Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

He stared at me for what must have been a whole minute; my eyes and then my mouth, the base of my throat and then back up to my eyes again. I felt peeled raw and exposed.

“Uh, thanks for that,” I said. Caspien stopped, looking uncomfortable. I expected him to say something predictably dick-ish. “It would have been inconvenient if you’d died in my uncle’s arboretum,” he said before disappearing out of the backdoor and into the sunshine.

I closed the door and turned to face Caspien. “I’ll keep your dirty secret for you,” I told him. His face broke into a relieved smile that lit his eyes and softened his pink mouth. “On one condition.” He stiffened, face turning to stone. “You don’t see him anymore. You won’t talk to him on the phone or text him or whatever else you do with him. It stops. All of it. Or I’ll tell Luke, and trust me, he will believe me.” He looked faintly shocked, like I’d surprised him. He thought about this a moment, then gritted out through his teeth: “Fine.”

I was standing over him as he lay on my bed. His T-shirt was ruched up, and I could see the golden stretch of his stomach, hard and flat above the waistband of his shorts. Suddenly, his legs shot out, and he hooked them around the back of my thighs, locking them together. He smirked as he held me there.

I didn’t know who this Caspien was. He wasn’t the cold, serpentine boy from the mansion. He wasn’t even the stiff, serious boy who’d washed my hands clean of Oleander plant. It wasn’t the boy at the beach or the boy who chatted warmly with Luke. This was someone else, maybe even the same person who kissed men in dark rooms and whispered provocative things to them down the phone. There were so many sides to him. He was a kaleidoscope, one that I couldn’t look away from. I was entranced.

There was a moment, one strange, stretched-out moment, where I could do nothing but stare into the ice blue of his eyes. Then, at his mouth. And then back to his eyes again. It came from nowhere, but I felt it everywhere. The need to kiss him. I imagined the soft, wet pink inside of his mouth, the taste of his lips, the shape of his tongue. It was an onslaught of want. Loud and hot and violent. As my senses rushed back in, I felt something hard and warm between my legs. Whether he felt it too, and it’s what made him release me, I don’t know, but I practically threw myself backwards off him, staggering back into the desk. Caspien sat up on his elbows and stared at me, his own breathing quick and his eyes alight with something dangerous. He was looking at me as though seeing me for the first time. As though, for the first time, I interested him. But it was a dangerous sort of interest –the sort he might give a bug he’d trapped under a glass.

He scoffed at that. “There’s not a soul alive who cares about me, Jude. This isn’t bloody news to me.” It didn’t come out like he was looking for pity, but like some well-known fact he was tired of talking about. “What are you talking about?” I scowled. “Gideon cares about you.” I care about you. He gave me a look that sent a shiver down my spine. “You know nothing about Gideon, Jude.” “What does that even mean?” He rested his head back on the door with a quiet thud. “Forget it.”

I wasn’t breathing and there was a sound like music in my ears. Like Caspien playing piano. He was so close and so devastatingly pretty, and I didn’t know how to say all the things swirling about in my belly with the sandwiches, birthday cake and champagne, but I knew if I did, then everything would change. Things were already changing. This hot, confusing, frightening thing that got louder and more desperate whenever I was around him had reached some critical point. One I couldn’t come back from even if I wanted to. Telling him why I’d hated seeing that book seemed too difficult, too impossible. So I went toward him instead, took his face in my hands, and kissed him.

My entire destruction felt possible from that kiss, and I had no desire to fight it. It was what books and song lyrics told you kisses ought to be. It was the end of childhood and the beginning of something else, and I knew I would not be the same when it was over.

“I need the toilet.” My body was stiff and sore from sitting, and that weird, jangly feeling was back beneath my skin. Like the crackle of thunder before a lightning strike. “You can’t run away every time something gets a little difficult, you know,” he snarked as I reached the door.

He stared at me, a half-embarrassed, half-angry little frown on his face. I waited for him to lash out with an insult about my clumsiness or stupidity, about it being my fault he fell in the first place. But instead, he kissed me. He pressed his lips onto mine, shoved his tongue into my mouth and ravaged it. Then my hands were in his hair and holding his head in place because the thought of him stopping was the worst thing I could imagine. I would die if he stopped now; I was certain of it.

He made a noise then, some desperate whimper that I knew I’d spend the rest of my life thinking about, and tore his mouth from mine to look down into my eyes. His cheeks were flushed pink and his mouth a bright strawberry red and I thought I might cry from how beautiful he looked. It was the sort of beautiful great art and literature was created for. Fragile and delicate and destructive. I would write about it the very instant I was alone, and if the words didn’t exist to describe it, then I’d create new ones. I reached my lips up, seeking his again, and he took pity on me and kissed me again. As he tilted his angle and moved again, a jolt of pleasure raced down my spine to my balls.

“You don’t need to act like this, you know,” I said calmly, though my heart was thundering behind my ribs. “Like nothing means anything or like everything’s a joke. You don’t need to act like that with me.” His face did a strange thing, like he was trying very hard to keep something from showing on it.

Avoiding his eyes, I crossed to where my bag was and grabbed it up off the floor. “I have to go.” I started toward the door. “Oh look, Judith’s running away again.” I stopped and turned back. His eyes were hard as marbles, sparkling in the dying sunlight. “You know, if you don’t want me to go, you could just say that.” It was bravado, spoken from some senseless place I’d never even been. I imagined some alternate reality where he said don’t go, Jude, and I wouldn’t. We’d clean up and lie together on his bed and talk. Maybe about books or films or music or something else. Maybe later, we’d do that all over again. Slower, less fevered. And as he said nothing in response I deluded myself that he was imagining the same. When it was clear he wasn’t going to speak, I pulled my bag over my shoulder and said, “I’ll see you on Tuesday.” I left him standing there in his dead mother’s bedroom, not knowing that winter would come and go, the leaves of the trees would be turning, sprouting the green of a new spring before I saw him again.

“I hateyou forleaving me with this. This thinginsde me that never goes away.”

Later, I’d come to understand that he knew how sincerity affected his features. It was why he so rarely showed it. Sincerity gave his face an almost fragile quality. Delicate and exquisite. His beauty was always striking, but when he was tender and gentle with it, he became almost painful to look at. Magnificent and terrible as an angel. Divinity made flesh.

He let out the first laugh I’d ever heard from him, and it very nearly stopped my heart.

Finally, he said, “To protect someone.”

Caspien was an altarpiece, Deveraux his reredos, and I came to him in blind idolatry.

Back then, he was the beating heart inside my chest, the hopes and dreams I harboured in my soul. I existed only because he perceived me. He lived inside me then, in a different way to how he does now – like some exotic disease I was infected with in my youth and of which there is no cure.

I loved him. I was as certain of that as I was my own name, both universal truths. I am Jude Alcott, and I am in love with Caspien Deveraux.

Only I could love Caspien how he deserved to be loved. And so I would. I’d love him in spite of everything he was and everything I knew he could be. No matter what he did, no matter how much he hurt me, in this I would be constant. As long as Caspien Deveraux breathed, I would love him.

When his hand settled on my head again, fingers sifting almost tenderly through my hair, I had the strangest urge to cry. From pleasure and fear and the overwhelming sensation that I was nothing unless I was allowed to be this to him. Have this with him. I could not imagine a life outside of this. It would be as void and empty as death itself. The words sat on my tongue for hours after, the immense and terrible truth of them: I love you. I don’t want to remember a time when I didn’t. I love you. And as long as I am able to draw breath, then I will love you with every single one. I love you.

“He’s going to break your heart, you know. And still, you’ll love him. He’ll break it over and over again and you’ll continue to love him.”

He’d said nothing of the same heart being broken over and over again, sometimes in exactly the same place, sometimes slightly to the left, sometimes slightly above. That surely would weaken the entire structure until one day, the thing would crumble to dust.

Drunk enough to forget how Cas was supposed to be the first. The only.

“No.” I cut him off. “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it, Gideon. I don’t want to hear any more words of wisdom about broken hearts or theories about what it is Cas actually wants and needs. What I want is to pretend he doesn’t fucking exist. What I want is to wake up in the morning and forget that he’s out there living a life with someone else.” I was saying too much. It was dangerous to say this much. “Do you have any idea what that feels like? Knowing that? Knowing that while I’m here, alone, looking at all the places he used to exist in, he’s just...off somewhere else with someone else? While I struggle to figure out who the fuck I am now and what I’m supposed to want now, he’s thriving and happy and comfortable.” I sneered the last word. “So please stop telling me about where they are or what they’re doing or how perfect their fucking life is, Gideon, because I don’t want to know. It’s enough. This,” I hit my own chest with a soft fist. “What he left behind is enough, okay?”

I let every painful memory flood back in, like a dam bursting and the swell rushing to the front of my brain, pouring over the walls I’d built. I missed him. I missed what we’d had. The lie we’d had. The lie he’d let me have.

Against all reason and better judgement, I dropped my head onto his shoulder, turning it so that I could press my nose against his neck and inhale. I nosed gently at the skin, breathing him in. I waited for him to mock me, push me away, or tell me to stop, but he did neither. Instead, he angled his head to give me better access. I breathed deeper.

The image blasted itself across my frontal lobe. Cas bent over, open and begging. Me shoving into him over and over and over. Punishing him for everything he’d done. Taking from him what I’d wanted for so long. What I deserved to have. Drinking up his pleas for me to slow or stop and ignoring every single one. There was no hesitation or confusion about what I wanted when it came to him. There never had been. I was almost feral with the certainty of what I wanted from Cas.

Either way, I understood that there was a side of myself that existed only in opposition to him, a side that, when I was alone and tried to understand it, felt so separate from my conscious mind that I imagined it was what possession felt like.

I wanted to scream: This is important. How I feel now, today is important. How much I want you still is the most important thing in the fucking world. How certain I am that I’ll break down and cry the moment you walk out that door is fucking important.

If Caspien is the reason this story exists, then Nathan is the reason I am writing it.

There’d been comfort in knowing how well he could read me, how well he knew me, because it was provenance of what existed between us. He knew me the way he’d know a book he liked or a piece of music he knew by heart. He knew me well because I was his, and now that he didn’t...

Soon, I fell into that familiar trance of watching and listening to him move and speak. That commanding way he’d always had of holding my attention, of being the only thing I could see, of being the sun to my Icarus.

The intensity of my feelings for him in that moment, so acute and unyielding, transcended everything that had come before. He was still the boy I’d loved three, four summers ago, but that love had matured inside me like wine in a barrel, and it was more robust and vinous than it had ever been. I’d learned so much in the years we’d been apart. I’d studied in one of the greatest institutions in the world, I’d met friends and lovers who had changed me inexorably with their wisdom, generosity, and kindness, and yet, in the loving of this person who had never offered me any of these things, I was still unchanged. Nothing existed when Caspien was next to me; it had always been that way. I needed nothing else, wanted nothing else, and I never felt as whole or as completely alive in the world as I did when he was with me.

“No one’s perfect.” “You are.” I looked down to check the sarcastic smirk on his face, but it wasn’t there. His mouth was a straight line, but since his eyes were still hidden behind his sunglasses, I assumed he was smirking with them. I laughed and said something like, “Ha, okay, no more alcohol for you.” He muttered something I couldn’t make out, and then I was certain I heard him snore.

Suddenly, he leaned forward, and I thought, terrified, that he was going to kiss me. Instead, he leaned his forehead against mine and breathed me in. His breath was gin-sweet and hot, and I tried to steady my own. “I miss you,” he whispered, so softly it felt like an exhale.

As he lay sprawled there, panting, naked, and hard, I tried to consider what this would mean, how much it was going to hurt when he left me again – because he would, it was what he did, and decided I didn’t care. I was Jude. He was Cas. This was us. What was one more battle scar on my heart when the war was this glorious?

“I’m yours, Cas,” I told him. “You’re mine, and I’m yours. Always. Tell me you know that, tell me.” “I know, Jude,” he replied, soothingly. “I know.”

“I love you, Cas, I always have. I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you, I think. Even when I thought I hated you, I loved you. I don’t think I know how not to, so please don’t go back there. Don’t choose that, choose me. Stay with me. We’ll go to Gideon’s, pack our shit, and leave. Together.” He looked tormented. “You’ve no idea what you’re asking.” “Yeah, I do. I’m asking you not to go back to someone who fucking hurts you,” I said. “You’re not safe with him.” “And you’re not safe with me,” he said. “I’m poison, remember? Like that Oleander plant you found that day in the arboretum. Best to rip out at the root.” He gave me a small, bitter, Gideon-like smile.

P.S – I didn’t mean what I said that night in the rain. You can always come back to me. You can always call me. I’ll always answer, Cas.

I began to play Oleander: the piece I was most confident in, the one I’d worked on longest. The one I’d been lost in the night Xavier broke my hand. That night, I’d boarded a plane and left him for the first time, only to find Jude, inexplicably, waiting for me on the other side of the ocean. My lighthouse in the storm.