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“You are in every line I have ever read.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
It was a bright, burning Tuesday in August when Caspien Deveraux broke my heart for the first time.
My heart, a soft and fleshy thing that was vulnerable to their poison. Over the years, that soft fleshy thing has hardened, broken, bruised and scarred over but pierce through the hard outer shell, and there it was. Unchanged at its core.
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.
“You’re going to be a dad?” Caspien said, eyebrows raising. “That’s amazing, Mr. Green. Congratulations! You’ll be smashing.” Smashing. I almost snorted. Who said ‘smashing’ like that? What was he, fifty?
His hair was down about his face, one side tucked behind an ear. Ears that looked small and kind of girlish. I’d have to look at some more ears to decide if they were girly or not, but they looked delicate with their soft pink lobes.
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.
“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.”
Dear Cas. You left. I can’t believe you left. I went to the house today to try and catch you before you did, but I was too late. It felt different without you inside it. I think that’s how my life is going to feel now. Sometimes, it feels as though you’ve always been here; I can’t remember what my life was like before this summer. Before you. I’m guessing you left because you didn’t want to look at me after what happened, and I suppose I get it. I’ve been scared for days about looking at you, too, scared about what I might do when I did. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. You’re everywhere:
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The fire had been lit and crackled softly behind the guard as I approached. I had an inkling of what I thought might be inside, but it didn’t prepare me for what I found when I peeled off the thick paper. My own face, fey and dreamlike, stared up at me. He’d filled it in with watercolour, a palette of pinks, greens, and blues. Light caught on my rosy lips and cheeks, and sunlight poured through the window. Behind me was a view out onto the estate, rolling dips and hills which I knew led all the way to the sea. He’d added something too, something that wasn’t in the room with us that day: a
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“I say, did you ever write him the letter we spoke of?” He sat down and gave me an encouraging smile. I shook my head. “I tried. I just...I couldn’t think of anything I thought he’d like to hear about.” I remembered the letter I’d written and stuffed under my mattress. I’d forgotten all about it. “I don’t think that is the purpose of letters, Jude.” He took a sip of his hot chocolate. I frowned at this. “What’s the purpose of letters then?” Another of his encouraging smiles. “Well, to say things we might not be brave enough to say face to face.”
I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.
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.
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.
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.
“You want to become something you think will make him see you as his equal.”
“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
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.
Caspien’s memory was too big, too powerful, too all-consuming for there to be room for anything else. He was a ghost, and what I was living through then was a haunting.
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.
“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.”
But I was Jude. And Jude loved Cas.
The intensity of my feelings for him in that moment, so acute and unyielding, transcended everything that had come before. He was still the boy I’d loved three, four summers ago, but that love had matured inside me like wine in a barrel, and it was more robust and vinous than it had ever been.
“I think I might be drunk,” he said, sounding as sober as a judge. “Oh, thank fuck for that,” I said. “If you’d drunk that much gin and were still sober, I’d have doubted your physiology.”
“I think about it,” Caspien said. “The night in Oxford. Probably more than I should.” A deep tremor rolled through me. There was guilt and a deep aching sadness, but it warred with white-hot shameful lust. “I’m sorry,” I said. He opened his eyes. “I’m not.”
“How did you imagine it?” he asked. Perfect. Tender. Life-changing. I tried a smile. “You don’t want to know.” He looked like he might ask me to tell him anyway. But he said, “You don’t look at me the way you used to.” Because I’m afraid to, I wanted to say. “Well, thank god for that,” I said instead.
We reached for each other at the same time, and as he gasped into my mouth, I took his face in my hands and kissed him hard. I backed him up against the sink, careful not to hurt his hand, as I slid my hands into his hair and tasted his mouth for the first time in a lifetime. It was an antidote. Except he was my poison, too.
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 know.” I kissed him. “Fuck, you were made for me, Cas, I swear you were. You feel so good. So perfect.” I kissed him again.
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.
“I’m sore everywhere. What on earth did you do to me?” I lifted my head to say. “Fucked you senseless.” The blush that crept across his cheeks was the most disarming thing I’d ever seen. “I’ve never had much sense, so I wouldn’t count it as a major accomplishment, Jude.”
“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.”
“Caspien is a realist, Jude. He’s always been the same. He’s also extremely stubborn, and will never ever admit to having made a mistake. Even if that means a life of unhappiness.” I pounced on that. “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.”
“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. We’ll go to Gideon’s, pack our shit, and leave. Together.”
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
Eight Years Later
Why
“That he left him. Two years ago. They divorced, quite messily. Caspien was ruthless with him – he had an exceptional lawyer, a far better one than Xavier. Caspien has been living in London; he has a role with the London Symphony.” Gideon sounded proud.
“You said he left Blackwell two years ago.” Gideon knew what I was asking, what I now understood. “As soon as he turned twenty-five.” I won’t ask Gideon for a single penny and I have not a penny to my name until I turn twenty-five. “He stayed with him until he inherited his own money,” I said as everything slid into place. “He married him so he could take half of what he owned,” Gideon supplied. “Six years. Any marriage under five makes the splitting of assets a little trickier.”
“I called you,” I said. “You did.” “And you answered.” “I told you if it was important, then I’d answer.”
“Yes, because I never wanted you to see me like that. As something small and weak – like he did.” I could tell this was difficult for him to say, but he pushed on. “I thought if you knew what he’d done to me then it would change how you saw me. And I didn’t want that.” “It never changed how I saw you, Cas; it never could. It only made me hate him more.” He gave me a sort of conflicted look. “I know. I know that now.”
“But then, there was you. And everything that you are: warm and kind, gentle and sweet, and you loved me despite everything I was and everything I did, and everything I couldn’t give you. Christ, I didn’t know what to do with that kind of love, Jude. How to hold it or carry it or even look at it. It was terrifying. I was sure I would kill it – I tried to. But then I began to feel its absence. I missed it. I longed for it. The feel of it on my skin, and deep inside my chest and in my head whenever I felt like I might disappear from loneliness. You and that love was what I clung onto when...when
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He was nervous. Caspien Deveraux was asking me out, and he was nervous about it. “Are you asking me out on a date?” I asked, half-smiling. His cheeks flushed, beautifully. “I...yes. I think so. But only if you’re single, and you’re going to say yes, because otherwise...well that’s rather awkward. And embarrassing.”
It was a dangerous and violent thing to love. And just like me, Cas was war-weary and battle-scarred. But together we’d heal. Together, we’d smooth away the cracks on our hearts so that they could do what they were made to do: love.
Thanks to my Beta Readers: Cara,
Cara, you were an absolute rock throughout the finishing of this book. I cannot thank you enough for listening to my constant ramblings over what felt like every moment of these boys’ lives, for the cheerleading voice notes when I needed them most, for all the crying ones too - I think my dark author heart loved those most of all. And thank you for helping get this over the line at the end there so I could go drink cocktails on a boat in the Aegean. Couldn’t have done it without you. I can’t wait to have a wee dram with you next year and talk about how perfect Cas is. I adore you.
