Twenty

”What on earth do you think you’re doing, Jude?” Caspien’s voice was a shard of black ice.

All of my bravado disappeared the instant I heard it. I tried to breathe, tried to find a voice that was stronger and more assured than I felt.

“Oh, hey. Nice to hear from you,” I said. “How’sSwitzerland?”

“Cold. Now, what are you playing at?”

“I’m not playing at anything,” I said. “I wanted to test out a theory, and I guess it’s confirmed.”

He made a thin snorting sound. “Don’t be absurd. Nothing’s been confirmed. I’m simply tired of your pathetic, stalker behaviour. I’d have thought my leaving the country would have been enough to stop your stupid infatuation with me, but clearly not.”

It stung. Sharp and hot. But I barrelled on nonetheless. “Hardly. But you know who is infatuated with you? Xavier Blackwell. Senior Partner at Blackwell, Price and Houghton. ‘I can’t stay away from you, Caspien,’” I mocked. “‘I miss you all the time.’”

He was silent, and I felt the frigid ire of his rage across the sea. Whereas my anger and fury toward him were always hot, his ran cold as the ocean floor.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Is that so.” I thought about this. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I’d miscalculated, abysmally. But I really didn’t think I had. His reaction was already moons away from how he’d reacted to my previous guess. I could hear how quick his breaths came. “Guess it won’t mean anything if I send him a message then. You know, just to confirm that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sure his email address is here on his company website…”

“What is it you want, Jude?” he hissed.

At that moment, there was only one thing I wanted, and I wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.

“When are you coming home?” I said.

He was quiet for a long time. If not for the quick flutter of his breaths, I’d have thought he was gone.

He said, “Where are you?”

“At home.”

“In your room?”

I didn’t understand. “Yes, why?”

Caspien said, “Put your camera on.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

I hesitated a moment before I pulled the phone from my ear. Before I switched mine on, he turned on his own. My heart did a lurch in my chest when I saw him. He was dimly lit and beautiful and fresh from a shower. His hair was wet and pushed back from his face, his skin damp and glittering. I hit the button to turn on my own and shrunk a little from the deadly weight of his glare.

“Well, are you happy now?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” He ran his tongue over his lip. My eyes traced the movement. “To see me.”

“Wh—what are you talking about?”

He rolled his eyes. “I truly thought my leaving would help you figure out what it was you wanted, but evidently, you’re still behaving like a child.”

“I’m not a bloody child,” I pouted.

“No,” he said, and his eyes gleamed with something. “No, you’re not anymore, are you? How was your journey into manhood? Was it all you hoped it would be?” His smirk was callous and a little sly. “Did you hear angels singing when you slipped it inside? Some say it’s quite profound.”

My entire head seemed to catch fire, burning bright and loud, a beacon of shame and embarrassment. It had been too much to hope that my memory of telling him I was going to lose my virginity on my drunk phone call was questionable. I’d hoped I hadn’t said it. Hoped my mind had been only showing me the most embarrassing possibilities so that the truth would be more manageable.

I was too humiliated to answer, so he went on.

“You know, some also say that one hole is very much like the other. Merely a warm wet place to stick your cock.”

I didn’t even need to wonder where and how he’d learned to speak like this. I already knew. And I hated Xavier Blackwell more than the driver who’d killed my parents at that moment.

I gritted out, “Well, if that’s what he says to you, then I feel sorry for you.”

A strange look crossed Cas’s face.

“And you told her you loved her, I suppose?”

Something in my face betrayed me, and of course, he pounced. “Oh, my god. You actually did. Jesus Christ.”

“Look, you don’t know anything, okay? We’re—”

“Oh, for fuck sake, Jude, stop lying to yourself, and me, it’s bloody exhausting.” Caspien’s voice was sharp as a blade. “How many times have you gotten off to the thought of what we did in my mother’s bedroom?”

I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to hang up and never have to look him in the face again, but that thought lasted less than a second. Instead, I glanced away from the phone.

“If you tell me the truth,” he said. “I’ll let you ask me something in return – something I promise to answer truthfully.”

I looked back at him. He was serious. Beautiful and deadly and serious.

“But if you lie about it, and trust me, I’ll know because you’re a horrendous liar, I’ll hang up, block your number, and you’ll be lucky if you ever see me again.”

My bones trembled beneath my skin, alive with panic and terror. These past few months had been bad enough. Never see him again? It was unthinkable. I knew I could threaten him, threaten to expose his lawyer; wasn’t that what I’d come on here to do anyway?

But deep down, past the madness, I knew I didn’t want that.

I didn’t want to threaten or force him to see me. I wasn’t sure this was any better, him forcing me, but it certainly came with less guilt.

I closed my eyes and counted.

My voice shook a little when I said, “I...can’t remember.”

“Try.”

I’d thought about what we did more times than I could remember: in class, as Luke drove me to school, while kissing Ellie, while thinking about the essay I was writing, the film I’d just watched, or the song I was listening to.

But he’d only asked how many times I’d gotten off to it. Still, it was a lot. I was a teenager. I closed my eyes and thought about it. I’d imagine it was him with his hand around me. I’d imagine the curve of his lips or the shape of his hands. I’d remember his kiss and his tongue and the sounds he’d made when he’d come. I’d think about how the inside of his mouth had felt and tasted. I was almost fully hard by that point and I gripped the end of my dick to try and calm it down.

When I opened my eyes to look at him, he was smiling a little, clearly pleased with himself. His eyes looked dark in the light of his dorm room, his mouth a lush ruinous thing.

I remembered that mouth open and filled with mine.

“A lot, okay,” I said with a heavy sigh.

“I thought so.”

Sweat had begun to dampen my forehead.

“Cas, look, I don’t...I don’t know what I want, okay? I wish you were here so I could see you, so we could talk and see...” I didn’t know what I was saying or where the next words would lead me. “I just wish you hadn’t left.”

The self-satisfied look on his face melted away. Something softer and more sincere moved into his eyes.

Later, I’d come to understand that he knew how sincerity affected his features. It was why he so rarely showed it. Sincerity gave his face an almost fragile quality. Delicate and exquisite. His beauty was always striking, but when he was tender and gentle with it, he became almost painful to look at. Magnificent and terrible as an angel. Divinity made flesh.

“You’re making things very difficult for me, you know,” he said quietly.

“Sorry.” And I was. I was sorry about a lot of things.

It felt like a long time before he spoke again. When he did, it was with a measure of defeat.

“I will be home at the end of March for two weeks.”

“March?” It was January. I was certain I’d go crazy if I had to wait another two months to see him.

“Yes. Then there is one more term before I can say goodbye to this overpriced prison in the Alps for good.” He looked around the room with disdain.

“Is it that bad?”

He shrugged. “It’s no worse than any other school, I suppose. It’s just that everyone who goes here is a sociopath. The child of a millionaire or oligarch or diplomat; sometimes all three at once.”

“Sounds awful,” I said.

“It is. But I’ll likely have to see half of these idiots again at Oxford.”

“Oxford? You’re going to Oxford.”

Another shrug. “It’s where all Deverauxs go. It’s where Gideon went. And my mother before...” He trailed off. “Anyway, he’s already paid my tuition. I’ve had a place reserved there since the minute I was born, I think.” This was said with a measure of derision.

I couldn’t remember having a conversation as normal as this with him before. I listened, hungry for whatever he would feed me next.

“But truthfully, I’d like to go to the Lervairè Conservatory. It’s a music school in Boston. They only admit thirty students per year; it’s quite prestigious.”

“Thirty per year?” There were more than that in my registration class.

“Costs a fortune if you aren’t awarded a scholarship,” he said. “Not that money is the issue, of course. It is the skill I lack.”

“You have plenty of skill.”

The side of his mouth lifted a fraction as though he might smile, but then it was gone. “I have a degree of it, but not enough for Lervairè.”

“Well, Lervairè sounds like a wanker.”

He let out the first laugh I’d ever heard from him, and it very nearly stopped my heart.

He was about to say something when there was a rap on his door, then someone shouted in French. Or whatever other language they spoke there.

“They’re putting the lights out,” he grumbled. “They insist on treating us like criminals. We’re fed like them, too. I mean, the food is passable, but it’s the herding of us into the dining hall at one and six like prime cattle that is the issue. Some of us like a late dinner.”

I caught myself smiling because hearing him talk like this, as though I were a friend he could just talk with, gave me a pleasant warmth in my stomach I never wanted to go.

“Gideon is coming to see you tomorrow?”

He nodded. “Though not by choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is some kind of parental mediation session. He has to attend it, or they’ll attempt to expel me again.”

My eyebrows shot to my hairline. “Expel you? What did you do?”

“This time or the last time?”

I laughed. “Um, this time?”

“I broke the Austrian ambassador’s son’s nose with a Lacrosse stick.” When he saw my expression, he added. “I hadn’t properly warmed up, and my grip was loose. It was an accident.”

“Right.”

Caspien said nothing.

“Do you have to go?” I asked, remembering the lights-out call.

“I should. I have a 7 a.m. skiing class.”

“Can I...call you again? Tomorrow?” I held my breath.

He stared.

“Yes,” he said at last. “If you like.”

I bit back my smile. “Well, I guess I’ll let you go, then.”

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” he said.

“Um, I don’t...have I?” I looked around, thinking.

“I promised you a truth. In return for yours.”

My cheeks warmed from the reminder of mine.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” I tried to think of something. It wasn’t that I didn’t have things I wanted to know the true answer to – I had plenty. It was that I didn’t know which I wanted to know the answer to more.

I wasn’t going to ask him anything about Xavier Blackwell. I wouldn’t waste this kind of opportunity on him.

In the end, I went with something I had asked myself over and over and over these last few weeks. Something only Caspien would be able to answer. Something I’d tried to ask him in my many letters and something I had asked him in my texts and voicemails but which he had failed, as yet, to answer.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

I could tell I’d shocked him. Maybe he’d been expecting something about Blackwell. Maybe he’d been expecting something along the same vein as what he’d asked me.

He stared at me, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t answer. He looked so unsettled by the question that I was sure that when it did come, it wouldn’t even be the truth.

Finally, he said, “To protect someone.”

“What does that mean?” I frowned.

“One truth, that was the agreement. Goodnight, Jude.”

And then he was gone, and I was left with those three words rattling around my head for hours until I finally fell asleep.