Chapter 1 #2
He could not make himself explain past that. He sent the third one a breath later, the only word that would come.
The phone lit.
It was the same thing twice, rattled out and sent before he could tidy it, and that was how Jude knew Nate had stood up the second the texts landed. Nate, who never repeated himself, who chose words the way other men chose tools. He had said it twice because he was already moving.
Jude typed ok, two letters, and looked at them before he sent them, because two letters was all he had and he knew Nate would read the size of the word and understand exactly how much of Jude was left tonight to type with. He sent it anyway.
Then he sat in the dark booth with his knees up and watched the screen as though it might change the darkness of the night, and he waited.
He felt Nate before he saw him.
It was not a swoon and not a hope. Jude had given up hoping years ago, folded it small and put it somewhere he didn't open, because Nate was Easton's best friend and straight as a fence post and fifteen years was a long time to want something you were never going to be allowed.
This was lower than hope and older. Fifteen years had taught Jude the exact sound of Nate's boots on a wood floor, the unhurried weight of that walk.
His head came up toward it before he had found the door with his eyes.
Nate was already most of the way to the booth.
He had on a Carhartt and jeans, and he was not smiling.
Nate smiled the way other men breathed, and a Nate who was not smiling told Jude more than a sentence could have.
The clubhouse was loud and Nate moved through it quietly, and the room seemed to make a little space for him without being asked.
He stopped at the edge of the table; looked at Jude for a moment, just looked, and Jude made himself hold still under it and not perform anything.
“Hey,” Nate said.
Jude's head came up. He did not have a word ready. The relief had hit him too hard and too fast and emptied his mouth the same way the panic did, except this had no fear in it anywhere.
“Nate,” he managed.
“Get your stuff.”
Jude got his stuff. He got the jacket and the messenger bag.
His hand closed around the half-full water glass out of pure habit before Nate said, low and even, “Don't drink anything you set down,” and Jude put it back on the table like it was hot.
He filed the instruction somewhere with all the other instructions he had not known he was waiting for.
They were halfway across the floor when Rand came back in from the cold.
After that Jude mostly watched.
He watched Rand notice the bag in his hand.
He watched the smile come up on Rand's face, the wide easy one, the babe one, and he watched it stop being able to do its job, because Nate had stepped half in front of Jude without seeming to move at all.
Rand was talking. Of course he was. Rand was very good at talking; it was the first thing Jude had ever loved about him and it was going to be the last thing he believed.
He's mine, Rand said, somewhere in it, and Jude felt the old reflex twitch in his throat, the apology, the smoothing and fawning, the sentence that would make everyone comfortable again.
He opened his mouth.
Nate spoke before the stutter could even decide whether to betray him. Jude never had to find the word. Nate found all of them, flat and unhurried, never once getting loud. Jude stood in the shelter of that flatness and understood that he was being handled with care, and let himself be.
Jude could not have repeated a word of what Nate said to Rand.
He only saw the room change. He saw Sovereign, President of the Lords of Darkness MC in the high-backed chair at the back, not moving, watching Rand with cold appraisal.
And he saw Scarlet’s knife. It had been turning between the Enforcer’s fingers the whole time, a small bright wheel, and at some point in what Nate was saying it simply stopped, point-down, and went still.
And that was what closed Rand’s mouth. Not Nate. The knife.
Then Nate’s hand came to rest against the small of Jude’s back. Barely. The lightest Nate had ever touched him in fifteen years, two fingers and the side of a palm, just enough to mean this way.
Jude went.
Outside the cold was clean and total, and the lot had gone dark in the corners, and nobody followed them.
Nate walked him to a truck Jude didn’t know, an old Ford, opened the passenger door, and Jude climbed up into it.
The door shut. He watched Nate come around the front of the truck through the windshield, big and unhurried, and get in on the other side.
He didn’t start the engine right away like Jude expected.
Nate put his hands on the wheel and left them there.
Jude looked at the side of his face. He knew a rescued person was supposed to be quiet and grateful and small about it, and he had every intention of being all three. Instead, however, the only words left in him climbed straight up and out.
“You came for me.”
“Yeah.” Nate’s voice had gone rough at the bottom. He turned the key, and the truck shook itself awake around them. “Yeah. I did.”
He pulled out of the lot. At the mouth of the service road he turned left, and Jude’s tired brain took a full block to understand that left was wrong, that left was not the way to his condo, not the way back to the rooms where Rand’s things were and Rand would, eventually, also be.
“This isn’t the way home,” Jude said. Even he could hear how small and quiet his voice was.
“No,” Nate said. “It’s not.”
He did not explain it. He just drove, both hands on the wheel, the heater ticking as it came up warm, and Jude sat in the passenger seat of a borrowed truck and didn’t let himself look too long or too hard at how easy it had been to get in.
With Nate. Because if there was one true thing in his whole life, it was Nate.