Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

have been in pain for as long as I have been alive; this is just a different kind. More immediate, more ghastly to look at.”

romantic love was as unknowable to me as the universe. Love in that sense, love in that all-consuming, life-affirming, passionate, glorious sense, had come and gone with one person only, and he’d taken it with him when he left.

My heart, a soft and fleshy thing that was vulnerable to their poison. Over the years, that soft fleshy thing has hardened, broken, bruised and scarred over but pierce through the hard outer shell, and there it was. Unchanged at its core.

A brownish-red brick mansion with over a hundred windows and a stone-covered wraparound veranda on one side, a large glass conservatory on the other, a turreted section, and around ten chimneys.

“Arboretum,”

But my favourite thing about the cottage was the garden and the view from my bedroom window out onto the shiny surface of the lake at the end of it. The lake was more of a glorified duck pond, but it was deep enough to swim in and big enough for a rowboat I could lie in and stare up at the sky for hours – which I’d done yesterday.

“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.”

“What’s the purpose of letters then?” Another of his encouraging smiles. “Well, to say things we might not be brave enough to say face to face.”

But most of all, I hated him, loathed him, for infecting me like he had. For slipping under my skin and into my blood and finding his way to my heart.

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.

“Everything you think and feel is in your eyes, you know. When you hated me, I could see it. When you didn’t, I could see that too.” His

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.”

“I don’t care,” I said naively. I don’t care if he can’t love me the same way I love him. I’m still going to.” Unconditionally, for as long as I could breathe.

He was capable of love, and I’d prove it.

think it’s easier for hearts to heal when they are still young.

“You’re fucking poison.”

“The way I have always seen it,” Gideon said as he sipped his wine, “is that we have only two choices when the heart is broken. The first is to allow it to heal. It is quite astounding what the human heart is able to overcome. Though it shall never be quite as strong as it was – its foundations will be forever weakened – it can heal. The second...” Here, his eyes danced to me. For the first time, I saw something in them that made my blood run cold. “…is to turn it into so impenetrable a thing, such a fortress, that it will never be breached again.”

“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I think that’s the first time I thought you might have a heart. I still think about that night now, now that I know you don’t. I’ve grown to think that the only good thing about you not having a heart is that it means you can’t love him either.

You probably think I should have moved on by now. Maybe I should have. But don’t they say that the things that happen to us in the years when our brains are still developing become part of us forever? You happened to me. I grew around you. Then you left. You uprooted yourself, and now the place you grew out is just barren. But there’s still a Caspien-shaped avulsion where you once were.

I couldn’t remember who I’d been before him, and didn’t know who I was now that he’d discarded me.

The best thing to do, I’d found, was to drink enough so that the moment my head touched the pillow, I’d sink into undreaming sleep. I drank, and I forgot. And then I remembered, and then I drank again.

Story Of my adult life

Alcohol wasn’t perfect, it couldn’t keep him out of my head completely, but it came bloody close.

But now that I was away from the place, the thought of going back there made me feel physically ill: like returning to the scene of some horrendous accident. Some place where a terrible trauma had been done to me.

“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 reckon when he’s made a few more mistakes, he’ll realise what he had in you.” I raised an eyebrow. “You think he’ll come crawling back?” “Christ, no, he wouldn’t crawl for anyone,” Luke said, and we both laughed. “But he’ll walk in that weird upright way he has, right back to you.”

The thing that scared me most was that I was going to belong to him like this forever. He’d carved out a part of my heart and soul for himself and nothing except him would be able to fit inside it. It was him or it was nothing. It was him.

“You finally hate me then.” “You tell me?” I asked, slamming my bottle down on the desk. “What are my eyes saying, Cas? Do I hate you?” I could feel the alcohol in my bloodstream now, hot and fervid. I was taller now than the last time we’d been face to face, and from this angle I could see the faintest trace of circles beneath his eyes, a dullness in them that had never been there before – even when they were hard and cold, his eyes were always bright and sharp. His lips were pale and dry, but I’d never wanted to kiss them more. “No,” he said, looking into my eyes. “You don’t hate me. You wish you did, but you don’t.”

No, I wasn’t the predator. He was. He’d always been the one hunting me. I’d only ever tried to survive him.

“I think I’ll fuck you raw. Make you go back to him with my come inside you.”

“Do you feel better now?” he asked, not answering my question. “Now that you’ve gotten it out of your system, will you move on?” I blinked at him, speechless. Then, fury, hot and sharp. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said, sitting up. “I had fucking moved on! You came here. To my university, to my dorm. You provoked...whatever that was. I had moved on.”

He was poisonous. I’d been infected with him, and every time we were face to face, he’d twist his tainted blade that little bit deeper.

I told you that I hated you, but you were right, I don’t. I love you. I think I’ll always love you. P.S I haven’t stripped the bed yet. Love, Jude

I like films – I like them a lot more since I joined your class, but they don’t move me the way books do. I can never quite suspend my belief enough to lose myself in them completely.” “The way you do when you’re reading,” said Nathan. “Exactly.”

“Then let me spell it out for you, Jude Alcott. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the day in the coffee shop. I’ve never wanted to take someone home just to shower, feed, and cuddle them to sleep before.”

If I could have chosen a love, one that would have made me a better version of myself instead of worse, then I’d have chosen Nathan. But we don’t get to choose these things. I’d learned that lesson already, and I’d learn it a few more times still.

But those reminders had followed me onto Oxford, too, and that was because Cas didn’t live in a place, he lived inside me.

I hadn’t come, hadn’t been hard the entire time he fucked me – and

Well i liked nathan until now

Nathan was everything I should have wanted. Everything I should need, but I sat there knowing that what I wanted and needed was something else entirely. Someone else entirely. That’s the only way I was going to feel whole. That was the only way I was going to heal. By having him. By realising what it was to be wanted by him. To be loved by him. And since I knew it was impossible, because he wasn’t capable of it, that knowledge was a new but familiar kind of devastation.

What on earth was wrong with me that I wasn’t satisfied with this? Here was a man holding me to his chest and telling me my comfort was important to him, my feelings were important to him and yet my fucking soul ached for someone who’d thought nothing of either.

We can g to therapy together

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

“I hate feeling like this. But I don’t know how to stop,” I admitted. “I wish I could just love someone else. I wish I could just love you. You’re so much better than him.” I was crying now. Stupid, childlike, tears I knew I would be ashamed of later. Nathan only held me tighter. “Love doesn’t work like that, baby.” He laughed gently. “But for what it’s worth, I wish you could too.”

He knew me the way he’d know a book he liked or a piece of music he knew by heart.

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.

we went to the British Library. A

We reached for each other at the same time, and as he gasped into my mouth, I took his face in my hands and kissed him hard. I backed him up against the sink, careful not to hurt his hand, as I slid my hands into his hair and tasted his mouth for the first time in a lifetime. It was an antidote. Except he was my poison, too.

What was one more battle scar on my heart when the war was this glorious?

“Does he fuck you as good as this?” His eyes had blazed with arousal as he shook his head. “I want to hear you say it.” “No. He doesn’t...fuck me like this.

“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.”