Chapter 9
Jude didn't sleep, and for once it wasn't the bad kind of not-sleeping.
He lay in the borrowed bed with the borrowed shirt soft against him, Benny a warm weight folded into his good side, and held himself dead still, the stillness of a man with something balanced on his open palm that a single twitch could send off the edge.
Nate had kissed him. Nate, who was Easton's best friend and straight as a fence post and too many years of a closed door.
He'd crossed the two feet of careful air he kept like a vow and put his mouth on Jude's mouth, then left with a gentle smile on his kiss swollen lips and desire in his dark brown eyes.
Jude had felt it. Nate's hand had shaken against his jaw, and Nate's hands didn't shake. Years of watching him without meaning to, and Jude had never once seen it happen. Something had to have gotten in deep to put a tremor in a hand like that.
He turned the kiss over in the dark, looking for the place it broke. There wasn't one.
That was the part that wouldn't let him sleep. Not the kiss itself. That it had held.
He had a line in the spiral notebook, written two years ago at the kitchen table at three in the morning, that he'd told himself was about wanting in general, the abstract animal of it, because that was the only way he'd been able to write it down at all.
I keep a door I painted shut and call it a wall.
He'd believed that. He'd leaned his whole life against the door and called it peace.
And tonight a man had walked up to it from the other side and it hadn't been a wall at all.
It had only ever been a door. The paint came off in one pull, and Jude lay there with his heart slamming the same way it did under stage lights, too big for the body it was in, and couldn't for the life of him find the catch.
He pressed two fingers to the inside of his own wrist, where Scarlet had pressed his, and counted. Fast. Not panic-fast. The other kind. He hadn't known, until tonight, that there was another kind.
Morning came grey and quiet., Jude's nerve drained out with the dark. It always did. Daylight made a coward of him; daylight was where he could be seen.
By the time Nate knocked, Jude had built three versions of the conversation and discarded all three, because every one of them ended with Jude apologizing for having been kissed, and he was so tired of the shape his own mouth made around sorry.
He had been sorry since he was a child. Sorry felt like the shape he came in.
Other kids came tall or left-handed; he came apologizing.
And he was lying here this morning under a roof full of men who didn't seem to want his sorry, with the print of Nate's mouth still somewhere on his, and the apology came up out of habit.
He swallowed it back down and it tasted like a stone.
"Come in," Jude said. He was impressed by how steady it sounded.
Nate came in. He had two mugs this time. He didn't wear the careful look he put on before gentling someone through bad news, and Jude took in the absence of it fast and complete and his chest loosened by a notch.
Nate set a mug on the nightstand. He didn't sit in the corner chair. He pulled it close, close enough that the careful foot of air was gone, and Jude watched him do it and understood that the removal was deliberate. Jude's whole body went still and listening.
"I'm not going to pretend last night didn't happen," Nate said. "But, I'm not going to do it again until you tell me you want me to. That’s not a line I can cross like that again without your explicit consent."
"You kissed me," Jude said. It came out as the thing he had been holding all night, plain, almost stupid in its plainness.
"I did."
"You're not-" The word he wanted was a word he had used about Nate in his own head for fifteen years and it wouldn't come now, jammed at the front of his teeth, and he felt the old heat climb his neck. "I thought you were straight."
Something moved at the corner of Nate's mouth that wasn't quite a smile.
"I know you did. I let you. I let most people.
" He turned the mug in his hands once. "I'm not. I lean toward women and I never said the rest of it out loud because the rest of it is complicated. I wasn’t trying to be deceptive or hide, it just never really came up. "
Jude looked at him. A lifetime rearranged itself in the space of one breath, every remembered moment tilting a few degrees and resettling into a picture that had been the real picture all along, and the vertigo of it dropped through him from the sternum out, the floor-gone lurch of a song's first big downbeat when the whole room came in at once.
"Okay," Jude said, because it was the only word that would hold steady.
"There's a harder part," Nate said. "You can have all of it or none of it. But you should have the true version before you choose."
The harder part took a while.
Nate didn't give it as a speech. He gave it in plain pieces with space between them, watching Jude's face to see what got through and what needed to go slower. Jude sat against the headboard with Benny's chin on his knee and took it all in with his usual grace and quiet.
Nate told him about the nature of himself, which Jude had been aware of without once hearing Nate speak of it as a burden.
How men looked at the shoulders and the hands and built a Nate in their heads who was always the one doing the holding-down, and how he'd stopped correcting them years back because correcting them cost more than just staying home alone.
He said it flat, the voice he used for true things he'd made his peace with.
But Jude watched his thumb move once across the side of the mug, the only part of him that gave anything away, and heard the thing under the flatness: a man worn thin from being read wrong about the one part of himself that was most his own.
And Jude, who had spent his whole life being told what he was, felt the recognition hit him low and sure, the hook coming back at him out of the dark past the stage lights. He knew this one. He knew it in his bones.
"They used to laugh," Jude said. He wasn't sure he'd decided to say it.
"When I- when it came up. What I wanted.
In bed." The stutter pressed at the front of the sentence and he breathed through it the four-count way and got the rest out, because Nate had handed him the true version and Jude wasn't going to hand back a sanded one.
"I'm not- I don't look like someone who tops.
I'm small and I sing pretty and I get nervous ordering coffee.
So when I said it, the guys I said it to thought it was funny.
Or sweet. Like a kid playing at something.
Rand thought it was funny right up until he decided it was a problem, and then it was a thing he took away, and-" He stopped.
That was the edge of the country he wasn't going to walk into this morning, the one where bare was a brand and there was a receipt for it in his own blood.
He stepped back from it. "Anyway. I get it. "
Nate did not laugh. Nate looked at him with something steady and enormous and unhurried, and said, "I want exactly what they thought was funny."
The sentence sunk into Jude and kept going until it reached the core of him.
He had wanted, for years, the one thing in bed they had all laughed at.
And here was the one man whose hands he trusted in all the world, telling him the joke was his wish, that the two of them fit along the exact seam each had been shamed for, and Jude felt his eyes go hot and didn't bother to fight it, because Nate had already seen him cry once this week and the world hadn't ended.
"You're sure?" Jude asked, his voice breaking at the end.
"I've been sure for years. I just didn't have any business saying so." Nate set the mug down. "I do now. You're out. You're safe. And you asked me what I was doing, so I'm telling you."
There was one more thing, and Nate put it on the table before Jude could, which spared Jude the having to.
"I know this is assuming a lot, but we get tested," Nate said. "Both of us, before anything past this. I'll book mine this week."
Jude's face closed before he could stop it, the old reflex, and he turned it toward the window.
The river went by, grey and patient. He had known this conversation would have to come and he had dreaded the exact moment of it, because the moment of it was where he would have to say the unsayable arithmetic out loud, that he had been made bare against his will and handed the consequences like a gift he was supposed to thank someone for.
The shame of it sat low in him, older than this morning, with Rand's voice laced all through it.
Skin to skin's just how I show you you're mine. Like Rand had done to others. And passed on their sickness because he didn’t give a shit if he hurt Jude. He never had.
"I have to tell you some things first," Jude said, to the glass. "About- about why that matters. For me. It's not pretty."
"You don't have to tell me anything to make me careful with you," Nate said.
"Careful's already decided. The tests are just how grown people do this.
" And then, easy, no weight on it at all, the easiest Jude had ever heard a person make the hardest sentence: "Yeah, of course we wait for the results.
I'm not in a hurry. I waited years. I can wait two weeks. "
And that, of all of it, was the thing that broke Jude open.
Not the kiss. Not the wanting. This: a man saying of course to the careful thing, warm, like it was obvious and clean and no kind of accusation, when the only other man who had ever spoken to Jude about his own body had used that body as a ledger and bare skin as a brand and had made Jude believe, somewhere under the floor of himself, that protection was an insult and that being wanted meant being unguarded.
Nate's of course undid all of that in four syllables, not by arguing with it but by simply being the other way it could go.
Jude turned back from the window. His eyes were wet and he let them be.
"Okay," he said. "Two weeks. But Nate." He had to push the next part out past everything that wanted to apologize for asking. "I don't want to wait for everything. There's- there are things we can do. While we wait."
The corner of Nate's mouth went up, slow, the real one, the one Jude had watched him keep in his pocket.
"There certainly are," Nate agreed.
Nate moved the mugs to the floor.
He did it without hurry, with the same unhurried sureness he brought to everything, and the lack of hurry was the most erotic thing Jude had ever watched a man do, because what he was used to was the opposite, used to being rushed and managed and his own wants read back to him wrong.
Nate set the mugs down out of the way and came up onto the bed slow, careful of the bad side, his weight settling so the ribs didn't have to brace, one big hand bracketing Jude's jaw as it had the night before, and Jude tipped his face up into it and stopped, for once in his life, looking for the catch.
There was no catch. There was Nate's mouth, finding his again, gentler than anything had a right to be, and then less gentle as Jude pressed up into it, the want he'd kept folded small and shut away for so long spilling out all at once and filling him to the edges.
He got a hand into Nate's shirt. He got the other into Nate's hair, which was short and soft at the back of his neck, and Nate made a low sound against Jude's mouth that Jude felt in his own sternum, and Jude understood with a wild private joy that he was allowed to be the one reaching. That nobody was going to laugh.
Nate's hand moved down his side, careful past the ribs, learning him, and Jude arched into it and hissed when the angle pulled the bad side and Nate stopped at once.
"Eye and the ribs," Nate said against his jaw, not pulling back, just slowing. "I'm not breaking Scarlet's rules in the first week. He'll know. He always knows."
Jude laughed. It came out shaky and amazed and entirely his own, the first laugh in longer than he could measure that had nothing performing underneath it. "He said don't sneeze," Jude said. "He didn't say don't-"
"He didn't," Nate agreed, and kissed the laugh out of him.
It went on a long time, longer than Jude had let himself believe he was allowed.
Hands and mouths and the slow learning of each other, the want given air and the want held at the line they had drawn, and the line didn't feel like a brake.
It felt like the opposite. It felt like the first thing in two years that was his to draw, drawn with a man who had asked before he crossed any of it and would ask again.
When they slowed, finally, both of them undone and neither of them past the line, Nate pressed his forehead to Jude's and stayed there, breathing, his thumb moving slowly on Jude's cheekbone over the patchy place where the glitter used to go.
"Two weeks," Nate said.
"Two weeks," Jude said.
He had waited forever to be wanted like this and a few weeks would not kill him.
For the first time he could remember, the waiting wasn't a door held shut against him.
It was a door left open, with the light on, and a man on the other side of it in no hurry at all, counting the same days Jude was counting.
Benny, displaced to the foot of the bed, sighed the sigh of the deeply inconvenienced.
Neither of them moved him.