Page 186 of Oleander

Here, he looked at me. “I thought it might make what I’d done to you feel less...fatal.I don’t regret it. How can I? You did it, you got your degree from Oxford, and you published your novel. Doing that for you has been the best thing, the only decent thing, I ever did for you. Foranyone.You’re not responsible for anything that came after, Jude. This is why it became even more important you never found out. Because I know you: you would take this and make it your fault, somehow. When it was no one’s but his. I made the decision to give it to you before knowingwhat he was. There’s no fault of yours – or mine – to be found in who or what Xavier turned out to be.”

“But I was to go my whole life not knowing it was you?”

The thought was unimaginable. Painful.

“That was the plan.”

“Still as fucking selfish as ever, I see.”

He winced. But then I saw a hint of the Caspien trademark smirk I thought I’d never see again. “On the whole, yes.”

“So it was a consolation prize? ‘I fell in love with Caspien Deveraux and all I got was this lousy trust fund’? A thanks-for-taking-part sort of thing? That it?”

“Some would argue you got the better end of the deal,” he said. “You got the money without any of the aggravation.” He gestured at himself, the aggravation.

“Yeah, well that wasn’t your choice to fucking make, Cas!”

“But it had to be me, Jude. It had to be. If it had been up to you then you’d have chosen me without thinking, and I’d have broken your heart anyway, and neither of us would have learned a bloody thing!” His eyes were glittering and hard, his cheeks pink.

“So all of this was some sort of fucking lesson?”

“For me, yes, it was.” He ran his hands through his hair and turned to stare out the window, breathing hard and fast. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, calmer. “I thought I could live my whole life the way Gideon has: with love being some ancillary but ultimately useless thing I didn’t need. And perhaps I could have.”

He turned and smiled, some hollow sad thing I could barely look at.

“But then, there was you. And everything that you are: warm and kind, gentle and sweet, and you loved me despite everythingI 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 he made me feel as though I was nothing. It was how I survived.”

My throat and chest felt thick from the tears that threatened to spill out. “You could have left him, you could have left him, and you stayed because of me, Cas.”

“No.” He shook his head, firmly. “I stayed because of me, because I’d convinced myself it was what I deserved. I’d made a mistake, chosen badly, and I’d hurt you so cruelly that I could barely stand to look at you. But then in London you were...you. Different in some ways, wiser almost, but you were still you and incredibly, you still loved me. When I thought he might hurt you, I stayed to make sure he never could. I’d hurt you enough, the world had hurt you enough, and I wouldn’t allow anything else to hurt you. Not when I could prevent it.”

“You didn’t have to protect me from that, I told you I wasn’t afraid of him.”

“And have everything be for nothing?” He implored. “Jude, you have to understand the way I saw myself then. It’s impossible to let yourself be loved when you’re as inherently un-loveable as I believed myself to be.”

He sighed, loudly. “I have a lot of regrets, too many to count, but none as great as allowing Gideon and Xavier to convince me of my place in the world. I regret hurting you, Jude, I do, but I think…” He thought about this next part hard, then he took a deep breath, and said, “I think if I’d stayed with youthen, chosen you then, I’d have destroyed you. I’d have turned you into something cold and cruel and bitter; a person who hated the world and everything in it. Because that’s who I was then.” He looked around the room, then back at me. “You were everything warm and bright and alive in this place and I would have poisoned that.” Cas looked as though something very heavy had finally been taken from his aching hands.

“Maybe instead of you destroying me, I could have saved you?” I said.

Cas smiled another small, sad smile. “You did save me, Jude. So many times.”

After what felt like hours he moved across the room and sat next to me on the bed. There was less than an arm’s distance between us now and the proximity of him was like the sun after years of winter. Warm and vital, giving life to everything inside me.

It was him who spoke first.

“I loved your novel,” he said, soft and sincere.

“Thank you.”

“Was Bennett based on anyone?”

“What do you think?”

He nodded, smiling a little. “Thought so. Christ, he was awful.”

I looked at him. “Misunderstood, I’d say. Easy to hate a guy like that without taking the time to understand him.”

Caspien was staring at me very intensely. There was a hitch in his voice as he said, “You look well, Jude.”