Page 19
“You think I’m trouble, Oscar?”
He drags a thumb over my knuckles. “I think…that it is ludicrous I didn’t connect what I have heard your brother say of you recently with the rumours about the Letherby farm.”
“What’s my brother been saying?”
“That you have a farm of your own and your mother worries about you.”
“That all, eh?”
“Yes.” Oscar’s gaze is steady again, as it is in every memory I held of him before today. “And it was not gossip. Someone asked him a question and he answered it while I happened to be nearby.”
“Are you around him a lot?”
“Sometimes. We have many mutual friends.”
I know that. But I came here to get away from my life being other people’s business, and—actually, what? Do I care that Oscar’s heard my name on my brother’s lips, or am I jealous Folk’s around him all the time and I’m not?
Oscar used the word ludicrous and it fits my train of thought. Still holding his big hand, I lever myself from my crouch and take a seat beside him, leaning against his car.
We coexist in silence for a while. Literally for me, and Oscar is quiet too. He checks his phone a few times, answering texts with one-word replies, and I feel a sigh rattle through him.
I nudge him. “All right?”
Oscar turns his head, showing me his mouth as he speaks, his lush lips curving in a wry half-smile. “Yes, I am just annoyed with…everything, maybe, and I don’t like being angry.”
“Why not? Sometimes it helps.”
“With what?”
“Processing, maybe? I’m not that good at expressing myself when I think people are getting more of me than I want them to have.”
Oscar nods as if I’m imparting genuine wisdom and I almost laugh. But his face is serious. “I have never known a deaf person before. Will you tell me if you need something from me and I don’t realise?”
There isn’t anything I need from him tonight beyond him being okay. But I like that we’re sitting together in the dark too much to remind him he might want to go home. That we’re so close you couldn’t get a debit card between our shoulders, our hips, and our bent legs.
I nod, answering his question.
Oscar smiles for real, and it feels good. So good I look to the stars for another distraction, but they’re not there. It’s clouded over and I have to find another way to stop me closing the narrow distance between us. “Do you live around here?”
“In town, on the sea front. Aras lives in the old blue house across the road from your farm, with his mother and her husband.”
“Do you like him?”
“Aras?”
“No, the husband.”
Mischief lights Oscar’s warm gaze. “I knew what you meant. And yes. Paul is a kind man and he leaves room for me in a life that isn’t mine. I can’t ask for more than that.”
“There’s always more.”
Oscar hums. I think. I feel it. I like it. Makes me want to splay my fingers over his chest while he makes deeper sounds—the kind of sounds I don’t need to hear for them to become as much a part of me as they are of him.
“What about you, Poet?”
Even though I’m watching his mouth, Oscar catches me off guard.
Not his question, or the way his lips wrap around my name. But what sits beneath, low and weighted, threading through a barren space and landing somewhere that hasn’t seen light in years. Past thought, past comprehension, it doesn’t arrive whole. And yet, I go still in places Oscar can’t see. Pushing from the wrong side of absence, shutting off the part of my brain that wants to guess what it thinks should be there.
