Chapter 10
TEN
There had been times in his life when Jude had regretted his actions, but he’d never felt anything like the guilt that pressed down on him as he watched Nally struggle on with recording for the LSO.
He was still amazing, of course, but the magic that had been there for that first piece was completely gone.
And it was all his fault.
“I should have said something about Quentin’s DMs,” he told Nally in a gloomy voice when they finally wrapped the recording session, said their goodbyes, and made their way out to the parking lot, where Jude’s scooter waited. “I am absolutely in the wrong for not mentioning anything.”
“Yes, you are,” Nally said without looking at Jude. He was too busy glancing all around as they left LSO St. Luke’s, looking for Quentin, no doubt.
Nally didn’t say anything else as they donned their helmets and climbed on the scooter.
The only thing that kept Jude from screaming his way out of his skin was the tight hold Nally kept on him as they zoomed back to Mayfair.
Nally was furious with him, and with good cause, but the way he held on to Jude felt like he was clinging desperately to the last shreds of their friendship.
Don’t let go. The words buzzed around his head as they approached Cranleigh House. Please, don’t ever let go.
“The two of you look as though you’ve been to Timbuktu and back, and you did not enjoy yourselves,” Jude’s dad commented when they slumped their way into the kitchen from the back courtyard.
“Don’t even ask,” Jude said, going straight to the counter and clicking the kettle on. It might have been stupidly British of him, but he needed a tea.
His dad didn’t ask, but Nally answered anyhow. “Turns out I have a stalker from social media who Jude didn’t warn me about,” he said, accusation sharp in his tone.
Jude said nothing, but he caught the look of shock and incredulity from his dad, who stared at him as if he, too, thought everything was Jude’s fault. “A stalker?” he asked.
Jude reached up for two mugs from the hooks under the cabinets, took two bags of tea from the jar for the cups, and popped the lid off the sugar bowl and put one cube each in the mugs.
But he couldn’t avoid the accusations, his guilt, and, oh yeah, the other gigantic elephant in the room, his feelings for Nally, forever.
He turned, slumped against the counter, and sighed before saying, “I tried to handle an overzealous fan on my own, but that was a terrible idea.” Jude’s dad looked between him and Nally, who had moved to the perpendicular counter to bring down the tin of biscuits from the shelf where it lived, like he lived there, too.
“This guy, Quentin, first spoke to Nally at the film premiere. Then at a club where we were dancing. He’s sent a few messages and showed up where we’ve been a few times. ”
“Nally, I’m so sorry,” Jude’s dad said. “Are you alright?”
“No,” Nally answered, then shoved a custard cream in his mouth so he didn’t have to say anything else.
“It’s all my fault,” Jude went on, taking all the blame but feeling like he deserved to take more. “Nally’s been under pressure, so I wanted to protect him. But Quentin showed up at the LSO and caused a scene, and now we think he’s in real danger.”
“Go to the police,” Jude’s dad said, expression still one of shock.
“The police were there at St. Luke’s,” Nally said. “They can’t do anything unless Quentin makes an explicit threat or physically assaults me.”
“Outrageous!” Jude’s dad said.
“The police suggested we leave town for a while to give the whole thing a chance to blow over,” Jude said.
He felt before he saw Nally glare at him.
When he turned his head, Nally was still munching on his custard cream, but he looked mutinous for some reason.
That, even more than Quentin, struck fear into Jude’s heart.
He had no idea what he’d done to earn that sort of a glare from the man he cared about more than anything in the world.
“Well, it seems obvious enough to me,” Jude’s dad said, pulling him out of his worries. Both Jude and Nally looked at him, so he shrugged and went on with, “You need to get out of London for a while.”
“I have meetings to attend and a composition class to plan and teach,” Nally said. “I can’t just leave London indefinitely.”
“You can’t stick around and wait for this stalker to do something to convince the police he’s a threat,” Jude’s dad said, standing and moving to a small cabinet on the wall near the door.
He opened it and took out a set of keys with a Scottish flag keychain.
“Go up to the beach house for a while. It’s out of the way.
It could probably do with a good clean right about now anyhow, after your brother spent half the summer there. ”
“The beach house?” Nally blinked, glancing from Jude’s dad to Jude with a curious frown.
“It’s what dad calls our house on Eilean an Teaghlaich, our own private little island in the Hebrides,” Jude explained.
“What, that tiny island your great-grandfather or someone bought a hundred years ago when he fancied himself a man of the land instead of an aristocrat? That place we went that one time when I joined your family for a holiday?” Nally asked, his frustrated expression lightening into puzzlement.
“The very one,” Jude’s dad said, bringing the keys over to Jude.
“If you have to get out of London and go somewhere that a stalker won’t find you, what better place to go than a remote island off the coast of Scotland that barely has electricity, where my family members have gone to pretend they’re someone they aren’t for generations. ”
“I remember it having electricity.” Nally glanced between Jude and his dad.
“It has electricity,” Jude sighed, unsure whether his dad was being a pain or whether he was right. “There’s a generator.”
“Best not to use the electricity,” Jude’s dad said, touching the side of his nose. “The point is to pretend to be rustic, you know.”
“No electricity,” Nally said, back to frowning, though now he looked determined instead of all the other emotions he’d been running through fast enough to leave Jude breathless. “That means no internet.”
Immediately, Jude knew that Nally wanted to go to the island. And that it was just a little bit intended as a punishment for the way Jude’s mismanagement of his socials had caused the problem to begin with.
Resigned, Jude shrugged, letting his shoulders drop at the end. “I’ll go pack a bag with warm clothes and supplies.”
Neither Nally nor his dad said anything to stop him. He headed out of the room, leaving the two of them alone to say God only knew what about him as he went upstairs to pack.
Half an hour, one medium-sized suitcase, and a quick social media post to say he’d be off-grid for a few days later and he was back downstairs.
“Take the big car,” Jude’s dad said, handing over the keys to the SUV as Jude and Nally left the house. “It tends to do better in the Highlands than the Porsche.”
Jude didn’t even have it in him to make a joke. He took the keys, then he and Nally proceeded out to the SUV.
The drive to Hawthorne House was one of the most painful of Jude’s life.
Nally said hardly anything. He asked a few questions about what else had been going on with his socials.
Jude recounted everything Quentin had said in detail.
Whether that was enough or not, Nally spent the second half of their drive looking through all the messages and his accounts by himself in silence.
Once they reached Hawthorne House, Jude had to recount everything a second time to Robert and Janice Hawthorne, though he left out the truly scary details and made it sound like Quentin was just an online nuisance and the trip to Scotland was more of a lark than a necessity.
He didn’t want to worry Nally’s parents, or the rest of his family when he told the story a third time to a few of the other Hawthorne family members who had wandered by too late in the tale to get the full details.
As he did, Nally went up to his flat to pack a suitcase of his own.
“Are you certain the two of you should be driving to Scotland in the middle of the night?” Janice asked when he came back down again, looking wan and exhausted.
“I’d rather leave now so we can get there as soon as possible,” Nally explained. “I just don’t want to deal with the real world for a while.”
It made absolute perfect sense, and it also made Jude feel like shit.
“This is all my fault,” he said for the umpteenth time once they were on the M40, heading northwest with only a few other cars around them in the blackness.
“Yes, it’s all your fault,” Nally nearly shouted, stopping him from saying more. “We’ve established that already. Give it a rest, will you?”
It was awful. Jude hadn’t felt anything even close to the misery of having Nally shout like that since Timothy days.
He kept quiet, tightened his hands on the wheel, and held his breath to stop himself from bursting into tears.
The fact that he was so close to sobbing was embarrassing and awful.
He was either so tired that his emotions were leaking through, in which case he shouldn’t have been driving, or he’d kept all of his feelings, all of them, bottled up for so long that they were about to explode and destroy him.
“Look,” he said quietly after the several agonizing minutes it took him to get his feelings under control.
“I think we can both agree that everything is shit right now. I’m sorry I let things get that far.
But I also think that you and I both know we have some serious things that we need to talk about.
Badly. Things we should have dealt with when we first started feeling them. ”
There was nothing but silence from Nally.
“I think we both know what this is really about,” Jude went on after navigating a bit of traffic to get around a truck. “I think there’s a lot you and I need to talk about. About…us.”