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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 can’t stop thinking about it.” “Me too,” I said again. Cruelly, I wanted to forget it had happened at all. I hated how irreversible and permanent it felt. I hated that I spent every day checking my phone for contact from Caspien. I hated, too, that despite everything I felt about what I’d done and was doing to her, how much further I was prepared to hurt her the very moment he walked back into my life. But still, I longed for that moment.
“What is it you want, Jude?” he hissed. At that moment, there was only one thing I wanted, and I wasn’t about to pretend otherwise. “When are you coming home?” I said.
“Why did you leave?” I asked. I could tell I’d shocked him. Maybe he’d been expecting something about Blackwell. Maybe he’d been expecting something along the same vein as what he’d asked me. He stared at me, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t answer. He looked so unsettled by the question that I was sure that when it did come, it wouldn’t even be the truth. Finally, he said, “To protect someone.”
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.”
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.
“Don’t all the boys you do that to look at you like this, after?” Maybe it was a pathetic attempt to find out how many boys there were, or maybe it was an attempt to make myself look less...less in love. But his eyes grew very serious as he looked at me. “No,” He said. “No one looks at me the way you do.”
don’t mind it,” he said obliquely. “What?” “The way you look at me.” His gaze was very intense suddenly, his eyes holding my own in their pale grey snare. “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 voice was horribly self-assured. “It’s rare. Most people try to hide what they truly feel. But not you, Jude Alcott.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked him. “Hide what you feel?” “You think I have feelings? My, how times have changed.”
Love. Unconditional. 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.
“Oh, Jude. You poor thing. You poor, poor thing.” I couldn’t understand at the time why his apology sounded so strange and discordant, like an out-of-tune piano. But now I know it was because he was pleased. My misery – the misery he knew would come inevitably – pleased him. “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.”
“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
And in a voice that would haunt my dreams, he said, “Make it hurt.”
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.
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.
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,”
If Caspien is the reason this story exists, then Nathan is the reason I am writing it.
I knew I shouldn’t want him anywhere near me, not again. But I was Jude. And Jude loved Cas. And so I also knew I would never tell him to go again.
“Your friend is a bit of a wanker,” he remarked. “Is he? Most people like him.” “Most people are idiots.” I chuckled. “He’s a good guy, just a little excitable around new people. Like a Labrador puppy.” “He’s a chauvinist.” “Christ, okay,” I frowned at him. “Gin makes you cranky. Noted.” “He spoke over his girlfriend at every opportunity, used sexist language at least twice, and thinks far too much of himself.” “No one’s perfect.”
“You are.”
Was he sad? Was he in pain? Because if he was, then it changed everything, and I didn’t know what to do with the new reality it left me with. I needed him to be happy. Because part of my grieving Cas, instrumental, in fact, to my grieving him, was knowing that he was happy with the choice he’d made. Was knowing that he’d chosen that perfectly comfortable life with Blackwell on the other side of the fucking world and regretted nothing. I didn’t want to hear that it had been a mistake, because then it would mean we’d both been miserable for no fucking reason.
“You don’t look at me the way you used to.” Because I’m afraid to, I wanted to say.
“You’re exactly the same as you’ve always been. This is all just another bloody act: this version of you.” I waved in his general direction. “The one cooking me dinner, asking me things like you care about the answers, telling me you miss me. Who are you with him? Which version does he get? I’m curious.”
Cas was watching me very closely, breathing very quickly. “I see,” he said at last. “What do you bloody see?” “You’re in love with him.”
I stared at him, speechless. Then, I began to laugh. Near hysterical laughter that sounded insane in the echo of the kitchen. “Oh, I fucking wish,” I said when it had died in my throat. “I fucking wish.”
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 love this,” I whispered. “Being here with you. No one else but us.” I was prepared for him not to answer, but very softly, as though someone might overhear him, he said, “I do too.”
“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.”
“So he is unhappy? With Xavier?” “Of course he is, but it hardly matters. He’s made his bed, and he’s far too prideful to consider getting up from it. He’s also far too smart to leave Xavier Blackwell on the promise of something as fleeting and pointless as happiness and childish notions of love.”
“After how deeply he hurt you, you cannot possibly tell me that you’re not somewhat satisfied that this is the bed he now lies in?” It felt as though he’d punched me.
“You make it sound like you’d be happy. But you wouldn’t be, not with me. I don’t make anyone happy, Jude. In fact, I’ve a great deal of skill in making people quite miserable, you included. Or had you forgotten?”
“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.
I ruin everything I touch. Christ, my own mother loathed me. I ruined her and I’ll ruin you as well and I don’t want that. I don’t want to be the one to ruin you, Jude. Not you.”
“If you go back there, if you choose him now, then we’re done. I’m done. I can’t watch you do this to yourself. I won’t.” The threat was the only thing I had left, a last desperate grasp at a drowning thing. “Please try to be happy,” he said again as he took a step backward. “I mean it, Cas, we’re not doing this again.” He was further away now and he had to raise his voice a little to be heard over the sound of the rain. There were tears in his eyes, as there
were in mine. “But this is what we do, Jude. It’s what we’ve always done.” “Not anymore. It’s over. Don’t come to me again.” He smiled, sadly, and nodded once. “Finally, he learns.”
I still love you. I think I always will. But it’s like my parents, I’m never going to stop loving them, I’m only going to get better at living without them loving me back.
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.
“True. But what I…he…what we did to you was the breaking of us.” He sank deeper into the pillow. “We were never the same after you left us. It was too great a thing for us to move past.” “Well, thank god for that,” I scoffed. “At least you two weren’t able to fuck anyone else up the way you did me. That’s something.”
“Money isn’t comfort to me, Gideon. Comfort is going to sleep with the person you love wrapped up in your arms. It’s knowing the people you love are safe and happy. Comfort’s not choosing a piece of shit grooming abuser over someone who would have spent every day trying to make you happy. Comfort is knowing you deserve happiness and to be loved. That’s my comfort, Gideon. He was my comfort, and I would have been his, and you’re part of the reason neither of us has it. So keep your fucking money. I’m not interested in it.”
“But it had to be me, Jude. It had to be. If it had been up to you then you’d have chosen me without thinking, and I’d have broken your heart anyway,
“Maybe instead of you destroying me, I could have saved you?” I said. Cas smiled another small, sad smile. “You did save me, Jude. So many times.”
I’d been telling the truth when I told him he’d saved me over and over again; because if Jude could love me, Jude who was perfect, Jude who was the sun, then it meant I was worth loving.
