Chapter 3 #2
“Where’ve you been? I came back early, I’ve been calling you for three days, I thought you were dead in a ditch, Jude, I called hospitals-” Rand’s voice cracked, genuinely cracked, and his eyes were wet, and Jude could never hold onto this from the outside, never make it make sense in the daylight when he tried to explain it to himself: Rand’s tears were real.
Not performed. Rand felt every one of them.
That was what made it work. “I thought something happened to you.”
“Something did happen to me.”
It came out smaller than he meant it. It came out like a question.
“I know.” Rand’s face crumpled. He came into the room, and Jude held still instead of stepping back, because stepping back made it worse, and his body had learned that before his mind ever agreed to it.
He stood with the passport in his hand while Rand crossed to him.
“I know, okay? I know I’ve been- I know it’s been bad.
The drinking. I know. I’ve been so messed up since the tour fell through and I took it out on you and that’s not- you didn’t deserve that.
You didn’t. You’re the only good thing I have. ”
“Rand...”
“No, let me- I need to say it.” The tears were coming now, freely, and Rand’s hands came up to Jude’s face, and Jude let them, because the alternative was a fight and he did not have a fight in him.
“I’ve been thinking about it the whole time you were gone.
About what I’d do. If you really left. And I couldn’t- Jude, I couldn’t find the part where I’d still be here.
Do you understand what I’m saying to you? ”
And there it was.
Jude had heard this before. He had heard it enough times to know its shape, to know that it was a hand closing around his throat and not a confession, to know, in the clear flat underneath place, that the people who loved him had never made their staying alive his job, and that the ones who did this did not love him.
He knew all of that. He knew it the way he knew Nate was straight and the door was closed: a fact that lived in his head and could not get down into the rest of him where it might have done some good.
Because under the knowing was something older, set in him so early he could not find its edges: that he was a person other people chose, and choosing could be unchosen, and his whole life was a long apology for the space he took up.
He had been nine when his birth parents went off a winter road and did not come back, and Jerome and Lenay had taken him in and fought the system to keep him, loved him as fierce and plain as they loved Easton, and he had spent every year since terrified of being one more weight on a house that already carried too many.
Jerome’s legs. Lenay’s good days and bad days.
A second son nobody had planned for, dropped onto a family that was already going without.
He had learned to need as little as a child could need.
Rand had found that the first month and had been pressing his thumb into it ever since.
You’re nothing without me. Who else is going to put up with you.
I’m the only one who stayed. And now: I couldn’t find the part where I’d still be here.
If Jude left and Rand did something, it would be Jude’s fault. He knew that was not true. He could not make it not feel true.
“Don’t say that,” Jude said. “Don’t put that on me.”
“I’m not putting anything on you. I’m telling you the truth.
You wanted honesty, right? You always say I don’t tell you how I feel.
” Rand’s thumbs moved on Jude’s cheekbones, wiping at nothing, the old tender gesture that used to mean safe and now meant caught.
“Stay. Just tonight. We’ll talk. Real talking, not- I’ll be different, I’ve had three days to think and I’m going to be different, I already called Dr. Shaw, I’m going back on the meds, I did that for you, I did that while you were gone.
Don’t throw three years away over a bad month.
Please. Please, baby. I can’t do this without you. I won’t.”
The duffel was on the bed. The passport was in his hand. Nate was in a truck eleven floors down with the engine running, and all Jude had to do was finish zipping the bag and walk out, and he knew it, he could see it, the whole clean shape of the leaving was right there in front of him.
He felt himself fold.
It was not a decision. He could never explain that to anyone.
It was not a moment where he weighed it and chose wrong.
It was a slow giving-way, the floor he had not trusted finally proving it was not there, and he felt it happen from the inside: the version of him that had packed the bag going quiet, and the older version taking over, the one that had been apologizing for twenty-four years for being a child somebody had to choose.
His shoulders came down. His hand, holding the passport, lowered.
“One night,” Jude said.
Rand exhaled against his hair, and Jude felt the win go through him, the small triumphant slackening Rand always tried to hide and never could, and Jude closed his eyes so he would not have to see it land.
“One night,” Rand agreed, gentle now, gentle as anything, because he had what he wanted and gentleness was cheap once he had it. “Thank you. Thank you, baby. You won’t regret it. Come here.”
Jude went where he was pulled. Of course he did.
His phone was in his back pocket. At some point, while Rand held him and talked into his hair about how it was going to be different, Jude got one hand around it and typed without looking, the way he could type without looking, and sent the only thing he could manage that was both true and not true at all.
He turned the phone face-down against his leg before the reply could come, because he already knew the shape of the reply, and he could not survive reading it from inside Rand’s arms.
He had been so close. He had packed the bag.
He would lie awake on this one. Not on having stayed. He had always known, underneath, that he would stay. Leaving was for other people. What would keep him up was the duffel on the bed with his whole life zipped into it, and how close his own hand had come to carrying it out the door.
Rand kissed his temple and called him baby and Jude stood in the beautiful cold condo eleven floors above the man who had come for him, and let himself be kept.