Page 93 of Oleander

She eyed me suspiciously. “Um, sure...okay. Come in while I put my shoes on.”

“It’s cool, I’ll wait here.”

Her expression faltered a little more, but she nodded and went back inside, leaving the door open while she went. I looked at the inside of her house, which had always felt warm and welcoming to me, knowing that it was the last time I’d ever get to see it.

It was as awful as I’d expected it would be. I’d been stumbling and vague and unable to give any reasonable explanation. She’d accused me of cheating on her while she was in Norwich at her grandfather’s funeral – which I’d denied – or liking someone else at school – which I’d also denied, but more comfortably – and stormed off angry and confused, calling me names I more than deserved, but it was done.

Luke picked me up at the pier, a sympathetic glance at me as I got in the car that I was sure I didn’t deserve. He never asked me how it went or how she took it; he just drove us home. Silent and supportive from the driver’s seat.

When we reached the estate, I asked him to drop me at the big house. He’d given me a look but nodded and kept driving.

“I’ll be home shortly,” I told him before getting out of the car.

The moment I stepped inside, I heard the piano, and I rushed to the music room. I remembered the last time Gideon had left him alone, when I’d found him strange, wild, and fragile at the piano, and panic fluttered behind my ribs.

He sat upright and elegant at the piano, fingers moving artfully over the keys. The song this time was mournful and slow, meandering through low notes and high. I recall thinking that it sounded like heartbreak.

My emotions were not as easy to define then. I knew them only as loud, chaotic things which burned a path straight through me without clarity or warning.

But I know now that what I felt for him that night was empathy. Acutely and painfully, I felt all of Caspien’s losses as if they were my own. I hadn’t expected to feel more pity for him than I’d ever managed to find for myself. (We’d both been foisted upon family members who had never expected to have to make space for us in their lives.) But while I had Luke, solid warm grounding Luke, Caspien had Gideon. Gideon, who was a walking puzzle of a man, and who seemed as unknowable to me as the moon. Their relationship was jagged, openly hostile, and with the barest glimmers of warmth now and then. I’d been lucky.

I’d never thought of myself as lucky before. No one who loses their parents at a young age knows what luck feels like. But I understood something then, and it was that, for the years I’d had them, my parents had loved me. Intensely and unconditionally. Cas had never had unconditional love. I suspected Gideon incapable of it. Xavier Blackwell’s intentions, too, were not borne of love; I was certain of it. They’d come instead from a place of deviance and twisted desire.

So in that moment, Caspien was transformed. Or rather, how I perceived him changed so permanently that I saw him only for what Iwantedhim to be. Vulnerable and lost and in need of something only I could give him.

Love. Unconditional.

OnlyIcould 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’ve often wondered if I hadn’t made that prideful promise to the universe when I was still a child, if things would be different now. WouldIbe different now? Would my life have followed a different path? Would I have been able to love someone else?

He turned, his playing coming to a discordant end.

“It’s over then?” he asked, standing up. “Is that why you look so miserable?”

I strode across the room, purposeful with my promise, and took his face in my hands and kissed him. I fell upon him with the same force I always did, as though he were moonlight and I the shore being pulled into him. The keys clanked as he fell back against them, as I brought him to me to taste his jaw, his throat, and the nodes of his collarbone.

I dropped to my knees, nudging the piano stool out of the way with my body, and then I pulled down those loose pyjama bottoms he always wore and drew him into my mouth. He was soft and warm, and the scent of his skin was crisp as a winter’s night. He gasped, in pleasure or surprise – I wasn’t sure – but his hands were suddenly in my hair, gripping tight, urgent.

I moved on instinct, clumsy and awkward in my attempt to make him hard. Every second that went by, I expected him to throw me off, but his hands only gripped me tighter. Revelling in his need, I looked up at him and sucked him deeper, deeper so that I could feel the sensation of him growing hard into my throat. Then his mouth fell open, pleasure whispering from between his lips. My tongue curled around him, and as I pulled back to draw breath – it hadn’t occurred to me to use my nose for this – out came a long string of saliva. I sucked in a breath and let him guide me back over him, enclosing him, harder now, between my lips.

He watched me work, focused as a watchmaker, shapely mouth parted in what I wanted to be awe.

I was hard, desperately so, but I ignored it. It didn’t exist. All that existed was Caspien; his cock and my mouth and the weight and warmth of his body against mine.

“Jude,” he said in an urgent voice. I pulled off, choking around the thick pool of saliva flooding my mouth. He gripped himself, stroked once, then again and came with a breathy little moan over my face. I realised with a shock that my mouth was still open. The taste of him landed on my tongue and lips, and I gulped at it hungrily. “Now you,” he said, a little breathless. “I want to see you come.”

I obeyed. Still on my knees and painted with him, I stroked myself fast and rough while he watched. I came with a crashing intensity that made my ears ring and my heart feel like it would burst out of my chest.

When I fell forward, it was into him, and I folded an arm around his waist and buried my head in his abdomen.

When his hand settled on my head again, fingers sifting almost tenderly through my hair, I had the strangest urge to cry. From pleasure and fear and the overwhelming sensation that I was nothing unless I was allowed to be this to him. Have this with him. I could not imagine a life outside of this. It would be as void and empty as death itself.

The words sat on my tongue for hours after, the immense and terrible truth of them: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.