Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jess
I didn’t know how long I stood on my front porch, frozen by Jude’s words and—well, really, just the words.
I’d been in love with you for a long time.
I’d been in love with you for a long time.
I’d been in love with you for a long time.
They replayed on a loop, the rest of it fading into the background, until my phone buzzed in my pocket. When I finally looked, I had six messages from Dove saying she and Elise were going to bring me dinner whenever I was back, and to let them know.
Did I want them here? Didn’t I need time to process this?
I huffed an odd laugh. No. I needed someone to help me make sense of it. I needed a chance to rant. And Elise and Dove would let me do that.
I replied they could come whenever they were off work—I’d be home all day and ready for them whenever they arrived. I’d already texted the office to tell them I wouldn’t be in until tomorrow. It might’ve felt good to go to work, but something told me I wouldn’t be able to focus with Beast’s—Jude’s—words floating around my head.
After a long shower during which I did not miss the scent of Beast’s soap, and purely appreciated the presence of shampoo made for a human woman and not something better suited to cattle hair, I slumped into bed fully intending to nap for as long as possible and forget about all of humanity for a few hours.
I’d been in love with you for a long time.
And I didn’t want you with him.
You’re everything.
There they came, like good little soldiers in formation. Each sentence flashing through my mind paired with the image of him, his face in absolute misery and his hand fisting, then flexing as he confessed the truth he’d held locked inside himself for years. He’d been vehement, pleading, and flushed from the neckline of his T-shirt to his hair after he’d said those words.
Sleep was a rude jerk and played keep away, so I sat there letting the disbelief grip me, then the denial. Finally, I got up and decided I’d clean everything in my place before my friends arrived just in case there were any fun germs hanging out from before I’d left—aka in another lifetime.
How was I supposed to function normally when that man just said he’d been in love with me? How could I possibly wrap my head around his words when he’d treated me with such glaring disdain for so long?
Could I even believe him?
Beast wasn’t someone to talk for talking’s sake. He didn’t speak even when spoken to half the time and I didn’t see what he had to gain from lying about something like that. If anything, it put him at a disadvantage. Admitting he’d loved me, even in obvious past tense, made everything so…
So…
Messy.
Confusing.
Utterly incomprehensible.
By the time Dove and Elise arrived, I was crawling out of my skin and ready to get some feedback from someone outside my own head. I’d also escalated from sadness and disbelief to… well, really, to anger.
Because how dare he.
It’d become a chant, a low-level refrain in the vein of one of his classic, barely intelligible grunts— how dare he, how dare he, how dare he.
It’d built and built, each passing second, each remembrance of his agonized face and that tone weaving together to create the parachute, and by the time my friends saw my face, I’d jumped fully out of the logic plane and was spiraling on gusts of confusion and untethered, irrational fury.
Dove bustled in with a large bag sporting the Guac logo splashed across it, and the sight instantly brightened my life, even through the storm of anger banging cymbals in my mind.
Nothing would help the situation like chips and guac. Since my appetite had fully returned and my stomach appeared to be behaving normally, I would drown at least some of my rage in avocado-based therapy.
Elise followed, brow furrowed and face downcast as she tapped at her phone before slipping it into her pocket and looking up right as Dove rushed me and pressed her palm to my forehead, nurse mode activated.
“Oh my gosh, you’re alive. I thought for sure he would’ve skinned you and boiled you for stew.” She squeezed me tight, then leaned back and squeezed my shoulders, then my biceps, then wrists then hands before holding my palms up, then flipping them over to inspect my unpolished nails. She raised her phone and shone a light in my eyes for a second before I flinched away. She grabbed my head and steadied me, studying my pupils before saying, “Okay, you seem okay, but are you okay? Because I would not be okay.”
I laughed, grateful for her sense of drama and humor, not to mention her instant care-taking that provided the perfect momentary distraction and disarmed me for a minute.
“Seriously, it’s amazing you two made it out alive,” Elise added, a small grin on her stunning face.
“I’m amazed, too, though it probably helped that I was either unconscious or delirious most of the time.”
And… had I? Somewhere in me, I recognized that part of who I was didn’t make it out. Jude had steadily throttled the hatred out of me with his attentiveness, his gentleness, his homemade bread, and wearing his fluffy boy cat on his shoulders.
No. No. We do not think of the cat or we lose all ability to think clearly.
Dove settled the bag on my counter. “Not even lying, I knew you were in bad shape based on your texts.”
Elise nodded. “Totally.”
“Because they were short?”
Dove chuckled, pulling out a large bag of chips with a splotchy patchwork of grease stains on the sides. “No. Because you were only reassuring us you were fine and not ranting about how awful he is.”
I forced a laugh. “Yeah. He was…” How could I explain it? “He was actually really good to me.”
Maybe that’s what sent me through the loop-the-loops of anger yet again… he could be so lovely. He’d been so far from the beast he’d embodied, and yet our history… he’d loved me, and he’d let us go on like this?
Clearly, the love had died out at some point.
The silence in response to my statement had me looking up to find them both frozen, Dove holding a container of guacamole aloft, and Elise holding two glasses she must’ve just taken out of the open cupboard in front of her.
“What?”
“Beast was good to you ? Should we have you evaluated for Stockholm’s Syndrome?”
Elise cracked up, but Dove held steady. I rolled my eyes at her, though based on how I’d ranted about him in the past, and the many times they’d seen how tense any situation became when both of us were present, I couldn’t fault her for the assumption.
“He didn’t hold me hostage, for one, and two… he was great. And you know I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t completely true because I have nothing but contempt for the man.”
Not true anymore, and you know it.
Ugh. There came the feelings to mess everything up.
“Wait, you do not sound like you have contempt. You sound… something.” Elise narrowed her eyes.
Dove finished unloading the bag of takeout and gestured for us to take our meals as we moved to my small dining table.
Elise poured waters and raised her glass. “I’m sorry this is water, but I figured after being sick, margaritas were a no go.”
“Correct. Rain check on margaritas. This woman needs hydration and rest and to tell us why she’s conflicted over a man she has hated for years after a few nights at his mountain cabin.” Dove wiggled her brows like something salacious happened in the last few days.
How to begin? Well, he gave me a bath and carried me to the bed and then, just before it all ended, he told me he used to be in love with me. Neat, right?
When I didn’t speak, Elise set her hand on my arm where it rested on the table. “Hey, whatever’s going on, you can tell us.”
The compassion in her eyes made my heart ache. These women were pure gold, and I was so deeply grateful to have them in my life.
“He really was great. It was confusing and I feel upside-down. We were almost like friends by the end, and then—” I dove a chip into the container of guac. “Then I asked him why he did what he did.”
Eyes wide, Dove urged, “And?”
“And he said I wouldn’t like what he had to say. So I went to bed angry and didn’t sleep the whole night, and we drove back to town, and he followed me all the way home to make sure I was safe and when we got here, I told him off again , and he finally told me why.”
“ And!? ” Elise this time.
I leaned back in the chair, the weight of these emotions and lack of sleep hitting me all at once. “And he told me Kurt really had assaulted someone. That he, Beast, always suspected he’d cheated on me. And that Kurt was an idiot for doing that. ”
“That steaming pile of dung,” Dove said through clenched teeth.
“I’m so sorry.” Elise’s eyes shone with sympathy.
This bit, they already knew from what I’d said at book club. Not the Jude point-of-view, but the gist of it. Now came the hardest part.
“When I asked him why he never told me Kurt was cheating, do you know what that total jerk face had to say to me?” I said, my voice far more watery than angry, because even that heat couldn’t burn through the tenderness I felt now.
They waited, rapt.
“He said he couldn’t trust himself—that there was no concrete evidence, and he wasn’t sure if it was just wishful thinking.”
“What? Why?” Dove asked, echoing Elise’s expression.
My stomach pitched but my heart flipped when I explained, “Because he was in love with me. And he didn’t want me with Kurt from the beginning.”
Jaws dropped. Eyes grew wide. Dove shoved up from the table and paced.
“Wait. No.” She circled back to the table. “Waiiiit.”
“Seriously? He said that? Just… said it?” Elise asked, as dumbfounded as I still felt.
I nodded, relieved they were as shocked as I felt, and feeling a new wave of frustration crash in me. “I mean, who does that?”
Dove nodded. “Seriously. Who does that.”
Elise sat quietly, clearly still absorbing the news.
“He never once expressed interest in me. And now, he’s acting like he was so in love with me he didn’t trust himself to know whether his best friend was cheating? Did I enter an alternate universe?” The heat in me stoked to a flame.
“I’ll admit, I’m hung up on the fact that he’s saying he loved you and yet he acts like you’re radioactive when you’re within ten feet of each other.” Elise dunked a chip in her guac. “Damn, I wish we had margaritas for this.”
I laughed for a second before continuing with her thought. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Obviously, I went to his cabin before I knew I was sick when I realized I’d been so brutally honest with him while he was struggling with grieving. And I don’t feel proud of that.”
Elise reached for me, setting a hand on my arm. “Aw, my friend, you are amazing for doing that. As rough a time as he’s having, and I don’t want to discount that because it sounds like the grief is significant, I do want to acknowledge that you have been incredibly civil to him most of the time. After your assignment together, things boiled over, and I don’t know if you can be blamed for that.”
I exhaled slowly. “I don’t know. I’m starting to wonder whether I’m the cause of so much of this head-butting and meanness. Like, did I create this rift between us and he just… responded in kind?”
I hated the thought, but after his kindness to me all weekend, and then his parting shot… I couldn’t turn away from it. If he’d really felt that way, but I’d been so unwilling to hear him out in my own grief and disbelief over Kurt leaving… had I caused all of this?
“Mmm, no. I call BS on that. It’s not like he was just gruff and avoided you. Sometimes, he was actively a jerk, right?” Elise asked as Dove sat back down.
“Yes. But I… I’ve lashed out at him so much. I just don’t know.”
We were quiet, crunching on chips and likely all wishing our water would turn into wine. Dove broke the silence first.
“Let’s say it’s true… what does it change? Here you are now, and you’ve been nothing short of enemies for the last five-plus years until approximately ninety-six hours ago. So… what? It’s not like you were in love with him, too. It’s not like it changes anything, other than maybe giving us insight. Unless…” Her blue eyes skewered into me. “Unless you had feelings for him, too.”
I scoffed. “I was engaged to someone else. So no. I didn’t.”
But what I didn’t say was that I had liked him almost instantly. His giant hand had swallowed mine in a shake that first day and I’d been compelled to say his name out loud because it suited him so perfectly—I didn’t know how I knew that, I just did. And then he’d gotten this pleased look, almost like he’d enjoyed me saying it.
But along came Kurt, and somehow, inexplicably, he’d worn me all the way down. And he became the person on whom I pinned my hopes of finding an anchor and a solution to what I’d seen as the problem of my solitude and loneliness. And Jude never said a thing—never made a move, never even hinted.
Until now.
But that was in the past. Likely so far in the past he couldn’t even recall the feeling of loving me.
And all I could feel was anger that he’d allowed me to hate him for so long without telling me the truth. And maybe more so, anger that I’d let myself be so awful for so long.