Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between May 3 - May 8, 2025
42%
Flag icon
I brushed my teeth. Then I worried that brushing them might indicate that I’d been expecting to kiss him, so I grabbed a bag of Skittles from the sweet cupboard, threw a handful into my mouth and chewed.
kaye taz
Relatable
42%
Flag icon
“I like being choked on someone’s dick like that,” he told me. “The bigger the better, really. I like it to feel as if I’m going to die.”
42%
Flag icon
“Would you like to do that to me, Jude? Shove that…” He indicated it. “…so far down my throat I can’t breathe? Choke me with it?”
44%
Flag icon
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.
44%
Flag icon
“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.”
45%
Flag icon
When her parents found out they locked her up here, then forced her to birth me.”
45%
Flag icon
she rather hated me by the sounds of it; from the moment she was aware of my existence, she loathed me.”
45%
Flag icon
“Daddy dearest. Ah yes, she talked about him at length. She loved him with as much ferocity as she hated me. I think she blamed me for his leaving her. Gideon says he doesn’t
kaye taz
...
46%
Flag icon
“Christ, Jude. Do you think you have any idea what love is at your age?”
46%
Flag icon
“I think,” I said. “I think I know what it isn’t.” Another pause. Then: “I’m honestly not sure you do.”
46%
Flag icon
Cas had never had unconditional love. I suspected Gideon incapable of it. Xavier Blackwell’s intentions, too, were not borne of love;
46%
Flag icon
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.
47%
Flag icon
I was nothing unless I was allowed to be this to him. Have this with him.
47%
Flag icon
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.
47%
Flag icon
Some perverted part of me wondered what he’d do were I to turn around, and say very slowly and clearly, that I’d broken up with Ellie Walsh, the hottest girl at school, because I preferred having Caspien Deveraux’s cock shoved down my throat to kissing her.
48%
Flag icon
“Did you miss me?” I asked. “I told you,” he said against my skin. “I was bored.” “You must have been really bored,” I panted. “Extremely,”
48%
Flag icon
“Did you think about this today?” he asked between sweet kisses. “All day,” I managed.
48%
Flag icon
The ferociousness with which I needed him and with which I couldn’t bear to part with him, terrified me.
48%
Flag icon
“I love how hard you get for me, Jude. This big dick is always so fucking hard for me.”
48%
Flag icon
“This beautiful dick only gets hard for girls and me. How peculiar.” I wasn’t sure the former was even true at this stage. I didn’t even want to find out.
48%
Flag icon
“When I come home again, I think I’ll let you put this beautiful thing inside me. Would you like that?” Need pulsed out of the hole he was playing with. “Fuck,” I said and thumped my head back against the mucky ground. “Would you?” “Yes. Fuck, Cas, yes. Fuck.”
49%
Flag icon
“I’d fuck you so hard, Cas. So fucking hard you wouldn’t be able to sit on that horse for a week.”
49%
Flag icon
He gave me that look he sometimes did, the one which suggested he thought I was the stupidest person he’d ever met.
49%
Flag icon
“You’ll call me tonight? When you get there?” “Yes, Jude.” Letting go of him physically hurt.
49%
Flag icon
This time, when we did those things on our calls, the absence of him was far harder to bear.
50%
Flag icon
“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.
50%
Flag icon
“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.”
50%
Flag icon
He pulled me into a tight hug that smelled of violets and fresh moss.
kaye taz
??
50%
Flag icon
Caspien did not always play the game by Gideon’s rules, and Gideon could not win a game unless he were in complete control of it.
50%
Flag icon
I’d gotten rid of Blackwell, and I’d do the same with anyone else who thought they could love him better than I could.
51%
Flag icon
he said he’d been approached by a client who wished to remain anonymous but had asked them to set up a trust for a third party. Here he looked at me. “In the name of Mr. Jude Alcott.”
51%
Flag icon
“A benefactor has instructed Moreland and Wright to set up a trust in which Mr. Jude Alcott of The Groundsman Cottage, Deveraux Estate, St. Ouen, Jersey, The Channel Islands, is the sole beneficiary.”
51%
Flag icon
Who would do such a thing for me?
kaye taz
Lowkey think the truck driver who killed his parents
53%
Flag icon
“You never stopped, did you?” I said. “Seeing him. Blackwell was always there. You were just more careful about it. I was just more stupid about it.”
53%
Flag icon
“And then you found out his name.” Everything stopped. The very air seeming to still. “That was when it began...” I whispered, understanding everything all at once. “When you pulled me closer, when you wanted me the way I wanted you.”
53%
Flag icon
He’d never looked more cruel, more cold, more beautiful.
53%
Flag icon
“You’re fucking poison.” Caspien’s gaze flickered with what looked like torment, but then he lifted his chin and stood. “If I am, then it’s perhaps for the best that ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
53%
Flag icon
I couldn’t imagine a life without him in it. Without seeing him, even if it were only that. Looking at him. Even if I couldn’t have him, I could still love him.
53%
Flag icon
“Cas, no. Please don’t go. I don’t care about him, about what you’ve done. I can’t lose you, too. Just please, please don’t leave me.”
53%
Flag icon
“I cannot love you; surely you know that.” “I don’t care.”
53%
Flag icon
Cas, I love you...I love you...” I pressed my lips, tear-stained and trembling to his mouth, to his cheek, to his eyelids. “I love you so much, please. Please don’t go.”
53%
Flag icon
“But you won’t be happy!” I spat it like a threat. At this, he frowned a little as though thinking hard. “I am not sure I’ve ever been happy, Jude. So that shall make very little difference to me.” He pulled open the door. “I could make you happy, Cas,” I managed, wiping at my eyes again. ”If you just gave me a chance, I think I could make you happy. I know I could.”
54%
Flag icon
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. That you don’t.
55%
Flag icon
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.
55%
Flag icon
They were the only thing keeping me alive after you left.
55%
Flag icon
I couldn’t remember who I’d been before him, and didn’t know who I was now that he’d discarded me.
55%
Flag icon
If I had a type. I wasn’t sure that I did. Or rather, I had a very specific, very singular type. Boys who can’t love you and break your heart for sport.
56%
Flag icon
I drank, and I forgot. And then I remembered, and then I drank again.
57%
Flag icon
Gideon seemed to want me to know only three things: how inevitable all of this was, how getting our hearts broken was intrinsic to building character, and how well Caspien was doing in Boston without me.
59%
Flag icon
When Cas came back into my life, I didn’t want there to be someone else I would have to hurt or leave, so I could have him.