Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining
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Read between May 3 - May 8, 2025
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I’d slept with girls, but I knew that didn’t mean I was straight. I’d loved a boy, and yet somehow I knew that didn’t mean I was gay.
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I could bear it if I knew he thought about me sometimes. If he stood eating breakfast thinking about me for even a moment, then I could bear it, I thought.
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The plan was for you to come over this evening, Jude. What had his plan been exactly? To break my heart in the library? To bring Blackwell out like a surprise guest star in what I’d believed to be our love story?
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“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.”
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“Truth is, it feels like I’ve been losing you a little every day since we came here.”
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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.
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Go to him. Hold him. Kiss him. Fuck him. Love him. Love him. Love, love, love …
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“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?”
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“You don’t hate me. You wish you did, but you don’t.” I grabbed his arms and pushed, walking him backwards until he hit the wall. The smell of him hit me the way it always did, sharp and clean like the whitest freshest snow. “I fucking hate you,” I hissed, quietly.
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“You shouldn’t have come here.” His eyes dropped, slowly, to my mouth. He said, “Yes, well, it seems I have rather a propensity for making mistakes.”
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I don’t remember how my hand got to his throat, but it was there, wrapped around it, as I held his head against the wall. “What the fuck are you doing?”
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His mouth was a ruin. Red and wet and asking to be fucked. His eyes were glazed over with something I remembered painfully well. Lust.
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“This isn’t going to stop at a wank, or even a blowjob. If you don’t stop.” I didn’t want him to stop. I let out a desperate moan as his perfect fingers traced lower, over my balls. “What are you going to do?” he taunted. “Finally shove your dick in me?”
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Cas bent over, open and begging. Me shoving into him over and over and over. Punishing him for everything he’d done. Taking from him what I’d wanted for so long. What I deserved to have.
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“I think about it sometimes,” he said. “Your perfect dick. About how it would feel in me. I do regret ending things with you before trying it out.”
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“Sometimes I wish you’d done it that day. Instead of crying and begging the way you did,” his mouth twisted with contempt. “I wish you’d held me down and fucked me – who knows, maybe things would have turned out differently if you’d behaved like a man instead of a little boy.”
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When he was naked but for his trousers at his ankles and his shoes and socks, I flipped him over so that he was on his front and grabbed him by the hips to pull him up towards my mouth.
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I was painfully hard, throbbing and hot. I looked at his hole: I was going to ruin it.
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“I don’t think I’ll use a condom, you know,” I said, running my cock over his gaping hole. It was thick and red and angry against the faded golden tan of his ass, an ass which was pinked from my mouth and hands. “I think I’ll fuck you raw. Make you go back to him with my come inside you.”
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Caspien under me and helpless, unable to say no, suffering me. It should have terrified me. And there was a low-level hum of terror at what I was prepared to do to him whether he wanted me to or not. I loved him, desperately, and he’d taken that love and turned it into this, turned me into this.
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I was a red raw mass of animal with a single goal. Take. Fuck. Survive.
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“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?”
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“I had fucking moved on! You came here. To my university, to my dorm. You provoked...whatever that was. I had moved on.”
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I’d hurt him. I’d really fucking hurt him. Last night, I’d wanted to hurt him, and I’d done it.
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I was beginning to suspect he practised this. That he spent hours picking over the right words so they’d do the most damage.
kaye taz
Precisely this
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The idea of telling a soul about what had happened last night was the furthest thing from my mind. It was mine, ours. I wanted to wrap it up and keep it hidden from prying eyes. So that when I was alone, I could unwrap it carefully, examine it for things that didn’t exist: soft eyes, gentle pleas, tender touches. Giving any part of it to Blackwell made me want to murder something. I’d destroy it first.
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“I’ve spent a lot of time convincing him of my mortification over your little childhood crush,” Caspien was saying, “that telling him about this would sound so farcical he would laugh in your face. So, truly, I would not advise it.”
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“Don’t come here again,” I warned. I felt his entire body tremble, and my soul glowed from it. “In fact, the next time you’re stupid enough to come into any room I’m in, then I’m going to assume that you want me to fuck you again, how about that?”
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“You can stand there spouting whatever poisonous lies you want, Cas, but your body never lies to me.”
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You left me again today. It wasn’t as bad as the first time. Or maybe I’m just getting better at losing you.
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The way you looked at me as you left this time said: this isn’t done.
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I’ve always thought we were tied together somehow. I’ve thought that a lot since you left. That my place on this earth, the whole purpose ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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I remember you asking me to make it hurt, and even worse, I remember wanting to.
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After you left the first time, I thought about hurting myself. Would that have been important enough?
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I told you that I hated you, but you were right, I don’t. I love you. I think I’ll always love you.
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“Shit, things are serious.” “Yes, very. We’re getting married in the south of France next summer.” “Sounds idyllic. What does he do?” “Bottom.”
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Nathan, someone else who would change how I looked at myself and the world. Nathan, who was everything I thought I wanted and needed: everything Caspien wasn’t.
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“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.”
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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.
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Cas didn’t live in a place, he lived inside me.
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“Yeah, well, I’m sorry for not being around when you’ve been going through this.” I took a sip of my lager. “You’ve been off living your life. Getting a degree at Oxford. Shagging your professors.”
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“Wait, is this your way of trying to get me to dress up as a girl for you?” “That could be fun,” he said. “Schoolgirl? I’ll be your teacher.” “Obviously,” I said.
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If Caspien is the reason this story exists, then Nathan is the reason I am writing it.
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Jude, sometimes you’re so fucking childlike, it scares me a little.” He said, “I think I hate the person who hurt you, but then I remember that he was a child too.”
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“I wish I could just love someone else. I wish I could just love you. You’re so much better than him.”
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I published my first book. The book’s dedication page had read: For Professor Alexander; I guess he was finally good for something, huh? I’d named the book after Tarkovsky’s film, The Sacrifice.
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this is my fucking house!” I glowered. “Actually, it’s Gideon’s house, Beth, and we live here by virtue of Luke working for Gideon, so I think it’s about time you pissed off out of here and left us in it in peace.”
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And then, because I was still me, I imagined me with Cas instead.
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When I woke up briefly in the middle of the night, groggy and dry-mouthed, I saw him standing over me. He had such a soft, tender look on his face as he looked down at me, that I went back to sleep with a smile on my face.
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Except it hadn’t been a dream. It had been real. He was here.