Fourteen

He looked surprised like he truly hadn’t expected me to come back.

“Elspeth made us some lunch,” I announced with a stupid, cheery tone.

“Do you want to eat in here or somewhere else?” The room felt sacred now, not a place to eat cheese sandwiches, but I wasn’t going to mention that.

“Here is fine,” he said, looking suspicious.

I set the tray down on the floor next to my backpack and carried the plate and juice over to him.

He didn’t say thanks as he took it, just watched me mistrustfully.

He placed the juice on the window ledge before setting the plate on his lap and picking up his sandwich.

We ate in silence, me sneaking looks at him when I thought he might not be looking at me. He never was. I was pretty sure Caspien never looked at me when I wasn’t looking at him. There were always more interesting things for him to look at, though unfortunately, that was not the case for me.

“I wouldn’t have said no,” I said after a lengthy silence.

He turned to look at me, pale blue eyes narrowing ever so slightly.

“I mean, if you’d asked me to come over. If you’d said you needed me for something, I wouldn’t have said no.”

He put down his sandwich and turned his body fully to me. Suspicion still swam in his eyes. “Did you get a personality transplant while you were in the kitchen?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I was just hangry.”

“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced.

“I didn’t get a chance to eat before I came over, you know, with that whole blackmailing thing.” I took a bite and gave him a playfully pointed look.

“I told you last night I needed you here by noon,” he said. “You should have gotten up earlier.”

I swallowed my mouthful and chased it down with a long drink of juice. He really was the most perplexing person I’d ever met. Every side of him thorny and prickled – a hedgehog had been the perfect description – even the pretty sides. And he was pretty.

Terrifyingly so right at that moment.

Bathed in sunshine, sleeves rolled up to show off delicate wrists and finely tapered fingers. Bed shorts riding high on long lean legs that were far stronger than they looked.

I picked up my other sandwich and looked out the window, where it was far safer for my eyes. It was a bright December afternoon, with a gentle breeze dancing off the trees and a clear, cloudless sky for miles. With food in my stomach and my new resolution to try and be an actual proper friend to Caspien, I settled in to read.

It was just after four in the afternoon when he stood and declared he was finished. I’d read most of La Morte D’Arthur over the afternoon and wouldn’t have minded if it had taken him another hour so I could have finished it.

I stood, groaning a little as the blood rushed back to my butt and legs, stretching my arms over my head to adjust my spine.

I watched him pack away his pencils – I still wasn’t certain if they were the ones I’d bought him for his birthday – into a large wooden box, organising them just so before closing and latching the box. He lifted the large sketch pad and was about to flip it closed when he caught me staring.

“Do you want to see it?” he asked stiffly.

“Yeah. If that’s okay.”

He shrugged and held the pad out to me. Nerves fluttered in my stomach as I took it. I’d no idea how Caspien saw me. I mean, I had an idea, given the things he said and did, but how had he drawn me on the page?

I didn’t even know if he was any good at drawing. That would almost be worse. As I took his sketch pad, I prepared myself to say something kind no matter what. Even if he’d drawn me hideously.

I held my breath and looked down.

Deep down, I suppose I’d known he wouldn’t be bad. I’d yet to find something he couldn’t do, especially if it involved his hands, but nothing prepared me for just how good he was.

In beautifully realised pencil detail, I sat in the window with my head buried in a book and my face etched in furious concentration. He’d picked out the wisps of hair that curled at the back of my head and around my ear, the freckles across my nose and cheeks, the dark shadow of my eyelashes.

Outside, he’d somehow caught the glimmer of sun on the pond as well as a few birds soaring into the sky. There was the intricate detailing of the window frame and the strip of sunlight cutting across the wooden floor beneath me. The composition had an unfinished quality, with the edges fading into the white of the page.

It was exceptional. I felt moved in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

I realised my mouth was open. He stood with his box tucked under his arm and a faint frown on his face as he looked at his own work.

I knew he didn’t need praise, certainly not mine, but I gave it to him anyway.

“You’re really good. This is so good.”

His gaze flicked to mine and I saw the faintest glimmer of something in the corners. Like he was pleased.

He looked back at the portrait.

“It will be better when I fill it in.” He took the pad and folded it closed. “You weren’t as terrible a model as I thought.” He set the box on top of the pad and moved to close the window.

“Is that your way of saying, ‘Thank you, Jude? You sat for hours in a really uncomfortable position for me, and I’m grateful.’”

“Of course not.” He had his back to me now, climbing up on the window ledge to pull closed the little latch on the top. It gave me a ridiculous view of the tops of his thighs and the curve of his arse. I tried not to look. I was about to turn away completely when he twisted weirdly and began to fall.

I rushed toward him and threw my hands up, meaning to catch him, but the gravity was too much and I stumbled too, but backwards, both of us falling into a heap on the floor. Me on my back and him on top, chest to chest, face to face. His mouth was so close that if I reached up just a little...

I couldn’t.

Wouldn’t.

Not again.

He stared at me, a half-embarrassed, half-angry little frown on his face. I waited for him to lash out with an insult about my clumsiness or stupidity, about it being my fault he fell in the first place.

But instead, he kissed me.

He pressed his lips onto mine, shoved his tongue into my mouth and ravaged it.

Then my hands were in his hair and holding his head in place because the thought of him stopping was the worst thing I could imagine.

I would die if he stopped now; I was certain of it.

His mouth was as warm and wet and perfect as I remembered, and I explored it like the paradise it was. Greedy and dizzy from the pleasure it offered.

When he pressed his body harder against me and moved, I saw pure white light, parts of us rubbing together that caused my whole body to sing loudly. Fireworks sparked behind my closed eyes and heat building so quick and urgent that I thought I was about to be incinerated from the inside.

He made a noise then, some desperate whimper that I knew I’d spend the rest of my life thinking about, and tore his mouth from mine to look down into my eyes.

His cheeks were flushed pink and his mouth a bright strawberry red and I thought I might cry from how beautiful he looked.

It was the sort of beautiful great art and literature was created for. Fragile and delicate and destructive. I would write about it the very instant I was alone, and if the words didn’t exist to describe it, then I’d create new ones. I reached my lips up, seeking his again, and he took pity on me and kissed me again. As he tilted his angle and moved again, a jolt of pleasure raced down my spine to my balls.

“Cas…” I moaned, moving one hand down to his arse and gripping his cheek hard, using that grip to move him over where I needed him. We kissed and moved and breathed together, minutes or hours or days of tasting him, of chasing that edge of pleasure that would take me to the end of the world.

Before I could stop it, I was over the edge, falling.

With a deep groan, I bit out against his mouth as I crushed him against me.

Caspien followed me a few moments later, or at least I thought he did. It was quieter, and he held his mouth pressed against mine, breathing into it as his long limbs trembled. Then it was over. He dropped his head to the crook of my neck and breathed me in.

It was me who spoke first.

“I’ll break up with Ellie.”

He sat up and stared down at me.

“Whatever for?”

“Because...” I gave him a look that said it should be obvious. It was obvious. To me, at least.

He climbed up and off my body, leaving me feeling bare and exposed. Cold and very wet too. He’d lain on me for approximately two and a half minutes, and somehow, my body had gotten used to his weight on it. I felt like I might be blown away.

“Because of that you want to break up with your girlfriend?” He snorted like it was the most absurd thing he’d ever heard. “Don’t be such a child.”

I had never felt less of a child in my life. I rose to my feet.

“I don’t know what it’s like at boarding school, but here children don’t do that.” I pointed at the floor where we’d just done the most intimate thing I’d ever done with another person. “Christ, Cas, I’ve never done that before with anyone.” I wanted him to know what that meant.

He blinked, and then his eyes grew dark, like a predator whose prey had just shown some fatal weakness.

“Is that your way of saying you’re a virgin? What, can’t you get it up for her?” His smirk was cruel, and I felt it like a needle in my chest. “Why do you think that is?”

I hated him again. Rooted around for something to say back, something shaped cruelly I could throw at him. But then I remembered the promise I’d made myself: be his friend. Even if he didn’t want it. Even if he made it impossible. Make an effort.

“You don’t need to act like this, you know,” I said calmly, though my heart was thundering behind my ribs. “Like nothing means anything or like everything’s a joke. You don’t need to act like that with me.”

His face did a strange thing, like he was trying very hard to keep something from showing on it.

“But it didn’t mean anything. We got off together, for Christ’s sake. I’ve done it a million times before. It doesn’t mean we’re in love, Jude.”

Love.The word was huge and loud and threatened to flatten me. I felt my entire body heat up from my toes to my hair.

I hadn’t been implying that. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I didn’t love him, for Christ’s sake. I was pretty sure I hated him. Or at least, what I felt for him was complicated and took up a lot of time and space and energy in my brain but it wasn’t love. It wasn’t anything like it.

Avoiding his eyes, I crossed to where my bag was and grabbed it up off the floor.

“I have to go.” I started toward the door.

“Oh look, Judith’s running away again.”

I stopped and turned back. His eyes were hard as marbles, sparkling in the dying sunlight.

“You know, if you don’t want me to go, you could just say that.” It was bravado, spoken from some senseless place I’d never even been.

I imagined some alternate reality where he said don’t go, Jude, and I wouldn’t. We’d clean up and lie together on his bed and talk. Maybe about books or films or music or something else. Maybe later, we’d do that all over again. Slower, less fevered.

And as he said nothing in response I deluded myself that he was imagining the same. When it was clear he wasn’t going to speak, I pulled my bag over my shoulder and said, “I’ll see you on Tuesday.”

I left him standing there in his dead mother’s bedroom, not knowing that winter would come and go, the leaves of the trees would be turning, sprouting the green of a new spring before I saw him again.