Chapter 8
Three days in, Nate had his wanting down to something that looked like care.
He knocked, even though the house was his and Jude would have told him not to bother.
He knocked because the sound bought Jude a second to put his face back on, and a man who'd spent two years learning to do that in front of someone dangerous had earned the right to keep doing it in front of someone safe.
Nate set the food on the nightstand instead of handing it over, because reaching for it cost Jude a wince he tried to bury, and Nate would sooner eat glass than be one more thing in the world that made Jude flinch.
He stood with his back to the window so the river light fell on Jude's face and left his own in shadow.
And he kept the margin. A foot of cold air between his hand and every part of Jude he wanted, which was the whole of him.
The rule had a name. He'd said it to himself in the truck on the worst night of Jude's year, and he said it again now, every time he carried up soup he'd made with more care than soup needed: a decent man, here, does nothing.
Doing nothing was the hardest work he had ever done, and he had done field surgery in a tent with the power out.
Jude slept those first two days like a man set down after carrying everything he was a thousand miles too far.
The concussion meant they kept the room dark, so Nate brought broth and crackers and sat in the corner chair and watched the blanket rise and fall, and Benny lay along Jude's good side like he'd been posted there.
Nate envied a beagle the right to put his weight against that body without it meaning anything.
By the third day Jude was sitting up. By the fourth he was eating real food with his right hand, the left arm tucked in close around the ribs without his even knowing he did it, and Nate watched him do it and loved him so hard it sat in his throat like a swallowed coin.
He was not supposed to be counting these things.
The tilt of Jude's wrist. The way the bruise had started going gold at its edges, like something healing wanted to be beautiful about it.
He counted them anyway. He'd stopped lying to himself somewhere around the second night.
Trip caught it on the fourth afternoon.
They were in the kitchen: Nate at the counter, running through the day's case notes with Ghost's latest manifest printout flattened under his coffee mug; Trip at the table with what he claimed was a crossword but was actually him not sleeping.
Jude had come downstairs, moving carefully, one hand on the railing, and had stopped in the doorway when he saw them both. Nate had looked up.
That was it. That was the whole thing. Nate had looked up, his hand had started to lift off the counter, not toward Jude, not quite, just a sort of reflex, an inch of motion he caught and cancelled before it laed anywhere, and when he looked back down at the manifest, the printout had blurred slightly before his eyes came back into focus.
Trip said nothing. No joke, which was how Nate knew.
He waited. Trip had the patience of someone who had spent years watching people lie to federal agents, and that patience had not gone anywhere just because he was no longer federal.
"Davya," Nate said, to the printout.
"Mm," Trip said.
Ghost had found it in the Windsor manifest: a cargo entry listing under-18 event equipment against a promoter name that matched no registered business.
There had been six more. Same profile as the first two occasions when the teens had gone missing, cash door, no posted owner, venue pulled from the all-ages circuit.
The kind of venue that didn't care what was in the van as long as the van pulled around back.
Nate knew that circuit. The city's version of it ran through the same pockets Jude's band had played for the last two years, the same unlicensed basements and half-legal event spaces where nobody checked IDs too hard because the draw was the music and the crowd was young.
He'd been to two of those shows. He knew exactly what the rooms looked like: low ceilings, sticky floors, the particular smell of a space that went from sweat to cold between midnight and two a.m.
He filed it. He filed it and pressed it down into the part of his head that held the case, separate from the part that held Jude, and he didn’t look at those two containers at the same time.
Trip set down the crossword.
"How's the shoulder?" he said, not looking at Nate.
Nate's shoulder was fine. He had not mentioned his shoulder in three days. "Better," he said.
"Good," Trip said. He picked the crossword back up. Then, lighter, to the grid: "You remember I told you. Back when his name kept lighting up your phone and you kept turning it face-down. I said that one was going to be a problem for you." He filled in a word. "I didn't say it to be right."
"You're not wrong, either," Nate said, because there was no point lying to a man who had spent a career catching liars.
"No," Trip agreed. "I'm not."
When Nate glanced up, Trip's eyes were on the puzzle, pen moving, the small deliberate incuriosity of a man who had decided where to stop looking and meant to stay stopped.
He had not said anything, either. He had a cup of coffee he wasn't drinking, and he looked at Nate the way he looked at things he'd decided not to fix yet, a beat past long enough to mean something and gone before Nate could be sure it had.
Then he went down the hall, and Nate listened to his footsteps on the stairs.
Jude had gone back upstairs by the time Nate finished with the manifest, and Nate carried a plate up because it was dinnertime and someone had to.
He knocked. Waited. "Come in" was Jude's voice through the door, low and careful in the register the cracked ribs had given him.
The room was dim. Jude had the window cracked two inches at the top, the compromise Scarlet had allowed once the concussion passed: air but no direct light.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed with a paperback open on his knee, Benny pressed against his thigh, and the light from the hall came in low across his face and lifted the green in his right eye.
The left was still bruised, yellowing at the edges, the swelling mostly down. It looked like what it was.
Nate set the plate on the nightstand. He did not leave.
He wasn't sure when he'd stopped leaving. The knock had been a courtesy once. Now it was the toll he paid to get back into this room, the small honest price of the only forty minutes of his day he wanted, and he'd quit pretending the staying was about the soup.
"You don't have to stay up here," Jude said, and it wasn't a complaint, it was a door held open for Nate to leave through, the kind of out Jude gave everyone because Jude had spent his whole life sure he was a weight people were too polite to set down.
Nate knew that out. He'd watched Jude offer it to waiters, to bandmates, to the man who'd put the bruise on his face.
He had never once wanted to take it less than he did right now.
"I know," Nate said. He pulled the chair from the corner and sat in it anyway.
Jude looked at him for a second. Then he put the paperback face-down on the bed and reached for the plate.
Right hand. Careful.
They were quiet for a while. Downstairs someone had the game on, the sound muted to almost nothing, and the creak of the house settling was familiar by now, a vocabulary of wood and old pipe Nate had been learning for years.
He knew which stair was louder. He knew the sound the radiator made when the building temperature dropped three degrees.
He had not ever, until four days ago, known what this particular room looked like in the dark with the window cracked.
"The band played the Woodbridge Box last year," Jude said.
He wasn't looking at Nate. He ate the way he did everything now, slow and a little braced, sitting up straight because lying back pulled the ribs, and Nate watched him manage it and wanted to take the plate and the pain and the whole careful effort of him into his own hands. "Before. Twice, I think."
Nate knew the Woodbridge Box. Small all-ages venue off the Lodge, cash door, the owner a guy who had twice filed noise complaints against himself to keep the city off his back. On the case manifest, one degree removed from the promoter name.
"Good show?" he said.
"The sound was bad," Jude said. He gave a half-shrug and stopped it, the ribs checking him. "But the room was full. I liked the room full." A pause. "We're supposed to play there again in six weeks. I don't know if that-" He stopped. "I don't know."
"You'll be past the ribs in six weeks," Nate said.
Jude looked at him then, the unhurt eye gone clear and dark in the low light, and there was something in it Nate wanted to name and wouldn't let himself, because naming what he saw in Jude's face was a way of touching it, and touching it was the one thing he wasn't allowed.
He'd lived too many years inside that rule.
He was so tired he could have wept from it.
"Yeah," Jude said. "Okay."
He went back to the plate. Nate looked at the window.