Epilogue

Gideon died on a Friday, quietly and without much theatre. Jude, Jasper, and I beside him as he went. We’d never used the word ‘love’ with each other, and that day was no different.

He still knew me by the end, which Jasper said was unusual. Still knew Jude. He’d gripped his hand and whispered another apology for his part in everything that had happened while I watched, quiet and wary, even now untrusting that he wouldn’t drip his poison into the well of us.

The night before he died, I’d sat by his bedside and read to him. Jude had gone to bed, and I’d sat in the dim light, the sound of his breathing so slow and so shallow that I was certain he’d gone. But then he’d spoken.

“Caspien, you won’t leave him again, will you?” he’d rasped. “No matter what?”

“I am not doing this, Gideon,” I said, not looking up. “If you no longer want me to read, then I’ll go to bed. But we are not discussing him. I’ve told you this already.”

“But you will tell him you love him,” he said, as though I hadn’t just refused to discuss it. “He needs to hear you say it, Caspien.”

I sighed and closed the book, lifting my eyes to the bed. “You do not have to worry about him, alright. I plan to make him happy.” And I did. I’d never do anything to hurt him, not again.

“And you’ll be happy too, won’t you? You deserve to be happy, too.”

“Yes, Gideon. I plan on being happy, too. With Jude. Please stop worrying about that.”

“But you’ve told him? He knows how you feel? How you’ve always felt?”

“He knows about the trust. I suppose I have you to thank for that. But we are taking things slowly.” I sighed, knowing that despite my protests, I was going to discuss this after all. “I cannot walk back into his life and assume my place in it is the same as it was.”

“Yes, of course. But I think if you just tell him you love him then it will all work out, I am certain of it.”

“Yes, uncle.” I said because I wanted him to sleep. I wanted him to stop talking.

Upstairs, I’d gone to Jude’s room – my mother’s room – and stood outside the door. I was afraid to knock, afraid of what it would mean if I did. I wanted to knock, to ask him to put his arms around me, to feel the comfort of his constancy. I wanted to lose myself in that deep, unwavering comfort only he’d ever been able to give me. It had been true that his love had been my greatest comfort over the years I’d spent with Xavier. Jude, whose love was a lighthouse on a stormy sea. Jude, who’d saved me over and over and over again. But we were taking things slow and it would be selfish of me to go to him now just because it was what I needed.

I’d gone to my bedroom alone. Cold and large and with memories, almost enough of them to pour scorn on everything I’d tried to fix inside myself since leaving Boston.

Gideon’s funeral was bigger than it ought to have been. People from the island and London, traipsing up the steep hill to the family plot to say goodbye to a man they hadn’t even known. Not really.

Only myself and Jude had really known all sides of him. Perhaps Jasper, his faithful nurse – who looked at Jude in a way I disliked intensely – had seen a side to him that not even we had.

Xavier hadn’t come.

Not only as I’d instructed my lawyer to advise him that his presence on the island would be considered a breach of our ‘agreement.’ The agreement we’d made upon our divorce, so long as he stayed away from me, the offences he’d committed against me (over the years I’d documented each one thoroughly) would never find its way to my lawyer.

In the end, it didn’t matter. He’d been caught in a compromising position with a boy of fourteen; the son of a client, a very rich and very powerful client who was doing a fine job of destroying him without my input. I expected I’d get a call before the case went to trial. I had been his husband, after all. Who knew his character better than I? A pity for him that our agreement wasn’t enforceable in a court of law.

At the graveside Jude stood close to me looking haunted and desperately sad, and I couldn’t help but imagine how he must have looked as a child at his parents’ funerals. Large, green eyes shimmering with fear and loneliness. He cried for Gideon. Gideon who’d only ever seen him as a playground where he could re-enact the pain that had been done to him. Jude’s heart was an awe-inspiring thing; its capacity for love and empathy and forgiveness despite what cruelty had been done to it was beyond my understanding.

Later, when everyone had gone and Jasper had left the mansion, I found Jude in the music room staring at the empty bed, cleared now of the detritus that had kept Gideon alive the last few months. He had a lost, far-off look on his face.

I took the opportunity to watch him from where I stood unnoticed, skin pale and smooth and hair a dark forest, rich with the dying light of the afternoon. He’d changed in the years since I first met him. From a gangly pretty boy who smelled of cut grass and Skittles, to something darker and frighteningly handsome.

Jude had always been unaware of his own appeal; of the very particular kind of beauty he possessed and the power it held over the people around him. While I’d been trained very early to wield mine like a weapon, his was innocent and guileless. Deceptively clever and yet filled with an almost child-like wonder, he was a perfect entrancing mix. He was less innocent now than he was then, more hardened – by myself and Gideon – but more attractive for it.

I loved him. I’d loved him for years.

It had taken me too long to realise it, to understand it and recognise it for what it was: that thing which had ruined everyone I knew. My mother. My father. Gideon.

Jude was the only kind of love I’d ever known.

“Did you love him?” Jude asked when I came to stand by his side.

I stared at the deathbed. “No. I don’t think I did.”

He looked at me, forlorn but not surprised. “Seems unfair we both became orphans and I got Luke and you got Gideon.”

“Luke is one of a very particular kind,” I said. Jude was another very particular kind. “Very few of us get a Luke. Besides, my father’s alive and well, remember.”

“Liam,” he said.

“Please, don’t.”

“You prefer Lucifer?”

“Immeasurably.”

He grinned. My heart flipped. I liked seeing him smile. I also liked hearing him laugh, so I divulged the next piece of information for that reason only. I’d sworn to take it to my grave.

“He’s a used car salesman.”

Jude’s mouth dropped open. “No, he isn’t.”

I nodded, grimly.

“Oh, my god, this is perfect.” And he burst into a fit of laughter.

We stayed at Deveraux four days after the funeral before going back to London together. We’d meet with Gideon’s lawyer on Monday. (Xavier’s firm had been relieved shortly after our separation.) Luke and Elspeth would fly over on Sunday evening, and the four of us, plus Finn’s parents, would attend the reading.

I already knew what the will contained, so there would be no surprises for me. I knew Gideon had shown Jude part of it, but there was some other detail in there he would be hearing for the first time.

At the airport exit, I stood facing him unsure what to say. Jude seemed relaxed; he’d been chatty and smiling throughout the flight.

“So,” he said hesitantly. “About that date...”

Nothing had happened between us in Jersey. Nothing but lingering glances and the briefest of possibly accidental touches. Tell him you love him, Gideon’s voice had said each time there was a lull in our conversations over the simple dinners we’d made together in the kitchen – dinners which had reminded me of our blissfully domestic weeks in London.

But telling him I loved him seemed like another selfish thing to do, and so it had never felt like the right time.

“You still want to?” I asked, a strange flutter of panic spreading over me. Had he realised he didn’t? After all this time, this last week with me could very well have changed his mind. Now that Gideon was dead, no longer forcing us together, maybe he’d decided th—

“Of course,” Jude said grinning. “When are you free?”

Smiling, I pulled up the calendar on my phone. “We have a concert coming up, so there’s quite a lot of rehearsal.” I scanned the dates, heart-dropping when I saw when I was next free. “We’re rehearsing every night for the next three weeks.”

“What time does rehearsal finish?”

“Around nine, sometimes later. Our conductor is...Stalin-esque.”

He chuckled at this. “So, I’ll wait for you after rehearsal. If that isn’t too late?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s fine.”

“Cool. So how about tomorrow?”

“Okay, tomorrow then. We rehearse at the Barbican.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll wait outside for you.” He began to back off, smiling.

“Uh, there’s a car coming for me,” I said. “If you want a lift back into the city?”

“I actually like the Tube.” He winked at me and then turned, looking back to shout. “See you tomorrow!”

I waved stupidly. Butterflies swirling and swooping in my stomach.

The following night, he was waiting inside the foyer when I came out, chatting to the doorman whose name I didn’t know, though I’d been here almost a year. When he saw me, he stopped talking and smiled that bright beautiful smile at me. The one he’d always smiled at me.

I groaned as the butterflies kicked up again.

“Ready?” I asked him, hating how nervous my voice sounded.

“Yep,” Jude smiled. “Catch you later, Phil.”

“Phil?” I asked when we were outside.

“Yeah, he let me in to watch you for a bit.”

I glanced at him. “You watched?”

“Didn’t know you had a solo.”

“A small one.”

“You sounded fucking amazing, Cas.”

I cleared my throat, a little embarrassed by his sincerity. “Thank you.”

“I bought a ticket for the concert on my phone while I was waiting.”

“Oh, I could have got you one.”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind paying for it.”

It was a brisk night in early November, and Jude’s cheeks and nose were already pink from the chill, his freckles like constellations across both. His eyes sparkled a lush verdant green – it was my favourite colour, the colour of Jude’s eyes. I pulled my scarf up and my coat around my body.

“Are you cold?” he asked. “We can just go in here if you want?”

It was a bar I knew the players sometimes drank in, and I was quite happy walking a bit further to find somewhere we would be alone. I shook my head, and we walked on a little more.

Jude was telling me about a film he’d seen with the same kind of enthusiasm he told me about books. I’d often thought that if Jude could find a job that somehow combined both, he’d be entirely in the perfect profession. For now, he was an English supply teacher at a grammar school in North London. He’d written his book over a few years, and though it had been a critical success, he hadn’t made enough money to give up teaching. Though it didn’t sound like he wanted to: he enjoyed it. I could imagine him being good at it, too.

We found a quiet-looking bar in Clerkenwell, shucked out of our coats, and sat at a table near the back. Jude fetched the drinks, and I watched him go, as oblivious as ever to the looks of both sexes, a fact that only made them more interested in him.

When he sat back down, handing me my beer, he was smiling so wide I thought I’d missed something.

“What?” I asked as I took a sip.

“I just can’t believe you drink beer now. As long as I’ve known you, it’s been something ridiculous: rosé wine, gin and tonic.”

“There’s nothing ridiculous about either of those.”

“I mean, true, I drank anything and everything at Oxford. If it had an alcohol content, I drank it. Some of the hangovers were legendary.” He grimaced.

“The folly of youth.”

He gave me a long, wistful look. “Indeed.”

We spent the night talking about everything and anything, avoiding any topic that would sour the mood. My flat was in Soho, and Oxford Circus was on his line, so he walked me home while explaining to me why Whitechapel was the most glamorous place in London. At the door of my building, we stopped. He looked up at it and then around the bustling thoroughfare.

“Do you get much sleep here?”

We were right on the corner of Carnaby Street and Fouberts Place, and it could be loud.

“Not really,” I admitted. I’d taken it for the size of the living room and its proximity to the Barbican.

“We should have gone to mine instead.”

“Aren’t you in Shoreditch?” I frowned.

“Yeah, but I’m in the basement. It’s quieter down there.”

“I had no idea you were so concerned about street noise.” I joked.

“Aren’t you? I think uni traumatised me for life; my first-year dorm looked onto an alley where they’d empty the bottle bins at 3 a.m.” He laughed. “God, this is the worst date-chat ever. Sorry.”

I caught my eyes drifting to his mouth again. I’d been doing it all night. The faint freckle he had, like a beauty mark, just to the left side of his upper lip. I wanted to trace it with my tongue again. It had been so long.

“Do you want to come up?” I asked him.

He nodded, looking a little nervous for the first time. Upstairs, he complimented the size of the living room, into which I’d managed to fit an upright piano, a reading area with bookshelf, lamp and armchair, two large sofas, and a dining table. Somehow, it still felt spacious. The bijou kitchen was tucked behind a set of glass, metal-framed doors at one end.

I left him to use the bathroom while I poured us both a drink; an old fashioned. Somewhat of a signature of mine.

“Fuck, this is good,” he said as he took a second mouthful.

I nodded, watching him now with the same sort of covetous look strangers often did. Everything about him drew me in. How he smelled, the sound of his voice, his laugh, the shape of his mouth. But mostly, it was always this: the way he had of looking at me. As though I was something he needed in order to breathe. Some vital commodity he would die without.

But he hadn’t died without me. He’d survived. Bloomed even.

I wasn’t the same person Jude fell in love with, and though I was still frightened of hurting him, of somehow destroying that which made Jude, Jude, I was determined to show him that I could love him back. I would allow him to love me while returning that love.

He watched me now with a strange mix of tenderness and hunger. I’d revelled in both sides before, and I wanted them both again. And again. And again.

“Can you play something for me?” he asked, casting his eyes over my shoulder at the upright. It hadn’t been where I’d expected him to go, based on the look he’d been giving me.

“If you like.”

I stood and carried my tumbler over to the piano and set it on the top. I sat on the small stool and lifted the lid. A flashback, a phantom pain over the fingers of my right hand. When I’m talking to you, you will fucking look at me, do you hear me!? The weighty top bashed down onto my fingers once, twice, three times. The pain excruciating.

“What would you like to hear?” I asked, clearing my throat as I forced away the memory.

“Anything,” said Jude softly. “I just like watching you.”

“And here I was thinking piano was more of an auditory experience.”

“Not when it’s you that’s playing it, it’s not.” He sipped his drink and gave me a bawdy look, which made me laugh.

“Actually, I’ve been working on something.” I shifted on the stool, feeling a little self-conscious. Especially given he was the muse.

“You wrote it?” His eyes widened with delight.

I nodded, settling my hands over the keys.

I’d been working on the suite for over a decade. I’d started it when I was still at Deveraux, a catalogue of songs that had become our story: The Boy. The Gardener. The Beach. The Reader. The Library. Oxford. London. Oleander.

It was almost complete though I still tinkered on the pieces daily, adding and removing things depending on my mood, never quite happy with the sum of the parts. But perhaps there was one more piece to create, one more to add. The Boy: returned.The Man: in bloom.

I began to play Oleander: the piece I was most confident in, the one I’d worked on longest. The one I’d been lost in the night Xavier broke my hand. That night, I’d boarded a plane and left him for the first time, only to find Jude, inexplicably, waiting for me on the other side of the ocean. My lighthouse in the storm.

As the piece moved through its motions, he watched me with tears in his eyes and his heart on his sleeve. His eyes had changed, but he still looked at me the same way. As though I was his and he was mine. I wasn’t afraid of that look now, I returned that look now.

When it was over, he shook himself as though coming out of a dream. He looked like he might jump to his feet and applaud.

“Fucking hell, Cas. That was...incredible.”

“Thank you.” I lifted my glass and moved to sit back on the couch across from him.

“I really want to kiss you,” he said after a moment. “Can I?”

“You never have to ask me that, Jude.”

He set his glass down and moved across the couch toward me. Then, he took mine and set it down too. When he brought his hand up to touch my cheek, I let out a small desperate noise I hadn’t thought I was capable of.

“Did he ever...” Jude began, green eyes turning dark. “Without your consent? Did he ever hurt you like that?”

I’d never lie to him. But neither did I want to say it out loud, the humiliation was too great.

In the end, I didn’t have to. His jaw clenched, and his mouth flattened into a line. Still, his touch was excruciatingly soft as he skimmed his thumb over my lip.

“Cas…” He pressed his forehead to mine, breathing quick. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please, don’t Jude.” I pleaded. “It’s over. I’m okay. Everything is okay now.”

“Please tell me you know you never deserved it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you said that day. I can’t.” He fixed me with a firm look. “Please tell me you know now that you never deserved what he did to you.”

The truth was, I was still trying to get to a place where I believed it unflinchingly. Counselling was gruelling and some days felt like walking through quicksand filled with snakes. But it was working, I could feel that too. And so while I couldn’t say it and mean it today, I knew I would be able to one day.

“I’m getting there, I promise.”

He squeezed his eyes closed and leaned in to kiss me. Gentle, soft. “I love you so much. So much. I think I’ll always want to kill him.”

I kissed him back then. Hungrily. Forcefully. Pushing him backwards on the couch so I could climb on top and bury myself in his mouth. He moved his hands over every inch of me, as though checking I was real, inhaling and tasting my mouth, my neck, eyelids, ears. As though I were something tender, delicate, which needed to be treated carefully. Only Jude had ever made me feel like this.

He touched me with his eyes and his hands and his mouth and it was like we were boys again. There had never been anything other than purest unbridled love when he did this. No matter how I’d hurt him, he loved me the same as he always had. With everything that he had.

I’d been telling the truth when I told him he’d saved me over and over again; because if Jude could love me, Jude who was perfect, Jude who was the sun, then it meant I was worth loving. Gideon had raised me to be something cold and poisonous, Xavier had tried to crush me to dust, but Jude had just loved. Tender and sweet. No matter who or what I came to him as, he’d loved me. Every version of me. And I felt like myself only when he saw me. He looked at me the same way he looked at the world, with warmth and wonder and curiosity. Jude gave life to everything around him, and I felt truly alive because he loved me.

I climbed off and led him to the bedroom, where we undressed each other in silence. Looks speaking a thousand words. Naked, I covered him in kisses, capturing his groans and gasps in my mouth and between my teeth. After what felt like hours, he changed our positions so I was beneath him, and began to open me.

First, with his mouth, exceedingly slow and deliberate, before using his fingers with a deft and careful touch that had me begging for him. Before pushing inside me, he brought us face to face and stilled, looking deep into my eyes. His own were a dark vine green now, pupils black and wide with desire

Tracing my cheek and then my mouth, gentle and soft fingers moving over their shape, he said, “I’m never losing you again, Cas. You realise that, don’t you?”

“You never lost me,” I said. It was true. I was always his. Just like he was always mine. “And you never will, I promise. For however long you want me, I’ll be here. I’m yours.” My body wasn’t used to his size, hadn’t been used to any size for a long time, but Christ, it wanted him. It was as though it had been made for him.

“I’m always going to want you,” he said, kissing me as he began to thrust. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.”

As he fucked me, he ran his hands over my body, under it, touching and tasting. It was slow and then it was frenzied. It was gentle and then rough. He turned me inside out and emptied me clean of everything but him. I was free of everything I’d been before, rotten and poisoned, new and remade, and I would never ever go back to any life that he wasn’t a part of.

He took hold of my arousal and stroked, dragging me to a point of pleasure so white-hot it felt like I was being burned from the inside.

“Jude...I’m going to...”

“Come for me, let me see you...fuck, that’s it, baby. Look at you. You’re so beautiful, Cas. So beautiful. So perfect. I love you so much.”

It was the most intense orgasm of my life. More intense than any I’d had with him before. More so than the countless times he’d made me come in that hovel of a dorm in Oxford.

When I was milked dry, he leaned in to devour my mouth as he fucked me to his own climax. Every thrust of Jude’s hips sent a spark of sensation up my spine, over-sensitivity a shocking but delicious pulse through my whole body. I was mindless from it. From him. His perfect body, perfect cock, perfect soul a balm to my own. I felt him erupt, a flood of hot healing pleasure coating the inside of me. He choked out another declaration and slid off me.

I twisted my body, throwing a leg over him to keep his cock inside me, not ready for the sensation of being empty of him yet. He belonged there. He let out a languid, sex-rough groan, before sighing dreamily.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that I actually get to have you like this,” he said.

I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon enough.” I rested my head on his chest, the beat of his heart a steady cadence.

“Oh, you wish.”

We were silent for a few moments before I decided it was time. I’d never said it before. Not once, to anyone. I didn’t know if there were certain rules to where and how, but I was impatient. It was a peculiar kind of weight in my chest, and I’d been nervous for over a week now; I wanted rid of the feeling.

“I love you, Jude,” I said in a strangely formal voice.

I heard it against my ear; the sound of his heart skipping its regular rhythm.

“What?”

“I love you,” I said again.

He sat up, causing him to slip out of me. I was forced to sit up, too.

“Since when?” he asked. There was a strange look on his face. Confusion, I thought. Or maybe fear.

I hadn’t been expecting this. Questions about it. “Um, well, for a long time. I just didn’t recognise it, at least that’s what my counsellor thinks, but now I know. Now I know that I love you. That I’ve always loved you.”

“You’ve always loved me?”

I was frowning now. “You don’t have to sound so utterly disconcerted by it.”

“Oh, trust me, that’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it? Your face has a strange look on it.”

“Does it?” He laughed. “I don’t know, I guess now I know how I’d react if someone told me I’d won the lottery. This would be my face.”

“Well, you’re not doing it now.”

Now he was smiling. Very big and very wide. I felt my own mouth turning up into a smile.

Without warning, Jude threw himself at me, kissing me hard over every part of my face.

“Say it again,” he said when he came up for air. His grin was still pulling at the sides of his mouth.

“I love you.”

“One more time.”

“I’m not a performing monkey, no.”

He laughed and kissed me again, and I kissed him back. But against his lips, unable to stop myself, I whispered it once more.

“You know,” I said when he was relaxed and half-dozing by my side, “Gideon has left you quite a disgustingly large sum of money and a house in Tuscany so it will be like winning the lottery.”