Chapter 2
Nate drove with both hands on the wheel and counted streetlights to keep his mind off what he wanted to do to Rand.
He was good at this. He had spent two years in a desert learning to keep his hands steady while the rest of him wanted to come apart, and then four more years in Marcus’s crew sanding the skill down until it ran without him thinking about it.
His voice had stayed level in the clubhouse.
His hands had stayed open. He hadn’t put Rand through the wall, though there’d been a stretch of about four seconds, while Rand said he’s mine in that arrogant voice, when Nate had known exactly how the wall would feel and exactly how Rand’s collarbone would give.
.. and had wanted it the way a thirsty man wanted water.
He hadn’t done it because Jude had been standing right there, watching, with a panic attack still draining out of his face.
Jude hadn’t needed to watch someone he considered safe, swing.
Jude had needed him steady, so Nate gave him steady, gave it to him so completely that Scarlet’s knife stopped turning out of what looked like professional disappointment, and Sovereign didn’t bother to stand.
At least the worst night of Jude’s recent life ended with nobody bleeding. Nate counted that as a win.
Beside him, Jude had gone quiet, the wrung-out quiet of someone with nothing left to spend.
Nate didn’t look over. A look would land on Jude like a demand for a reaction, and Jude had performed enough tonight. He kept his eyes on the road and ran The List.
The List was four years old. Nate had started it the first time Jude texted him at midnight, some small soft nothing of a message, a question about whether Nate thought a lyric was too much, and Nate had answered it and then lain awake adding items. Things Jude needed and wasn’t getting.
Jude ate when other people fed him and not otherwise.
Jude apologized before he asked for anything, every time, the apology stapled to the front of the request like a customs form.
Jude had a brother in a cell and a mother in a pew and a man in his bed, and only the first two of those had ever once put Jude first. The List had gotten long.
Nate had never shown it to anybody. He’d especially never shown it to Jude, because The List was also, if he was honest, a confession, and Jude was his best friend’s little brother, and Nate had decided a long time ago to carry it rather than make it.
He’d read every text Jude had ever sent him. Most of them more than once. He knew that about himself and didn’t examine it on bright days.
Tonight there were three.
can u get hold of rand. Then the second, the address of the thing wrong with the night: im at the lords clubhouse he was supposed to drive me home.
Then the third, one word, the one that had put Nate’s boots on the floor before his brain finished waking up.
please. Jude asking for help and apologizing for the size of the ask in the same five letters.
He hadn’t asked what’s wrong. He’d learned, over four years, that what’s wrong was a door, and a panicking Jude couldn’t walk through doors; he could only stand in front of them apologizing for not being able to.
So Nate had sent instructions instead. Then he had sent them again, the same four orders twice over, don’t move, don’t drink anything you set down, don’t go anywhere with Rand, fifteen minutes, rattled out and fired off before he could tidy them into something that sounded like a man in control of himself.
He didn’t repeat himself. He had that night.
He had pulled Jack’s truck keys off the hook and gone.
“You’re not going to ask,” Jude said.
It was the first thing he had said since this isn’t the way home, and his voice had the sanded-thin sound it got when there was almost nothing left under it.
“No,” Nate said.
“Why not?”
Nate thought about how to answer that without it becoming a door. “Because you’ll tell me when you tell me,” he said. “And because I already know enough.”
Jude was quiet again. Nate let him be. Out past the glass the long dark blocks ran by, and the one lit gas station, and the river off to the right put its cold smell into the heater air.
Nate drove them through all of it and didn’t reach over.
The wanting to was its own pressure, low and steady, worn so far into him it had stopped being news.
He drove them down toward the water.
The safehouse stood on the last street before the river, a wide brick former factory with a chain-link yard and an overhead light burning yellow into the cold.
Nate had texted Marcus from the clubhouse lot, three words, bringing someone in, and the light was Marcus’s answer.
He left it dark when the house was closed to strangers.
He left it burning when a bed was already being made.
Nate parked in the gravel and didn’t reach for the door yet.
“This is where some of the crew lives,” he said.
“Me, and a few others. I’ll tell you what’s inside before we walk in, so none of it comes as a surprise.
” He kept his voice even, a man laying out a floor plan.
“There’s a man named Marcus. He’ll be awake.
He runs this house and he is the closest thing I have to a father.
He will not ask you a single question tonight.
Nobody in there will. You get a room with a door, and the door locks from your side. ”
Jude looked at the house through the windshield. The light put a little warmth on his face and his face didn’t quite believe it.
“There’s people in there,” Jude said. It came out small.
“Asleep. Every one of them is someone I’d trust with you.
” Nate made himself say the rest plainly, because it was the true reason and Jude had earned that much.
“I could have taken you to my place. It’s quiet, it’s mine, there’s nobody in it.
But there’s only one of me. Tonight I wanted you under a roof with a whole houseful of people who would put themselves between you and harm and not ask why first. That is what this house is for. ”
Jude was quiet a moment. Then he nodded, the small worn-out nod of a man with nothing left to guard himself with.
The house met them warm.
The hall smelled of last night’s garlic and old woodsmoke. Boots stood paired along the baseboard, there were more coats than hooks. Jude stopped just inside the door. Nate let him stop, and let the house do the talking. It was better at this than he was.
Marcus stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug he wasn’t drinking from. He’d pulled a sweater on over whatever he slept in, and he didn’t have the look of a man just woken. He had the look of a man who’d put the light on and waited.
He took Jude in. Not a stare. Marcus had spent thirty years reading people from across a courtroom and he didn’t need to stare.
“You’ll be Jude,” he said. “Nate’s talked about you. I’m Marcus.”
Jude’s eyes went to Nate, just for a second, at Nate’s talked about you, and Nate kept his own face still and let it pass.
“Top of the stairs, second door on the left,” Marcus said.
“There are clean sheets on the bed already. This house keeps two rooms ready at all times for exactly tonight. You don’t owe anyone here a story, you don’t owe rent, and you don’t owe a soul an explanation if you decide to leave.
The bedroom door locks. The front door opens.
Both of them answer to you and to nobody else while you are under this roof. ”
Jude’s throat worked. For a moment Nate thought the kindness might undo Jude faster than Rand’s cruelty ever had, because Jude had a wall built against cruelty and nothing at all built to meet this.
“Okay,” Jude said, rough. “Thank you.”
“Take him up,” Marcus said to Nate, and it was gentle, and it was everything.
The second room on the left was small and plain and clean: a bed, a lamp, a chair, a window that gave onto the black moving shape of the river. Nate stood in the doorway while Jude set the messenger bag down on the chair like he wasn’t certain he was allowed to set it anywhere.
“I’m right through that wall,” Nate said. “Knock on it, or just say my name. I’ll be awake before you finish saying it. I don’t sleep much regardless.”
Jude looked at him from the middle of the little room. Under the smeared eyeliner his eyes were doing something Nate couldn’t afford to name, something that wanted to be hope and didn’t have the strength tonight to stand all the way up.
“You’re being so-” Jude stopped. Tried again. “I called you in the middle of the night.”
“You did.”
“And you came.”
“I’ll always come when you call,” Nate said, and heard the size of it land in the small room, and didn’t reach for anything lighter to set on top of it.
Jude’s mouth moved with no sound. He looked down at the bag on the chair.
Jude had nothing left to say tonight, and Nate didn’t make him find any.
He didn’t sleep, and hadn’t expected to.
He lay on his own bed on the other side of the wall from Jude, in his clothes, and listened to the house hold one more person than it had held that morning.
Jude wasn’t loud. Jude was a held breath through the wall, the small shift of a body learning a strange bed, once the small sound of a phone screen woken and checked and dimmed again.
Nate lay still and counted each sound and didn’t get up, because crossing that wall was Jude’s to ask for, and a rule was worth nothing if the man who set it broke it in the first hour.
So he stayed where he was and made himself do the harder thing, which was to be honest with himself in the dark.
Here was the honest thing. Some low and disloyal part of Nate had heard those three texts come in tonight, had read can u get hold of rand and the please under it, and had felt, alongside the fear, alongside the clean real fear for a person he loved, a flare of something close to gladness.
Because Jude had called him. Out of every name in his phone, at the worst hour of a bad night, Jude’s thumb had found Nate’s.
And Nate had wanted that. He had wanted to be the name the thumb found, and a man who wanted that, who warmed at a frightened person reaching for him, had to look hard at himself, and Nate made himself look.
He was thirty-one. He had known Jude since Jude was nine years old.
He had known him as Easton’s little brother first, a quiet kid at the edge of a room full of louder kids, a kid who sang in the church choir on Sundays in a voice too big for the body it came out of.
Nate had been seventeen then, and bad at reading, and grateful to Easton for never making that mean anything.
Jude had been a fact of the Davros house, the same as the screen door that stuck and the dog that didn’t bark.
Nate hadn’t watched him then the way he watched him now.
That had come on later, and slowly, the way rust comes, and Nate couldn’t have named the morning it started.
But it had started, and Nate did not lie to himself about it.
He was bisexual. He’d known it a long time, the way he knew his own blood type, a plain fact he didn’t advertise and hadn’t so much hidden as simply never handed out.
With women it was easy and uncomplicated, and he had let most people stop reading there, because the rest of it was nobody’s business and because the rest of it, when it involved men, came with a tax Nate had grown tired of paying.
Men took one look at the size of him, the shoulders, the hands, and built a Nate inside their heads, and the Nate in their heads was always the one doing the holding-down.
They were always wrong. Years ago Nate had stopped correcting them. It was easier to stay home.
None of which he had any business turning over with Jude Davros asleep on the other side of his wall, hurt, and trusting him.
Nate rolled onto his back and laid his forearm over his eyes.
A decent man, here, did nothing. Nate would keep Jude safe and fed and unbothered, he would keep every door in this house exactly as free as Marcus had promised, and he would keep every want of his own behind his own teeth.
When Jude was steady again Jude would walk back out into his own life and choose it, whatever it was, and Nate would let him, because the alternative was to be one more man standing over Jude deciding things for him, and Nate would put his hand in a fire before he would be that.
He had it settled. He felt almost calm with it settled.
Then his phone lit on the nightstand, and he turned his head, and the calm went thin.
It was Ghost. Ghost did not text at three in the morning for nothing. Ghost did not text at three for less than a fire. Nate read it twice.
Nate lay there with the screen going dark in his hand.
Sixteen. Third since Easter. He knew the shape of what Ghost wasn’t putting in a text, because it was the shape his whole adult life had bent itself around: a kid, a city that didn’t look hard enough, a road that ran somewhere and didn’t run back.
The old place in his chest pulled cold and tight, the place with a boy’s name kept in it, a boy from his mother’s church, a face Nate still saw on the nights he let himself.
He set the phone face down on the nightstand.
The room on the other side of his wall had someone in it now who needed Nate steady.
The crew would need him steady in a few hours.
He breathed the slow way he had taught himself to breathe, and he put the cold place back behind its door, and he lay in the dark a long while and listened to Jude not sleep, and did not sleep himself, and waited for it to become a morning he could do something with.