Chapter 8 #2
If I don’t moisturise a lot, and I mean a lot, my skin will dry up. It’s worst around the nose, where the skin gets all red and flaky.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Dray’s nose got all flaky and dried out, then fell off his face, then he died?
The hike ends where the gondolas poke through the clouds, floating between snow drifts and mist.
I heave a sigh at the queue.
It isn’t long, but it’s at least fifteen minutes out in the cold, and I’d rather not be here at all.
But Oliver doesn’t stop.
Without looking at me, his gloved hand reaches for my wrist, then he’s tugging me up the side of the line.
Silent glowers follow us all the way to the peak of the queue—and Oliver only hesitates when a plain black leather glove flitters through the mist.
It lands on the slushy path.
I think Oliver is about to trample it and bypass the three students turning to frown at us—but he doesn’t.
He spares a fleeting glance at the glove before looking at the girl who dropped it.
That’s when he halts.
Oliver’s profile is turned to me as he considers the girl with big doe eyes. A black beanie is tugged over her dull brown hair, braided over her shoulder.
The crisp cold blushes her high cheekbones.
She would be striking if it wasn’t for her eyes, so soft, so naive, so pretty.
Oliver thinks so, too.
I know it when he crouches down and plucks the glove from his path.
Slowly, he rises, moving in front of me as he extends the glove to her.
His smile is devastating. “Drop something?”
Her full, balmed lips disappear. She bites down on the smile, something between shame and a flurry of butterflies.
I recognise the smile for what it is.
I’ve suffered it many times when too-pretty men flirted with me.
I decide my brother is a whore.
The girl takes the glove back. Her touch is soft and gentle, just like her voice, “Thank you.”
Oliver grins his answer, and with that, he severs the moment—because the next unoccupied gondola jolts to a stop.
He turns for it.
The doors slide apart.
Before another student can take a step onto the podium, Oliver is ushering me inside. He climbs in after me, and the doors smack shut hard enough to shudder the whole car.
It’s a half-hour ride to Bluestone. Sometimes longer if the winds are strong. Since the sharp whistling of the wind spears around the gondola, I settle in on the firm bench.
Wrapping my arms around my middle, I lower my chin to the tickle of fur.
My eyes lift.
Slouched on the bench opposite me, Oliver’s hands rest between his spread knees as he absentmindedly brushes off the dots of melting snow and sleet from his gloves. He watches his hands but his mind has drifted elsewhere.
Mine is snagged on the girl.
It’s burned into my mind, the way he was looking at that girl in the queue, like everything I thought about him and Serena was wrong.
I always thought she was the one to push for an open relationship at the academy.
Now, I’m not so sure.
“Do you love Serena?” I ask.
Oliver’s surprise is a slip of his polished mask. It’s a blankness that dims his eyes, a fleeting slackness of his face that he aims at me.
“I…” He falters. “I have love for her. Serena has a way about her, and she knows all the right buttons to push. I’m… interested in her.”
Interested…
A word that sits uneasy in me.
My scowl is moody. “Interested? You confide in her,” I say, arms still tight around myself, “you spend a lot of time with her, you seem happy around her—and you both stray, but not as much as the others do.”
Oliver runs his hands over his knees. “We both explore others.”
I watch the clouds thicken beyond the window.
“Dray sleeps around way more than you do,” I say. “Asta does it more than Serena. You and Serena seem to… stick to each other more often than not.”
I don’t know why it feels so urgent to find reassurance in him, that he loves Serena, and only her, and he doesn’t care about the girl in the queue.
Maybe I need to believe in some sort of love among the aristos and elite.
But Oliver blasts away my hope into shattered shards of glass.
“I would say Dray strays the least, and I the most. He prefers escorts.” Oliver turns a dark grin on me.
“Less bother, as he says.” The sigh that deflates him is soft.
“And whatever feelings Serena and I once shared are straining more by the day.”
A frown furrows my brow.
Oliver relaxes in the seat, turning his cheek to me, and he looks out the window.
He shifts his wrist to study the face of his watch.
Not the one I bought for his New Year gift, not the Vacheron, but I’m hardly surprised, since the Vacheron is too much for a place like Bluestone.
Best to keep it at home in his vaulted wardrobe for now.
It’s either a show-off piece or a collector’s treasure, not a watch Oliver would wear around the academy.
Dray would.
I probe, my voice small, “What happened?”
Oliver shrugs. “Power shifted. Her father started consulting with me this past year, and Serena is nothing short of bull-headed. She was offered an internship after graduation. She begged her father to consider it. But I didn’t agree.
” He loosens a sigh and turns his blank gaze on me, blank as though he cannot fathom her resistance. “Her ego was hurt.”
My mouth thins.
The words tumble around my head.
An internship.
Something I knew nothing about.
Something Serena should know better than to be interested in, to hope for.
I don’t ask anything about it.
It’s ludicrous.
Instead, I latch onto the word that cringed through me, the one that stirred awake my own defiance in my own powerless life.
“Bull-headed?” I scoff, bitter. “For not wanting her fiancé to have the final word in her life?”
The look he throws me is withering. “It’s my place to make those decisions. Serena knows that. But her pride doesn’t welcome the transition.” He turns his cheek to me. For a moment, he watches the mountain beyond the window, then adds, “It affected us.”
“Because you call her proud for wanting autonomy, for wanting her own life to be just that. Hers.”
Oliver doesn’t bother acknowledging my response. He just stares out the window.
I consider him a while in the new silence that has found us. I consider the slight pinch of his mouth, tense, and the low set of his lashes.
He almost looks sad.
Maybe he is.
There’s an echo of pity in my chest.
But not for him—it’s for Serena.
It’s a dynamic I never considered in my quest for a husband, someone to fill a void and protect me.
My brother sleeps around, hardly loves her, then decides to steal away all of her choices, her autonomy, her freedoms and career, then call her stubborn and proud…
That’s not just sad.
It’s sorrow, it’s misery.
An ugly sensation swells in my chest.
I swallow it down and run my hands over my face.
Can’t let my misery consume me, not yet, not while Oliver is just dishing out information in this bid to repair a bond with me, or hold me closer so he can keep a better eye on me.
Whatever his motivations are, he keeps those close to the chest.
So I reach for every other piece of information I might be able to use for a plan I don’t have yet.
I drop my hands to my lap. “What about Asta?”
Oliver turns a questioning glance on me.
“She and Eric Harling are…” I shrug, “close.”
He scoffs. “One way to put it.”
I fight the urge to scoot to the edge of my seat. “How else would you say it?”
He turns a dark look on me.
Oliver isn’t stupid. He knows Eric and I met up in the city, and that I hid it from Father.
“Asta reads too much,” he tells me. “In her mind, he is her saviour. But really, he is her Wickham.”
I have heard Eric called a fortune hunter more than once, an aspirer, but to call him a Wickham?
That’s character.
A breath sags me. “All gentry are called fortune hunters when they pursue aristos. What if he actually likes her?”
Eric prefers Asta to me.
I know it.
I don’t fumble over the knowledge, try to justify it all with the reasons of politics in our world.
But there’s something deflating about it, all that work I put into a path I couldn’t pave fast enough.
After a moment, he says, “Eric has feelings for Asta, I’m sure. But I also suppose his apprenticeship is too suspicious to overlook.”
I blink at him. “What’s suspicious about wanting to be a master? That’s an acceptable profession for a gentry.”
“And it happens to be a prime position to meet young, pretty aristos debutantes.” Oliver’s smirk is dark.
“He’s a rat that made his home in a manor.
He positioned himself at the school for future meetings, future love,” he scoffs, “as backups—because the chances of him actually marrying Asta were always slim to none.” His smirk darkens into something ugly.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a few other aristos flings lined up, just in case it didn’t work out with Asta. ”
Oliver stares at me, unflinching.
That message was for me, clear as day.
It was to put me down, stamp out the hopes of a future with Eric I might harbour.
But I don’t harbour those hopes anymore.
Eric fucked me, then I heard nothing from him.
But if he called or wrote, I suppose I wouldn’t know. Communication is too easily intercepted in my home.
Still, he didn’t even look at me at the Debutante Ball. Not a glance, curt or lingering, and he was glued to Asta’s side.
He made his position very fucking clear.
The only hurt I felt over it was failure.
My own loss as my life vest was stolen from me.
So Oliver’s steady stare is unnecessary.
I loosen a weary breath and look out the window for the rest of the ride.
Oliver jumps out of the gondola first, his shoes sinking into the sludgy snow. He turns to help me out of the car, and as he does, I look up the path that coils towards the old academy.
It’s a path of dirty sleet marring the way.
My boots thud into the mush and, behind me, the gondola door slams shut, and it continues along the overhead wires to round back to the village.
I fix my fur-lined hood over my head and trek through the sludge.