Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

“It was a lie, Gideon. He was a lie, as were you.” I give him a pointed look. “No. You were the truest, most real, most untainted thing he ever had.” “He made his bloody choice, Gideon!” I snap. “Over and over again, he made his choice, and it was never me.”

“You are in every line I have ever read.”

It was a bright, burning Tuesday in August when Caspien Deveraux broke my heart for the first time.

It was the first time I met Caspien Deveraux, and I loathed him with a passion I didn’t know I was capable of. And though I didn’t know it then, I’d soon come to love him with the very same ferocity.

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.

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.

“Love is often painful. I think it’s rather the very nature of it.”

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.

I was sixteen, and she was my high school girlfriend, so, of course, I loved her. It took no thought or effort to love Ellie.

But it is possible to have your mouth full of someone’s cock and loathe them with ninety-nine percent of your conscious brain. The other one percent is hard and ferally turned on.”

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. And I wanted to live inside him too, crawl under his skin and settle there.

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.

He smirked, looking pleased. “This beautiful dick only gets hard for girls and me. How peculiar.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Jude. Love cultivates within us the most farcical of notions. It’s a dangerous thing, really. And gosh, you are quite desperately in love with him, aren’t you?” He gave me a commiserative look. I could only stare at him pleadingly. I often think about how I must have looked to him in that moment; vulnerable and defenceless as a kitten in a box. The look, whatever it was, was all the confirmation he needed. “Oh, Jude. You poor thing. You poor, poor thing.”

“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’d be his constant. This summer, I’d show him that. I’d be everything and anything he needed me to be. He was capable of love, and I’d prove it.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been to Cas, a distraction, a game, but he’d been real to me.

“I’m sorry, Jude. But I did warn you,” Gideon said, not sounding sorry at all. I stared at him. He moved to sit down, taking a large sip of his wine as he did. “I warned you that he would break your heart, and he did.”

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

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

He looked painfully beautiful. Painfully far away. Painfully not mine.

My mouth opened, closed, opened again. “You want me to have dinner with you?” “I mean, if that’s weird, I could leave the room, and you could eat. After all, the goal is just feeding you. I don’t technically need to be there.” Unexpectedly, I laughed. There was a nervous fluttering in my stomach, but I was ravenous with it. I wasn’t sure what the fuck I was doing, but I found myself nodding. “I really like spaghetti Bolognese.”

As I walked home under the same moon that had listened to my promise to love Cas unconditionally, I was almost convinced I was free from it. From him. From Deveraux, from that heartache that had been living deep inside me for so long. That delusion didn’t last very long.

“You imagine me with girls?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “I think you’re doing gay wrong.”

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

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.”

“But this is what we do, Jude. It’s what we’ve always done.”

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”

No matter how I’d hurt him, he loved me the same as he always had. With everything that he had.