Pretty Poison - Saltburn

005

The house party that they had been invited to this Friday evening turned out to be rather boring. It had falsely been advertised as a party, yet in reality it was a little get-together at most. There wasn't even music.

Exhaling cigarette smoke, Olympia let her head fall back against the headrest of the sofa she was seated on, squished between Felix and Oliver. Perhaps if she was drunker, the party would become more fun.

"It's not that bad." Felix said, nudging her side playfully. He had probably noticed her frustration with wasting a precious Friday night at such an event.
Still staring up at the ceiling, Olympia shrugged.

"Meh, I'm just missing the music and the possibility to dance."
Oliver shifted to her left, lifting his beer bottle to his lips.

"You're spoiled, that's what you are." Felix chuckled, even harder so when Olympia smacked the back of his head.

"Oy, don't act as if that's a lie."

"You're mean Catton." She gave back, pouting mockingly.

She could hear Oliver snicker and shifted her eyes to look at him. He looked good in a way, a different way than Felix or Farleigh did. Less pretty, less delicate; more coarse, rougher. It was as if God had taken about two hours longer to shape the Catton cousins, really taking his time to turn them into perfection, carving out every single one of their features with care and skill, while Oliver's face lacked the definition, the depth.

Yet that didn't make him ugly, the opposite actually and as she was watching him take another sip from his beer, for the first time since she met him, Olympia actually felt herself be attracted towards him.

Not that she would ever act on it, for several reasons but mostly because Felix would murder her for seducing his newest toy and also because Oliver still unsettled her with his always lingering presence.

"Thank you." She sing-songed as she snatched the beer from Oliver's hand, taking a sip of it herself. When he looked at her with raised eyebrows, she merely grinned at him teasingly; eyes twinkling brightly.

Taking a drag from her cigarette, she handed the bottle back to him and chuckled lightly when Felix tutted jokingly, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her closer towards the side of his body.

"Manners, Morrowe." He whispered into her ear, and she could practically hear the shit-eating grin he was most likely wearing. "How about you ask next time?"

Laughing, Olympia kicked his shin with her booted foot.
It wasn't hard to tell when Felix was joking and when he wasn't, mostly because he was almost always kind.

Olympia could count the times when he had actually been mean to someone on one hand and that was one of the things she loved most about Felix.
In her world consisting of fleeting acquaintances, incredibly fake friends and absent parents, Felix was the only constant she had. No matter what, he was always going to be there for her; always light up her life like he was the sun.

She loved him so much it almost hurt, even more so when she felt the platonic love, she had for him slowly change, take the shape of something she had always wanted to keep out of their relationship. Romantic feelings.

Their bond had always been close, intimate and perhaps even borderline flirtatious but not once before had she perceived Felix as anything other than her best friend, yet recently their dynamic had changed. Olympia wasn't sure if he was feeling it too, but she certainly did. As much as she tried to bury those feelings, push them away and ignore them, they still were there. Slowly but steadily, she was catching feelings for Felix.

It wasn't necessarily like it bothered her, hell they had even hooked up a couple of times, at the end of the summer break when every day had begun to feel the same and had stretched on endlessly and they both needed to find a different way to kill the time. Or on the occasional drunken night here at Oxford, when Olympia had ended up in Felix's bed and they just couldn't keep their hands to themselves and were way too wasted to think properly.