Page 192 of Oleander

“I’m getting there, I promise.”

He squeezed his eyes closed and leaned in to kiss me. Gentle, soft. “I love you so much.So much.I think I’ll always want to kill him.”

I kissed him back then. Hungrily. Forcefully. Pushing him backwards on the couch so I could climb on top and bury myself in his mouth. He moved his hands over every inch of me, as though checking I was real, inhaling and tasting my mouth, myneck, eyelids, ears. As though I were something tender, delicate, which needed to be treated carefully. Only Jude had ever made me feel like this.

He touched me with his eyes and his hands and his mouth and it was like we were boys again. There had never been anything other than purest unbridled love when he did this. No matter how I’d hurt him, he loved me the same as he always had. With everything that he had.

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 alivebecausehe loved me.

I climbed off and led him to the bedroom, where we undressed each other in silence. Looks speaking a thousand words. Naked, I covered him in kisses, capturing his groans and gasps in my mouth and between my teeth. After what felt like hours, he changed our positions so I was beneath him, and began to open me.

First, with his mouth, exceedingly slow and deliberate, before using his fingers with a deft and careful touch that had me begging for him. Before pushing inside me, he brought us face to face and stilled, looking deep into my eyes. His own were a dark vine green now, pupils black and wide with desire

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.” My body wasn’t used to his size, hadn’t been used to any size for a long time, but Christ, it wanted him. It was as though it had been made for him.

“I’m always going to want you,” he said, kissing me as he began to thrust. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.”

As he fucked me, he ran his hands over my body, under it, touching and tasting. It was slow and then it was frenzied. It was gentle and then rough. He turned me inside out and emptied me clean of everything but him. I was free of everything I’d been before, rotten and poisoned, new and remade, and I would never ever go back to any life that he wasn’t a part of.

He took hold of my arousal and stroked, dragging me to a point of pleasure so white-hot it felt like I was being burned from the inside.

“Jude...I’m going to...”

“Come for me, let me see you...fuck, that’s it, baby. Look at you. You’re so beautiful, Cas. So beautiful. So perfect. I love you so much.”

It was the most intense orgasm of my life. More intense than any I’d had with him before. More so than the countless times he’d made me come in that hovel of a dorm in Oxford.

When I was milked dry, he leaned in to devour my mouth as he fucked me to his own climax. Every thrust of Jude’s hips sent a spark of sensation up my spine, over-sensitivity a shocking but delicious pulse through my whole body. I was mindless from it. From him. His perfect body, perfect cock, perfect soul a balm tomy own. I felt him erupt, a flood of hot healing pleasure coating the inside of me. He choked out another declaration and slid off me.

I twisted my body, throwing a leg over him to keep his cock inside me, not ready for the sensation of being empty of him yet. He belonged there. He let out a languid, sex-rough groan, before sighing dreamily.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that I actually get to have you like this,” he said.

I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon enough.” I rested my head on his chest, the beat of his heart a steady cadence.

“Oh, you wish.”

We were silent for a few moments before I decided it was time. I’d never said it before. Not once, to anyone. I didn’t know if there were certain rules to where and how, but I was impatient. It was a peculiar kind of weight in my chest, and I’d been nervous for over a week now; I wanted rid of the feeling.

“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.

He sat up, causing him to slip out of me. I was forced to sit up, too.

“Since when?” he asked. There was a strange look on his face. Confusion, I thought. Or maybe fear.

I hadn’t been expecting this. Questions about it. “Um, well, for a long time. I just didn’t recognise it, at least that’s what my counsellor thinks, but now I know. Now I know that I love you. That I’ve always loved you.”

“You’vealwaysloved me?”

I was frowning now. “You don’t have to sound so utterly disconcerted by it.”