out a sigh, and turned.

“Come,” he said, disappearing down the upper floor corridor.

Anticipation buzzed under my skin like a swarm of agitated bees.

With a surge of trepidation, I followed him up the stairs. I could hear sounds down the hallway in the opposite direction of his bedroom, along the ‘closed-off’ wing, so I followed them. There was only one door open, one about halfway down the corridor.

Inside the room, the sheets had already been removed from the furniture, and he was pulling up the sash windows on one side of the dual-aspect room. The room itself was in much the same style as the rest of the house, but there was something distinctly feminine about it. Where the downstairs décor had notes of burgundy, green, and navy, this was done in pinks, creams, and purples.

Caspien was by the window, an easel set up in front of it and fiddling with what looked like a box of pencils.

“You can sit there,” he said, pointing to the window seat diagonally opposite where he stood. He’d already set it up with a cushion.

“Why?”

He stopped what he was doing and stared at me as though I was an idiot. “I’d have thought it obvious, no? I’m drawing you.” He went back to arranging his pencils.

I stared at him in shock. “You want to draw me?”

He flicked his gaze up from under his messy blonde hair. “It isn’t really a matter of wanting; it’s a matter of necessity. I have to submit a life portrait for my art exam and since there is very little life around here...” He looked around the room specifically. “You’ll have to do.”

My mouth dried up as I gripped the strap of my bag against me to steady myself. This wasn’t even close to what my mind had come up with when I’d wondered what he’d needed me for.

“What about Gideon?”

Without looking up, he said, “Gideon couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it.”

“I’m not...” I wanted to say ‘model material’ or ‘not going to make a good model’, but instead I said “… doing it.”

Caspien sighed. “Yes, you are. Sit down, Jude.”

“You threatened me. Now you want me to help you? That’s not...that’s messed up, Caspien.”

“Oh, well, if we’re going to be doing that, then technically, you threatened me first.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. “That...wasn’t the same thing.”

“No?”

I huffed my way across the room towards the window seat. “I mean, couldn’t you just ask me to sit here for you like a normal person? Like a friend?” I already knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“We’re not friends, Jude.”

“No. We definitely aren’t.” I walked to the window and threw my bag down first before slumping into the window seat. “We’re playing at it; for Gideon and Luke.”

He levelled a look at me. “That’s correct.”

I glared angrily out the window for a few minutes until he said, “Didn’t you bring a book?”

I turned to glare at him. Of course, I did. I always had a book in my bag, something he knew well enough. Something he’d found surprising at first given my ‘airhead-looking face’.

“I mean, you can read if you like. That’s sort of how I imagined it.”

Well, now I wouldn’t read. Not if it was how he imagined it. Instead, I pulled my knees up on the seat, wrapped my arms around them, and stared out the window.

With a soft sigh, Caspien began to draw.

I rested my head on my knees and stared out at the grounds of Deveraux; honeyed autumn light poured over its surface. You could see the lake from this window, our cottage too, but at a different angle from the window in Caspien’s bedroom. The breeze was pleasant and soft, the sound of birds hypnotic, and with the gentle scratch of Caspien’s pencil lulling me off, I felt my eyes begin to close over. I was on the cusp of sleep when I heard his voice, soft as a feather against my skin.

“You’d have said no,” he said.

My eyes snapped open, and I lifted my head to look at him. “What?”

His shoulders dropped, and he rolled his eyes. He motioned with one finger for me to turn my head back around, and I complied.

“If I’d asked you to come over and model for me, you’d have said no.” His voice wasn’t as soft, but there was still an edge of vulnerability that I hadn’t heard before – not since that night I’d found him alone, but that didn’t count. That night existed in some weird alternate universe where this Caspien didn’t live.

Would I have said no? Everything was strange now after we’d kissed. After I’d kissed him. It wasn’t as if things had ever been normal between us. Caspien was like no one I’d ever met before, but before the kiss, it had been manageable, at least. We had been making small incremental steps toward something that might have, under some definition, be called a friendship. Until I’d ruined it.

Christ. This was actually my fault.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I could imagine him frowning but I didn’t dare turn my head.

“What for?”

“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 is why you 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. To every part 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? His dead mother’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.”

He slept in 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.

“Saw her grow up. Sad business what happened.” I didn’t know what had happened, and though I desperately wanted to ask, desperately wanted to know anything that might explain why Caspien was the way he was, I didn’t dare.

“Oh, I shouldn’t be talking about that stuff with you; sorry, love.”

Her face softened into a gentler smile, less haunted. “I’m so glad he has you, Jude. That boy needs a good bloody friend.” There was something very specific in her tone, in the expression on her face that I didn’t understand then but which, of course, I do now.

Obviously, I wanted to tell her that we weren’t friends, that he’d made it quite clear he didn’t want or need any. Especially me. I wanted to tell her that I’d tried, that I’d been trying for weeks to be his friend, and at every opportunity, he’d thrown it back in my face.

But then I thought about it…

Had I really tried? Or had I decided I hated him the moment he’d hurt my feelings back at the start of summer and resented his presence in my life since then? How much of an effort had I really made?

Christ, friends didn’t go about kissing other friends and getting hard by rubbing on them. Shame and guilt flooded over me. What sort of friendship had I offered, really? He might have threatened me to come here today, but I’d threatened him long before that. He was right. I’d done it for his own good, but I’d still done it. I hadn’t offered support or advice, not the way I would, were it Josh or Alfie. I’d never even tried – properly – to get to know him.

Yes, he made me feel strange and odd. I might have wanted to kiss him every time I looked at him, but all of that was my problem. It didn’t change the fact that despite what he said – forcefully – Caspien did need a friend.

I let Elspeth make us a cheese sandwich, and I carried it on a tray with two cartons of juice and a couple of apples back up to his dead mother’s room.

I was going to be nicer to him.

I was going to be his friend, whether he let me or not.