Page 2 of Oleander

Jasper only chuckles, completely unperturbed.

“I do a bit of everything around here.” He shrugs. “He’s pretty much beyond the point of doing anything on his own now.”

The thought slips into my brain before I can stop it:Good.

“Coffee. Black. Thanks.”

“Sure thing. Decaf or?”

“Or.”

He smiles again. “Got it. He’s in the music room.” That he doesn’t direct me to it, that he knows I know exactly where that is, makes me wonder. How much does he know about what happened here?

“Hey,” I call out when Jasper is halfway down the hall. I have to force the words past my throat. “How bad is he? I mean, is he sensible?”

“Oh, his mind is still sharp as a knife. He probably looks a bit different from when you last saw him, though.” Jasper’s mouth turns sad, the smile he’s been wearing since I rolled down the window melting away now.

Sharp as a knife. Yeah, that sounded about right.

But no, Gideon wasn’t the knife; Caspien had been that. Gideon, the hand that wielded it.

Me, the soft, yielding flesh.

I don’t move immediately toward the music room. I stand there in the great hallway, looking at the closed doors. The rooms behind them are alive with memories: The library, the arboretum, the staircase leading up to his bedroom. I’m certain if I strain my ears hard enough, I’ll hear his voice somewhere. Certain that if I inhale deeply, I’ll still be able to smell him. He lives and breathes in these walls still, and I can’t fucking bear it.

It’s why I shouldn’t have come.

I’m about to turn and run, drive back to the airport and await my flight back to London on Monday morning when I hear it:

“Are you out there, Jude?” Gideon’s voice is changed but still recognisable. Distinct and elegant, as though spoken from a daisabove me. “Oh, do come in. I don’t have long left, and there’s an awful lot to talk about.”

I press my hand against the wall to steady myself, breathing deeply for a few moments. When I feel ready, I push off the wall and step inside.

The piano sits where it always has, where I’d first heard Cas play it, where I’d held and comforted him. And later, where I’d kissed and pleasured him, where I’d felt the sharp pieces of him break apart under me. Part of my mind cracks open, just a small opening and the memories pour out with all the strength it had taken to lock them up in there.

It’s taken me years to hear a piano played and not feel like my heart was being torn from my chest. Now, I watch his videos online to feel that very thing because something is better than nothing at all.

A violent cough wracks through the room, and I’m almost jolted from my body. I turn toward the noise.

One end of the huge space has been transformed into a grandiose kind of hospital room. A hospital bed with machines standing around it like an audience to the figure within. A couple of high-backed antique chairs at either side. Two tall, ornate chests bracketing the head of the bed. One is stacked with books and a table lamp; the other holds a bright bouquet of flowers. I wondered if they’d come from the arboretum. An enormous TV is set up at the foot of the bed so that it obscures the person lying in it.

It’s as though someone has come to die in a museum.

When I move closer and get my first look at him, all of the anger and rage I expected to feel…disappears, evaporating like rain on a hot pavement. A feeling completely unwelcome rushes at me instead pushing tears out from the corner of my eyes. I’m certain I’m about to break down, and I will not allow him to seethat again. I turn my head and try to centre my breathing as I wipe at the tears threatening to overcome me.

He probably looks a bit different from when you last saw him.

Death sits on Gideon’s chest like Fuseli’s Nightmare. It clings to every inch of his skin, fighting him for every breath. And they are terrible, desperate breaths. Painful and raw. His once vibrant, healthy skin is now a palette of grey and blue. Dark eyes that had once gleamed with life are as dull as mud water.

He’d been handsome – an elegant, refined kind of handsome that people would describe with words like ‘dashing’ and ‘debonair’ – and now he was a rotten, dying thing. It humbles me in the way I’d been afraid it would. I want to scream and demand he get up and show me he was the same man he’d always been – capricious and cruel, the mastermind of all my misery.

“Hello, Jude,” he says.

“Gideon.”

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

“You knew I’d come.”