.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.
Night had fallen by the time Oliver stumbled in on Venetia, blind drunk in the bath that was once Felix's just hours after they had buried him.
"Sorry!" Oliver exclaimed, immediately averting his eyes from her bare body that lay under the water before him but all she did was sneer at him.
"Your politeness is so grating." She scoffed, playing with her fingers under the water. "Do you know that?"
Oliver couldn't help but take her anger for provocation. What else was there to do?
"I'm sorry." He said, his voice low.
"You're always sorry. Always flinching away like a little fucking serf." Venetia continued as Oliver came to crouch beside the bath. What kind of game was she playing with him?
"I saw you. Sobbing in the church at the funeral. I watched you weeping away and I just...I felt so sorry for you. So sorry. But then I remembered... And I started laughing." She said, letting out a wild laugh that nearly made Oliver flinch back but then she continued on. "And then I couldn't stop laughing. Because I remembered that...That you only knew him for...six months? You hardly knew him, Ollie. You have nothing to do with him, with us, with here. Nothing at all. You're just a stranger!"
He couldn't help the sharp pain that burst through his chest at that.
"It's very late." Oliver said, lowering his eyes to the tiles of the bathroom floor but that did not deter the grief struck girl.
"Yet here you are. Right in the middle of it all. With your claws so deep in my sister." Venetia says, wagging her finger in his face. "Stranger fucking danger."
"Yeah, I'm going to bed..."
"Ollie, you know what daddy's started to call you?" Venetia laughed, waiting a beat. ""Spiderman"."
"Really?" Oliver said, smiling patiently as humiliation coursed through him.
"Because around. Oliver, you're always skulking Weaving your spidery, web."
"Goodnight." He said dismissively. "Drink some water."
But she merely laughed in his face.
"Hey, Ollie, Ollie, don't be upset. I don't think you're a spider." She said. "I think you're a moth. I'm right, aren't I! Quiet. Harmless. Drawn to shiny things. Batting up against the window..."
Venetia tapped her palm against his cheek: bat, bat, bat.
"...Just desperate to get in. Well you've done it now. You've made your holes in everything. You'll eat us from the inside out." She said, whispering her next words. "The way your already did to poor little Lexi."
"You've drunk way too much." Oliver said gently but before he could say anything else, a sudden look of realisation fell over Venetia's tear struck features and she looked up into his eyes.
"Isn't that his aftershave?"
Shit. It is. Before Oliver can stand she grabs him by the collar.
You are a fucking freak! I bet you're wearing his underwear too, aren't you? You disgusting little nobody." She hissed. "Oh my god. You ate him right up. And you licked the fucking plate."
The look of pure disgust on her face would haunt him for years. more than anything else that had occurred on the grounds of Saltburn. He would never forget that. Perhaps he knew that at the time. Perhaps that was why he laid down the razor blades, so easily prompting suicide.
