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 bothstray, 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.
