Chapter 10 #2
It started slow, the way it had the first time, and then stopped.
Jude got a hand fisted in his shirt and pulled, and Nate let himself be pulled, which was its own undoing, because Nate spent his life being the one who carried the weight for everybody else, and here was a man half his size pulling him down onto a narrow bed and Nate going easy as water, careful of the ribs, bracing his own weight on his forearms so none of it landed wrong.
Jude's mouth was hot and certain. Jude's hands moved under his shirt and up the plane of his back and Nate felt his own breath go ragged against the side of Jude's neck, felt the want come up through him from somewhere south of his sternum and bloom out hot under his skin, and the sound he made was not a sound he made in front of people.
Jude heard it. Jude went still for a half-second, then made a small triumphant noise into Nate's jaw and did it again, dragging his nails light up Nate's spine just to hear it twice.
And Nate understood that Jude had found the thing he kept furthest back and was holding it in both hands like something precious instead of something to use.
That was the whole difference, and Nate's eyes stung.
He pressed his face into Jude's good shoulder so Jude would not have to carry the sight of that on top of everything.
Jude's hand went to Nate's belt.
And Nate, who wanted nothing in the world in that moment more than to let him, caught the hand. Gentle. He brought it up and pressed his mouth to the knuckles and held it against his own chest where Jude could feel what his heart was doing.
"Wait," Nate said. "We said two weeks and I meant it." He was breathing like he'd run. "It's not the line."
Jude went still under him. Not the flinch-still of the early days. A listening stillness. "Then what?"
Nate sat up. He kept Jude's hand. He looked at the window, the black river moving, and he made himself say what was going on inside him, because Jude had handed him true things all week and Nate was not going to be the one who started sanding them down.
"Easton," Nate said.
Jude's breath caught.
"I've been in love with you for years," Nate said, plainly, to the window, because it was easier to say to the glass and Jude deserved to have it said even crooked.
"Longer than I let myself count. And the whole time, the thing that kept my hands to myself wasn't just Rand.
It was your brother. He's in a cell trusting me to look out for you, and I've been wanting you the entire time I've been visiting him and keeping his commissary up and telling him you were fine.
" His jaw worked. "I can't keep going behind his back.
That's the one move in this that would make me a liar to him, and I won't be that. Not to Easton."
Jude was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was careful, but it was not afraid, and it was not apologizing. "So what do you do?"
"I go see him," Nate said. "I tell him to his face.
Before you and I go one inch further." He turned back from the window.
"I'm not asking your permission to want you.
I had that the second you said come here.
I'm telling you I have to square it with the one man I'd be lying to, or I'm no better than a guy who takes what he wants and calls it love. "
And there it was, the truth he'd carried since the alley and longer: that the difference between him and Rand could never be that his grip was kinder. Jude had to be chosen by people who chose him in the open. Including by Nate. Especially by Nate.
Jude looked at him with the lamp on his face and the bruise nearly healed and something in his eyes that Nate let himself read this time, all the way, because they were past the place where Nate got to refuse to read it.
"Go see my brother," Jude said. "Tell him I said he's an idiot if he gives you a hard time." A breath. "And then come back."
"I'll always come back," Nate said. The cousin of the other line, the one he'd said in the truck, the one he'd said on the edge of this same bed with his hand under Jude's ribs.
He was building a small collection of them, these four-word truths, and he was spending them on the one person he'd never let himself have before now.
He kissed Jude's knuckles again and put the hand down gently and got up before getting-up stopped being possible.
At the door he looked back. Jude had the notebook open again already, the pen moving, and the lamplight caught the side of his face. He looked up and did not perform anything, just looked, and that was the picture Nate took with him down the hall and kept.
Tomorrow he would drive an hour north and tell Easton Davros he was in love with his brother.
Tonight he lay on his own bed on the other side of the wall, the way he had the first night, and listened to Jude not-quite-sleep, and did not open the cold place, and did not let the boxes touch, and waited for a morning he could do something with.
The boxes touched anyway, once, in the dark, just before he slept. Rand's name and the bridge and Caleb's choir voice, all in the same drawer for half a second.
He shut it. He had practice.
He would not have practice forever.