51. Lilah
51
LILAH
He looked good enough to eat in black pants that hugged his body, doing nothing to hide the bulge between his thighs, and a silky black shirt he left unbuttoned almost to his navel, putting his tattoos on full display.
The black was a contrast to his fair hair and the blond scruff along his jaw. He looked like a blond god getting ready to do the Devil’s work.
The fun kind.
I hadn’t been lying — I was starving — but now it wasn’t just for food, and I was almost sorry we couldn’t stay in the room, that I couldn’t slip my hands inside his silky shirt, feel the sculpted peaks of his muscular chest, straddle his body like I had on the sofa at home.
Then I remembered I was in Paris, and since Paris wasn’t an everyday thing for me, it would only be smart to enjoy it.
We took a car to a restaurant called Le Bayadère. It was the nicest place I’d ever eaten, even counting the restaurant in Greece, which had been amazing. Le Bayadère was all thick crown moldings and chairs upholstered in ivory that I wouldn’t have dared to eat on at home.
Candles flickered at the center of every table and romantic music played in the background, the lights of the city glimmering on the other side of the windows.
We were ushered to a quiet table where Jude pulled out my chair, then ordered for both of us.
In French.
“You’re full of surprises,” I told Jude when the server, a stoic older man with dark hair and the formality of an English butler, disappeared. “I didn’t know you speak French.”
He shrugged. “It was just a hobby, but stuff like that helps when you apply for SEAL
training.”
“Did you use it?” I asked. “In the military?”
“Not often, but it came in handy once or twice.” He flashed me a devastatingly sexy grin and heat pooled between my thighs. “This is a lot more fun though.”
I couldn’t disagree, especially after the server uncorked a bottle of red wine that tasted like vanilla and blackberries. The wine was followed by a cheese plate complete with succulent figs and tangy olives, then a five-course meal that included radicchio salad, chicken pate inside flaky golden pastry, salmon with caviar, and escargots, which were snails.
And yeah, the thought of eating snails kind of grossed me out, but they turned out to be little morsels of buttery, garlicky goodness.
For once, we didn’t talk about Imperium Fratrum or missing girls or mysterious hard drives. Jude told me how he’d been drawing since he was a kid, how the minute he picked up a pencil it had felt like coming home.
“My parents humored me for a while,” Jude said, taking a bite of the salmon. “Even my dad. He paid for my art lessons and everything. I loved it.”
“What changed?” I asked.
He took a drink of the wine. “I got older, went to high school. My dad said it was time to ‘get serious’ about something, and by ‘something’ he didn’t mean art.”
“Did you have to stop taking lessons?”
He nodded. “My parents fought hard about it, one of the only times I’d heard them fight actually. My dad won. I stopped going to art classes and started fighting with my dad pretty much constantly. I just wanted…”
The candlelight flickered over his sharp cheekbones.
“What?” I asked. “What did you want?”
He reached across the table and took my hand. “I just wanted to be myself.”
“I know that feeling,” I said softly.
“You do?”
I nodded. “I never thought about my mom’s religious fanaticism when I was a kid. It was just…” I shrugged. “It was just the way things were. I didn’t know any different. But once I got to middle school and then high school, I realized we were… weird.”
Jude laughed a little but there was nothing mean in it. He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed it. “If you’re weird it’s the best kind of weird.”
I smiled. “Thanks, but you know what I mean right? Like I wasn’t just different, I was weird . Everyone else had phones and shared memes on social media and talked about their crushes, and I didn’t even know what some of that stuff looked like. Those things might as well have been a fantasy or… science fiction or something.”
“Did you tell your mom?” he asked. “That you were questioning her religion?”
I laughed. “Noooo. I knew better than that. It would have landed me in the praying closet for days. But I just… knew. Something inside me knew it wasn’t right, all that hellfire and judgement, all those rules.”
“Is that why you went to Brandon Miller’s party that night?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to think back to the night I’d snuck out, trying to remember exactly what I’d been thinking when I’d slipped out my window, dropped to the ground, started walking toward the Millers’ house. “I think I was just curious. And Brandon had invited me, which had never happened before.”
Jude’s expression darkened. “He’s not a good guy.”
“Oh, I know that now,” I said.
“Then again,” Jude said, “neither were we.”
“No.” I squeezed his hand. “Not then. But people change.”
He took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be good. If any of us will ever be good.”
I looked into his eyes, said the thing that came to mind because now, at least, it was true. “Maybe not, but you’re good for me.”
Silence weighed between us, but not the awkward kind.
The meaningful kind.
We turned to less heavy topics over coffee and dessert — bourbon vanilla flan with salted caramel ice cream — but the conversation about Jude’s family lingered in my mind.
The more I got to know the Bastards the less clear everything seemed, the less black-and-white. There would never be an excuse for what they’d done to me in high school, but I was starting to wonder if this was what it meant to be an adult: to see the nuances of not just your own story but everyone else’s, to accept that the vast majority of people weren’t all good or all bad, that they were just an amalgam of their histories and psychology and the things they wanted.
The things they needed.
I wasn’t naive. I knew better than anyone that there were truly bad people in the world, people like Captain Sandoval and the people who’d held me on the Artemis .
Like the men behind Imperium Fratrum.
The brand on the back of my neck had almost healed, the numbers still there but less painful, more of a scar. Now it burned again, like just the thought of Imperium Fratrum was enough to make my body remember what they’d done to me, what they still wanted to do to me and to the other girls who’d gone missing around Blackwell Falls.
Maybe that was part of being an adult too: accepting that there really was evil in the world.
And that sometimes, it was up to you to stop it.