Ten

Finn’s room at the house on Fromme Street was about four times the size of my dorm, with a set of doors leading off to a small balcony large enough for a single chair. A large king-size bed in a metal frame was set against one wall with a flatscreen TV on the wall opposite, and there was an ensuite with a bath and a shower

It didn’t smell like an old library, either, and I suddenly wondered why we mainly went to my dorm when we did this.

I sat on the bed with the bottle of wine he’d slid out of the rack downstairs while he fiddled with the remote until the TV played some EDM playlist as was his preference. He rolled a joint and went to the balcony to smoke it. We passed it between us, along with the wine, until I felt so light-headed I had to sit down again.

“So, you ever gonna tell me?” he asked after we’d been silent a while. The joint was long gone and he sat against the headboard as he took sips from the bottle of wine. I was lying sideways near the foot of the bed.

“Tell you what?” I asked, though I had an inkling I knew.

“You and Cas,” he said. “What the fuck did he do to you?”

What the fuck did he do to me? I laughed at this. Because for some reason, it was funny to me then, what he’d done. What I’d allowed him to do. It was fucking hilarious actually. It was a joke, or I was.

“What’s funny?” Finn asked, a faint smile on the side of his mouth. I covered my eyes and laughed harder, so hard that my chest, stomach, and throat hurt. But then, I realised, I wasn’t laughing anymore.

Finn was beside me quickly, voice a little panicked as he said, “Fuck, Jude, are you crying? Shit. Okay, shit. Fuck, Jude.”

“I’m fine,” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I’m honestly fucking fine.” I looked at him and smiled. “Promise, I am.”

“Okay…” He looked like he didn’t believe me, so I surged forward to kiss him. He hesitated only a moment, as though suspicious of how quickly I’d recovered, but then he let me push him back onto the bed and kissed me back.

“Jude,” he murmured as I reached for the button of his jeans. “You sure?”

“Just let me do this okay, we’re going to fucking do this,” I said as I moved down his body, tugging off his jeans.

“You’re not gonna hear me complaining.” He laughed, breathless as he began to undress.

I sat back and did the same, pulling my shirt over my head before standing to take off my jeans.

Finn’s body was long, limber, and lean with dustings of dark brown hair where Caspien was completely hairless. Soft and lightly muscled where Cas was delicate edges and lean angles. I pushed all thoughts of Cas away as Finn turned over and pushed himself up on all fours and presented his arse to me.

“There’s lube and condoms in the drawer.” He gestured vaguely to the bedside table. I guessed the decision about who was fucking who had been decided, and I pulled open the drawer. “Fuck, hurry up,” he said impatiently as I rolled the condom over my dick which was, despite the alcohol and drugs, extremely fucking hard.

I thought about Adam The Rower saying he was going to finger me open before fucking me and I squeezed the lubricant over both my fingers and my dick, before sliding my pointer finger at Finn’s hole. It was so fucking warm in there, burning hot, and my dick pulsed.

“Christ, yes, fuck.” Finn gasped, arching his back up and out and into me. He looked good like that, really good, and I wanted to be inside him more than I cared about opening him up so I was glad when he begged me to do just that. “Just fuck me, Jude, just do it—”

I slid inside him in one single slow thrust, falling onto his back to kiss and nip at the nape of his neck.

“Finn, shit.” I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through the tumult of pleasure that was racing down my spine, through my balls, to the head of my dick. We stayed like that a second, mainly so Finn could adjust to me, before he began moving himself in short, shallow thrusts back onto me.

“You feel...” He panted. “Holy fuck, you’re so fucking big, Jude, fuck.”

“Sorry,” I breathed against his neck, and he laughed.

“I’m not,” he said, turning his head to kiss me on the mouth. “Now fucking do it. Split me open.”

Finn was as good at being fucked as he was at giving blow jobs; loud and incredibly enthusiastic and as I fucked him I felt hope rise in my chest so big I could barely draw breath. He hadn’t ruined me. Cas hadn’t ruined me. I could do this. I was doing this.

But then Finn pulled away so that I slid out of him and turned onto his back to bring us face to face, and I saw a look in his eye that I recognised. A want and desire that went beyond what we were doing now. One that harboured hopes and dreams of its own, ones I knew I couldn’t fulfil. It was the same look Ellie had given me. It shouldn’t have surprised me, he’d told me already – I care about you, surely you know that? – and yet it did. But hearing and seeing and knowing it were entirely different things, and I understood with a horrible certainty that this was how I looked at Cas.

“What’s wrong?” Finn asked, blinking. He leaned up to kiss me, sucking hard on my lip as he brought me inside him again. “Look, I don’t care,” he whispered.

I pulled my head back, separating our mouths, and held myself very still.

“I don’t care,” he said again. “It’s Cas, right? You think you’re in love with him or something?”

It was the wrong thing to say at completely the wrong time.

“I...I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I told him.

He smiled, reassuringly. “There’s nothing’s wrong with you, Jude.”

But there was something immediately wrong with me, at least. My softening dick slid out of him. Finn sat up, hair mussed and cheeks pinked, a dawning hopeless realisation on his face.

I moved to sit next to him on the bed. I felt wholly sober and very, very alone.

“I’m sorry,” I said, covering my face with my hands. “Fucking hell. I don’t know why I’m like this. I’m a mess.”

Finn was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “I happen to think you’re pretty great, actually. I think Caspien the Cunt likely just fucked you up a little bit, that’s all.”

I looked at him. “Christ, this must be the worst sexual encounter you’ve ever fucking had.”

He grinned. “Actually, guys cry over their exes all the time just before fucking me. It’s like a skill I have.”

“Another one? Like guessing the subject from the college thing?”

“Exactly.” He laughed. Then he gave me what looked like a sorry sort of smile. We were quiet a long time after that. Just the sound of street noise three floors below.

“We messed around a little bit a few summers ago,” I offered, some interminable amount of time later. “It was never serious, not for him. He was seeing Blackwell the whole time.”

“What a fucking prick,” Finn seethed.

“Your party was the first time I’d seen him since. He came to ask me to stop seeing you. Said the least I could do was not fuck his relatives. Something about manners.”

I felt Finn vibrate with rage. “So, what, he doesn’t want you but he doesn’t want anyone else to have you either?”

“Actually, he said that I could fuck anyone but you. He thinks I chose you deliberately to piss him off.”

Finn made a strangled, frustrated sound. “He is quite literally the worst fucking person on earth. I hate him. Like, I loathe that little shit.” But then he turned to me. “Wait, did you? Choose me deliberately?” I couldn’t tell how Finn felt about this. There was a gleam in his eye that suggested he might actually like it if I had.

“Not consciously, not at the start, at least. Tonight, though.” I looked down guiltily. “Tonight, I think I was trying to prove something to myself. Or to him.”

Finn thought about this, then gave me another of his easy smiles. “Okay, so please don’t judge me for this, but what if I told you I didn’t care? What if I told you I’d very happily lie back and get fucked by you, so you could prove something to yourself?” He nudged his shoulder into mine. “Or Cas. We could go the whole way and film it for him. Oh, Christ, please, let’s do that. The next family function would be a dream come true.”

I laughed, but it felt hollow, perhaps because I was hollow. Empty of that hope that had taken hold of me for a moment as I’d thrust inside Finn. I brought both hands up, dug my fingers into my eye sockets, and let out a groan.

“You know what? Maybe you’re just not that into me,” Finn said with a small shrug.

I looked at him, shaking my head in disagreement. “I think you’re great, Finn. We get on great. You’re hot and what we do – I like, a lot.”

“Yeah, and maybe that’s not enough. Maybe to get over him, you need something else. Something bigger, something that means...more.” He turned his body towards me. We were both still naked and yet it felt bizarrely normal. “Maybe the fact he’s my cousin is an issue for you. Or maybe you’re just way too much in your head about it all and you should have gone home with the rower – what the fuck do I know?”

I thought about this. I wasn’t sure this wouldn’t have ended in exactly the same way had I gone home with someone else. Anyone else. At least this way, I’d only disappointed a friend who I knew wouldn’t advertise my issues to the entire campus.

We got dressed, drank the rest of the wine, and fell asleep talking about all the reasons we were as fucked up as we were. Finn hadn’t known about my parents until that night, and I hadn’t known that he’d been twelve the first time someone had put a dick inside him. I told him about the summer I’d thought Cas was mine and how I’d found him with Xavier.

I told him about the email address I’d created too; how that Caspien The Ghost email address had kept me sane the last two years and how the idea of Cas ever reading any of them made me feel ill. (He’d offered to scan them for anything embarrassing if I ever did decide to send them to Cas. I told him there wasn’t a single word in there I wasn’t embarrassed about.) I didn’t tell him in any detail about what had happened the night of his birthday, only that I’d been so angry with Cas that it had frightened me. He blamed Cas for all of it, of course.

As I left the following morning, it was obvious that what we’d had before was over and done. We couldn’t – I couldn’t – move forward with him, and there was no going back. We’d stay friends throughout our time at Oxford together, and even now we still keep in touch, but that night was the last time we were ever intimate. I’m certain, though, that it had less to do with Caspien’s request and more to do with the fact I’d finally figured out what it was I wanted from Finn: friendship.

But had things gone differently with Finn that night, had we decided to try being together properly, then Nathan certainly wouldn’t have happened.

Nathan, someone else who would change how I looked at myself and the world.

Nathan, who was everything I thought I wanted and needed: everything Caspien wasn’t.