Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

A jolt hammered my chest as his eyes locked with my own. I couldn’t make out their colour from where I sat, the sunlight pouring over his shoulder, blinding me. All at once, it was the most important thing in the world. The colour of his eyes. I rose to my feet quickly to face him, a rush of pleasure moving through me at the fact that I was taller. By quite a bit. Half a head, at least. His eyes were a pale, ice blue.

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.

He considered something for what felt like a long time. Then he said, “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.”

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. 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.”

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.” I felt those words like a burn. My cheeks flooded with warmth. Embarrassed, I sat up, tucked myself into my jeans, and buttoned them. “I 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.”

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.

The words sat on my tongue for hours after, the immense and terrible truth of them: 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.

“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 hate feeling like this. But I don’t know how to stop,” I admitted. “I wish I could just love someone else. I wish I could just love you. You’re so much better than him.” I was crying now. Stupid, childlike, tears I knew I would be ashamed of later. Nathan only held me tighter. “Love doesn’t work like that, baby.” He laughed gently. “But for what it’s worth, I wish you could too.”

Cas was always distractingly lovely to look at, but especially so in the summer. It was how he’d been when I’d first seen him, first loved him, and in my memories, he was always this way: sun-kissed and glowing with the heat of the warmest season. In Jersey, he’d looked like a delicate and fragile summer bloom. In London, he took on a different aura: expensive and cosmopolitan. The insouciant way he held his water, the glint of his Cartier watch, the gleam even of his fingernails. He was grace and extravagance, oozing good breeding in a way that made me feel self-conscious.

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.”

I was Jude. He was Cas. This was us. What was one more battle scar on my heart when the war was this glorious?

There was no warning before he did it; he just rose up and leaned over me, kissing me very gently on the mouth. I knew the bliss couldn’t last. I knew I didn’t have him. That he couldn’t love me. But my mind and body didn’t care. So great and absolute was the pleasure I felt in that perfect moment. I wanted to bathe in it, in him, gorge myself so that when he left me, I would be able to sustain myself on it for the months and years to come.

We kissed under the heat of the sun, the cool blue of the water lapping at our bodies as I lapped at his mouth and his jaw, and as he played with the hair at the nape of my neck. “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.”

He looked radiant under the witching hour light. Over the last few weeks, his skin had turned a deep Grecian gold, bringing out the vibrant and dazzling azure blue of his eyes. He’d smiled more than I’d ever seen him smile, and day by day, his hand bothered him less. He was happy. When I bought him a white rose from a seller on the bank of the Thames, he rolled his eyes but looked adorably flustered. “You’re ridiculous, you do realise that?” he said as he took it from me. I smiled, unapologetic. “Oh, I know. You’ve told me enough over the years.”

“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.”

I’m sort of sad that this is the last one: maybe I’ll write a postcard from each city I visit? Keep them all and put them with everything else I’ve kept. The copy of Dracula you borrowed that day at the beach, the drawing of Falstaff I stole from your sketchbook, the piece of music you’d been writing that day that you threw away – I can’t read music so I don’t even know what it sounds like – the receipt from the night we went to dinner in London, the letter I wrote you when you left me the first time. I forget what else is in there, but there’s a lot of stuff in that box. The picture you painted of me is in a box in Luke and Elsbeth’s loft until I decide where I’m going to live after.

“Xavier would have ruined you, Jude,” Gideon said. “He wanted to keep you safe and happy. That was in Oxford, far away from Xavier. And him. He wanted you to live your dream...” “He was my fucking dream, Gideon!” I shouted. “Him! He made himself miserable, forced himself into a life with that piece of shit for what? For what?” I tore at my hair and scrubbed a hand over my mouth. Gideon looked sadder than I’d ever seen him. “For you, Jude. For you.”

I’d been working on the suite for over a decade. I’d started it when I was still at Deveraux, a catalogue of songs that had become our story: The Boy. The Gardener. The Beach. The Reader. The Library. Oxford. London. Oleander. It was almost complete though I still tinkered on the pieces daily, adding and removing things depending on my mood, never quite happy with the sum of the parts. But perhaps there was one more piece to create, one more to add. The Boy: returned. The Man: in bloom.

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. Gideon had raised me to be something cold and poisonous, Xavier had tried to crush me to dust, but Jude had just loved. Tender and sweet. No matter who or what I came to him as, he’d loved me. Every version of me. And I felt like myself only when he saw me. He looked at me the same way he looked at the world, with warmth and wonder and curiosity. Jude gave life to everything around him, and I felt truly alive because he loved me.

Tracing my cheek and then my mouth, gentle and soft fingers moving over their shape, he said, “I’m never losing you again, Cas. You realise that, don’t you?” “You never lost me,” I said. It was true. I was always his. Just like he was always mine. “And you never will, I promise. For however long you want me, I’ll be here. I’m yours.”

“I love you, Jude,” I said in a strangely formal voice. I heard it against my ear; the sound of his heart skipping its regular rhythm. “What?” “I love you,” I said again.

Now he was smiling. Very big and very wide. I felt my own mouth turning up into a smile. Without warning, Jude threw himself at me, kissing me hard over every part of my face. “Say it again,” he said when he came up for air. His grin was still pulling at the sides of his mouth. “I love you.” “One more time.” “I’m not a performing monkey, no.” He laughed and kissed me again, and I kissed him back. But against his lips, unable to stop myself, I whispered it once more.