14. Your Intuition Is Easy To Find!
YOUR INTUITION IS EASY TO FIND!
THE RAIN THAT HAD started during my shift at the store was pouring by the time I got to the de Witt house, passing the sign that read FIRE HAZARD: HIGH with a new suspicion that it wasn’t that closely monitored.
I ran from the landing to the house’s side entrance, pausing only to glimpse the shallow cavity of the broken fountain.
It was filled almost halfway now, a blurry glimmer catching my eye.
Rain wept down the sides of the greenhouse, flooding the cracked tile that surrounded it on all sides.
Genesis met me at the door, as usual. I handed her my phone without even feeling the loss.
I found everything inside it less interesting these days.
Just more things being sold to me in clever ways; more girls I’d known from audition rooms announcing their newest content partnerships, their soon-to-be big breaks.
(They say to keep your eyes on your own lane, at your own pace, your own journey. But nobody was really that blind.)
“Where’s Emmanuelle?” I was a little breathless, partially from running. The rain was starting to dry on my bare arms, and I shivered.
Genesis’s gaze flicked resentfully to the courtyard below.
“Right, okay. Does she have the—”
Genesis was already walking away. I rolled my eyes at her back, then darted for the stairs. I didn’t know why I knew it, but I felt sure this time he was awake. I’d felt it in the store, my hands on the cards, right on the soft pulse of peril.
Jude’s door was closed. I knocked quietly.
No answer.
I waited, then turned the knob and pushed the door gently open.
Jude was sitting in the middle of the room, on the floor. He was staring into nothing, though his gaze flicked over to me when I stepped inside.
I still hadn’t gotten used to the fact that his hair was gone.
It might sound strange to put it that way, but he seemed to me bereft without it.
The buzz cut made his features look different, sharp in a way they hadn’t been before.
He had a shallow widow’s peak, a trace of shadow around his face.
His brow seemed far more prominent, a perennial watchful scowl.
His eyes, when they met mine, were unusually calm.
Probably the result of sleeping for multiple days.
His doctor said he’d had a bad reaction to something he’d taken.
Another overdose was strongly implied. I wondered if death was his tell—if the attempts necessarily followed the guilt, or if he just tried regularly, so that statistically it could happen at any time.
“You’re awake.” I crept into the room. He didn’t flinch at my oncoming presence this time. “You’ve been out of commission for ages.”
“Does it matter?” He didn’t look at me.
“Were you trying to kill it again?” I sat beside him. “The monster.”
Jude forced his eyes shut for a moment, then stood. He wandered over to the table he used as a nightstand and brought me a loose sheet of paper. A drawing.
No rose petals here. No flowers. Just a gruesome mouth. Cascading viscera.
“Did you know her?” I asked, handing the drawing back to him. “Valerie Nguyen.”
He shook his head.
“They’re saying it was the boyfriend,” I mused. Jude turned away, putting the drawing back where he’d found it, tucked beneath a box of algae killer. “That they had some heat of the moment argument, something like that.”
“Maybe it was.” He shrugged. “Just not with that boyfriend.”
“You think she was having an affair?” I couldn’t tell if he was lying, feigning ignorance and indifference, posturing just to throw me off. Making things up to cover his tracks, a story that didn’t—couldn’t—revolve around him, who could only play the archetype of psychotic stranger.
But it didn’t seem like something he would do, rewriting the story. He’d already spent every other visit trying to convince me I should run.
“How should I know what constitutes an affair?” His gaze dropped to his hands. “It just seemed so—” He looked away, one hand rising to the hair that had been shorn away. “So angry.”
I rose to my feet. “Are you angry, Jude?”
He looked at me for a moment.
I thought of the blood on his knuckles. The hard path of his spine.
Whatever stood between us sharpened to a point. The resonance from something unignorable—the thing we’d always known was there—was glinting in the open this time.
Then—
“Come on,” he said. Just as abruptly, there was an ease to him, like a pinch point had passed. Like he’d decided something, or discarded something. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Now? But it’s raining.” My jeans were still wet from the walk from my car to the house.
He shrugged. I felt a tug somewhere in my core, like I’d been lashed to the edge of his shoulder. “You won’t melt. Worst case, you slip a little when I push you off the cliff.”
I startled with laughter. One hand clapped over my mouth.
“Jesus.” He was smiling at me. “You are severely unwell.”
“You’re the one making jokes about my murder.” I tried to stop laughing. “It’s not funny. You’re normalizing my death. I’m shook. I’m triggered.”
He frowned. “What are you even saying right now?”
“It’s not a joke.” I stopped then, grinding to a halt, like I’d just remembered a task left unfinished. “Valerie. She’s a person, not a joke.”
Jude blinked.
“I know that,” he said. “Do you?”
I stared at him.
Then he turned to go down the stairs.
He wasn’t kidding about the walk. We slipped out the side door, then took the narrow trail down to the greenhouse, in the direction of the ancient garage.
My skin, hair, and clothes were fully saturated within seconds, but Jude kept going.
I watched the blades of his shoulders shift beneath his sodden T-shirt, sharp in a way that cut me somewhere low.
He pushed open the door to the greenhouse and I darted inside, underneath his waiting arm.
The wet warmth of the glass interior was unearthly, like a fever dream, the way I imagined succumbing to a demon bog might feel.
Everything was demons with me, I realized.
I laughed a little again and looked at Jude.
He was standing beside the fogged-up wall, watching the rain come pouring down the glass.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His head turned partway toward me before he caught himself. “For what?”
“This life.” I joined him at the window, looking out into the canyon. “How lonely it is.”
“I’m not a victim. I’m a monster.” He paused, maybe waiting to see if I’d contradict him. “And more importantly, I’m alive.”
“You seem to think that death would be preferable.”
“I’m trying—” I watched his hands curl with something. Frustration, restraint. “I’m trying to hold myself accountable.”
“And you think that’s the behavior of a monster?
” I asked him. I found it … I don’t know, irritating.
The humanness of it that didn’t fit with the darkness, or maybe it was the possibility that darkness and self-pity could so annoyingly coexist. “You think a real monster has the time to sing its own elegies, or that it feels any remorse?”
Jude fixed me with a puzzled, disregarding look. “Are you actually angry with me right now? Or are you just … I don’t know, acting?”
“No.” Of course not. Except— “I don’t know.
Maybe.” My heart had started to pound from something.
Maybe he was right, maybe it was rage. Could it be rage, if I were the kind of person I thought I could be?
“I mean, Jude. A woman is dead. And it wasn’t painless.
She suffered because of someone else’s so-called passion.
” Something was beating on me, heavy plunks of disgust, the weight of an unsolved problem. “And I’m here with you, because—”
“Yes, good point.” He turned to me. It was so hot inside the greenhouse that I felt like I was going to faint. “Because of what?”
Outside, the rain came down even harder.
It saturated the frame of an open window.
The hard stone floor was getting soaked.
Everything convulsed inside me, sickening me.
I felt sorry for him, and also, I hated him for being boring.
For being a character I’d seen before; for fulfilling the heart-of-gold cliché.
He filled me with dread and bile and longing.
I felt something, that was the thing. It was horror that snaked up my throat. The heat of it, my own morbid curiosity, felt so staggeringly wrong it edged close to sublime.
He read it on my face, I know he did.
“You’re so fucking stupid,” Jude said. The words were barely audible. Just the warmth of his breath, the bare trace of suggestion. The shared image of what awful thing could happen next.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about what he might have done—the gruesomeness of it.
It lived in my brain, the possibility, the unknown measure of who and what he was, that existed in irreconcilable duality with the blood I’d already seen him shed, the scars of his own desperate escapes.
That wasn’t the problem, the plausibility of his evil.
The frequency I felt from him, that thing that buzzed between us, it was a strange, uncanny harmony.
Not discordant but haunting, dual tones of something other.
The wretchedness I both mirrored and craved.
I was the problem. He was right: The job, the house, my presence here, it was fucking idiotic. No sum of money should have been enough.
I pitched forward, onto my toes, and caught his lips with mine, unsure which one of us I strictly intended to punish.
He exhaled hard into my mouth, like I’d punched him in the stomach.
I forced him flat against the glass wall of the greenhouse, pummeling him with my need to pry him open, to scrape out the answers I needed like gored papaya seeds.
In return, he clutched my waist hard, hungrily.
Mentally, I held that sketch of a dead girl in my mind, unfurling it like a chart of stars, a scroll of inevitability.
And then, of course, I let it fall.