Page 4 of Oleander

“A dozen or so times. He threatens to sue me for harassment in the workplace. But he never leaves.”

I laugh, and he guides a spoonful into his mouth.

I drink my coffee while Gideon eats his soup in neat little sips from his spoon. It’s a comfortable silence, easy almost, despite the years since we last did it.

When he’s finished, he sets the spoon in the bowl, moves it away from him, and settles back into his pillows.

“You’re not going to ask how he is?” Gideon says at last.

My breathing falters, my fingers tightening around the cup.

“If there was something wrong, you’d have told me the second I got here.” I take a deep gulp of coffee. “So I assume he is the same as he always is.”

Gideon sighs as though he’s trying for patience. As though I’m a misbehaving child.

“This is…not right, Jude,” he announces. “Shutting him out like this. When was the last time you spoke to him?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

“Have you met someone else? Is that why you won’t see him?”

I give him a look, one that says there has never and will never be anyone else. A look that tells him I don’t want to have this conversation.

I mean it, Cas, we’re not doing this again.

But this is what we do, Jude. It’s what we’ve always done.

Not anymore. It’s over. Don’t come to me again. Don’t call me again.

And he hadn’t. It’s as if something in my voice or my eyes that night told him that this time, I meant it.

“It was a lie, Gideon. He was a lie, as were you.” I give him a pointed look.

“No. You were the truest, most real, most untainted thing he ever had.”

“He made his bloody choice, Gideon!” I snap. “Over and over again, he made his choice, and it was never me.”

Gideon gives me a look like I might be the one dying.

“It was always you. He chose you in the only way he knew how.”

“By leaving me? By moving to another fucking continent and marryinghim? That was Caspien choosing me? Christ, Gideon, you still lie so easily; it’s frightening.”

“He’s only ever loved you, Jude. Surely you know that.”

I look at him, incredulous. “He doesn’t know what love is; you made sure of that! We weren’t…thatwasn’t love.” I soundcertain as I fire it at him, but the truth is, I have no fucking clue how love worked or what it was.

Luke loved me, my parents had loved me, but romantic love was as unknowable to me as the universe. Love in that sense, love in that all-consuming, life-affirming, passionate, glorious sense, had come and gone with one person only, and he’d taken it with him when he left.

Sex and the fleeting kind of intimacy that came from it was something else altogether.

At uni, it had been easy with Finn. Being with him felt, sometimes, like being with Cas, which was why I’d ended it. Then there’d been Nathan. Nathan, who I could barely think about without feeling overcome with emotion so bittersweet that it ached. After uni, it had been celibacy, the occasional Grindr hook-up, and a lot of porn. There’d never been anything approximating the kind of love I’d nurtured for Cas.

Gideon nods, a grim kind of look on his face.

“I’ve had a room readied for you; you’re welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

“I can only stay the week,” I mutter, blood still hot. “I have to get back on Friday.” It’s a lie – mostly. I have an engagement party on Saturday that I’d RSVP’d for and no one would care if I missed it. I had nothing to get back to except an overpriced, cold basement flat in Bethnal Green, but I didn’t want Gideon to know that.