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I know you hate me. I know I do not deserve your forgiveness, Jude. But please, if you ever loved him – come. Let me say to you what I must, before it’s too late.
“He’s pretty much beyond the point of doing anything on his own now.” The thought slips into my brain before I can stop it: Good.
Gideon wasn’t the knife; Caspien had been that. Gideon, the hand that wielded it. Me, the soft, yielding flesh.
“Have you met someone else? Is that why you won’t see him?” I give him a look, one that says there has never and will never be anyone else.
“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.”
“It was always you. He chose you in the only way he knew how.”
“He’s only ever loved you, Jude. Surely you know that.” I look at him, incredulous. “He doesn’t know what love is; you made sure of that! We weren’t…that wasn’t love.”
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.
“I can only stay the week,” I mutter, blood still hot. “I have to get back on Friday.”
This place, him, Cas, all of it, live inside me. I am as much a part of the web as they were the creators of it.
It was a bright, burning Tuesday in August when Caspien Deveraux broke my heart for the first time.
I think about that frequently. About what I’d want my last night on this earth to look like.
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.
I had an image of charging after him, grabbing him by the hair and forcefully slamming him against something until he cried.
“Would you believe that he really is a sweet boy underneath?” “No.”
I tried not to think about how similar Caspien and I were; of how we’d both lost our parents and how we went to live with our uncles, and how if he wasn’t such a horrible snooty twat, we might have had something in common we could talk about.
I dropped to my knees again and returned to the plant, reaching out to pull at a particularly stubborn stem that had tangled itself around one of the window frames. “I think we should just stay out of each other’s way.” Without warning, Caspien’s hand wrapped tightly around my wrist. With a strength that surprised me, he yanked my arm back away from the stem.
“Oleander,” he hissed, like it explained why he was about to snap my bloody wrist. I blinked at him, confused. “It is a plant toxic to humans. Though I wonder if that would even apply to you.”
I still felt a little dizzy, my head a little big, and my body a little tight and breathless, but I was certain it was not because I had toxic plant poisoning.
His hands were shapely and pretty with long, elegant fingers. Fingers that could command horses, play piano, and wash poison from my skin.
“Which wrist?” Caspien asked me. “Left.” He nodded, some glimmer of something in his blue eyes.
“Look, I think we both know that what he wants is completely outside the realms of possibility, but we could play along. It would at least get him to leave us alone.”
I wanted to know his name. I wanted to know so that when I was older, bigger, stronger, I could hunt him down and hurt him in some way.
“No.” I smiled. “I’m here because I want to be, Cas.” It was the first time I’d ever used the nickname.
I saw it happen. The transformation in his face. A dark, cruel look lifting from his eyes, and another, softer – more familiar – look settling over it.
“ ‘A lover is a man who turns himself into a slave.’ ” Caspien, my beautiful boy, let me be yours... Happy birthday, X
His pretty mouth, his grey-blue eyes, his vicious sneer. There was comfort in those things. Because I knew my place in front of them. Beneath him.
“I think it’s easier for hearts to heal when they’re still young. Gideon’s was fully grown and weaker than most when it was broken. It will never heal.”
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.
He climbed up and off my body, leaving me feeling bare and exposed. Cold and very wet too. He’d lain on me for approximately two and a half minutes, and somehow, my body had gotten used to his weight on it.
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.
“If Caspien didn’t care, then you’d know, trust me.” Gideon smiled. “His ambivalence is much crueller than his animosity. If he acts as though he hates you, then it’s very likely he feels the opposite.”
What if I’d promised never to kiss you again? Never to touch you again? Would you have stayed then?
I think maybe he knew everything that was to follow. The dreadful chain of events that would happen after that awful December night.
I was scared I was the last person she’d want to see. The child she hadn’t wanted while the one she had was gone.
Jude in the window, by C.L.D.
But the longing in my chest was a constant thing, the absence of him almost as all-consuming as his presence.
He’d long ago begun to feel like a ghost, some figment I’d conjured out of loneliness. I’d have been convinced he wasn’t real if it wasn’t for Gideon. Gideon would swoop into the library like a moth to remind me of him, as if I were in danger of forgetting.
I pulled out my phone, typed two words into a text, and hit send. This time, I only had to wait four minutes for him to call me back.
I’d have thought my leaving the country would have been enough to stop your stupid infatuation with me, but clearly not.”
Whereas my anger and fury toward him were always hot, his ran cold as the ocean floor.
I hated Xavier Blackwell more than the driver who’d killed my parents at that moment.
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.
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
Finally, he said, “To protect someone.”
It took no thought or effort to love Ellie. What I felt for Caspien was more bewildering, labyrinthine, and like a cryptic puzzle that changed and evolved every time we spoke. More adult, more serious, more frightening.
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.
“What are your plans this weekend?” he said as though my entire month, year, hadn’t been leaning toward this point, as though it was even slightly feasible I’d made any other plans except wait for him to call.
