Chapter 12
Kit came to the house on a Thursday with a folder under his arm and the look of a man who had not slept.
Jude met him at the dirt drive because the safehouse was the home for now and Kit was not crew, and they sat on the steps in the cold with the river going by grey at the bottom of the yard.
Kit put the folder between them without a word and waited, which was how Jude knew it was bad.
Kit talked when things were fine. Kit went quiet when they weren't.
"I pulled the band's statements," Kit said. "All of them. Three years back."
"Rand handles the money."
"Yeah," Kit said. "I know. That's the problem."
Jude opened the folder.
He had been told, for two years, that he couldn’t do the finances.
Rand had said it gently and said it often, baby, you can't even read a bank statement without a panic attack, let me worry about it, and Jude had let him, because the numbers swam and the panic came up the second they did and it had been easier, always easier, to hand it over.
He had handed everything over. He understood that now in a way he had not let himself understand it before; he had given himself away brick by brick, until there was no room left in his own life he was allowed to stand in alone.
He looked at the statements. He waited for the panic.
It did not come.
Something else came instead, and it took him a moment to place it because he had so little practice with it, and when he placed it he went very still on the cold step.
The numbers did not swim. They sat there, plain, and they told a plain story.
Money had been coming into Hollow Bright's account and going back out of it to places that were not the band, in amounts that climbed, on a schedule.
Show money. Merch money. The advance from the festival last summer that Jude had been told fell through and had not fallen through.
Gone, in pieces, to an LLC with a name like a law firm and to cash withdrawals that stopped just under the number that makes a bank ask questions.
"He's been stealing from us," Kit said, low. "From all of us. Sy's been picking up shifts at the restaurant. I told myself it was the economy. It wasn't the economy."
And here was the thing Jude would think about later, sitting in Dr. Aronson's office on the phone two days on, trying to name it: the panic did not come, but the anger did.
It came up from somewhere south of the panic, somewhere he had not known he kept anything, and it was not cold in his chest the way fear was.
It sat low and level and hot in his gut and it did not shake his hands.
His hands were perfectly still on the folder.
He had never once been angry with his hands still.
Anger, for Jude, had always been something other people were allowed and he was not, the spark that got you hit, the heat you swallowed until it turned into the cold-tap-on-the-wrists kind of night.
This was different. This had solid ground under it.
"That festival advance," Jude said. His voice came out level too. "He told me it fell through. He sat at the kitchen table and told me Electric Forest’s people pulled out and I made him tea about it."
"It didn't fall through."
"No," Jude said. "I can see that it didn't."
He closed the folder. He did not throw it, though some new clean part of him wanted to, wanted to send Rand's three-year story under the grey water and watch it go.
He set it down on the step instead and squared the edge, and the anger settled into something with weight to it, something he could pick up and carry, and that was the part that scared him.
Fear didn't keep. Fear you could outrun up onto a stage. This was going to be with him now, a part of him. He found that he didn’t mind like he thought he would.
"I have to look at all of it," Jude said. "Myself. Not you telling me, not Nate telling me. Me."
"Okay." Kit watched him. "You sure?"
"He spent two years telling me I couldn't read a bank statement." Jude stood up, the folder under his arm now, the way Kit had carried it. "I just read three years of them on a porch in the cold. So yeah. I'm sure."
Nate found him at the kitchen table that night, surrounded by it.
Jude had spread the whole three years across the table and was working through it the way he worked through a setlist, methodical, a pen behind his ear, and he had not heard Nate come in until there was a glass of water set down by his elbow, not in his hands the nightstand way, and Jude looked up.
Something had changed in Nate. Jude saw it the way he saw everything, fast and complete, the second he looked up.
The careful foot of air Nate had kept even through the kiss, even through the bed, was gone out of his shoulders.
He stood differently. He looked at Jude like a man who had set something down somewhere an hour north and drove home lighter.
"You went to see Easton," Jude said.
"I did."
"And?"
Nate pulled out the chair beside him, close, and sat.
"He gave me hell. About as much as I had coming.
More, maybe." A corner of his mouth. "And then he gave me his blessing, which I told him I didn't need and he told me I had it anyway.
" He paused. "He said to tell you something. He said: tell him I said yes."
Jude went still.
He had forgotten he'd ever asked. It came back now all at once, a winter four years ago, a visiting room like the one Nate had described, Jude nineteen and miserable and finally saying the thing out loud to the one person who'd known him longest, do you think he'd ever, Easton, do you think Nate would ever look at me like that, and Easton, who loved them both, who could see the wreck coming from a mile off, had been kind and had been honest and had said, no, J.
I don't think so. Don't wait on it. Don't break your heart on a straight man who'd carry you on his shoulders but never see you.
And Jude had folded the want up small that day and put it away, on his brother's say-so, because his brother had never once lied to him to make him feel better.
Tell him I said yes.
Four years. The verdict reversed across four years and a bolted table, sent home through the same brother who'd handed down the first one.
"I asked him a long time ago," Jude said. His voice had gone thick. "Whether you'd ever. He said no. He said don't wait on it." He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, fast, the way Easton did, the way they'd both learned from the same kitchen. "He told me not to break my heart on you."
"He was right to," Nate said. "Then. He wasn't wrong about me. I hadn't told anybody I was bi." He reached out, slow enough that Jude could have moved, and didn't, and tucked a strand of the almost-white hair behind Jude's ear. "There's something else."
"There always is, with this week."
"My tests came back." Nate said it plainly, no weight on it, the way he made the hardest sentences easy. "Clean. I had Scarlet run them quick, he's got a contact at the lab." He looked at Jude. "Yours came too. They called the house line. Clean, Jude. Both of us."
The wait was over.
Jude looked at the man beside him, at the three years of Rand's theft spread out on the table in front of them both, and understood that two things had come home to him on the same day, the anger and the all-clear, and that they were not opposites.
They were the same thing wearing two faces.
They were both his body and his life coming back into his own hands.
"Okay," Jude said, and this time the okay was not the small worn-out one. It was a different word entirely. "Okay. Come upstairs."
He took Nate's hand on the stairs and Nate let him lead, which Jude noticed, and which undid him a little, because Nate led everything, Nate had led him out of the clubhouse and out of the alley and up these same stairs the first night with a hand under his ribs, and now Nate was letting himself be walked up them by a man half his size without a word of complaint.
In the room Jude shut the door. Benny, asleep on the foot of the bed, lifted his head, took in the situation, and removed himself to the chair with a put-upon grunt, which made Jude laugh. It was the right way to start, the laugh taking the last of the nerves with it.
"The ribs," Nate said, because he could not help it.
"Healing. Scarlet said four more weeks, not dead." Jude put his hands flat on Nate's chest and felt the heart going under them, faster than Nate's stillness let on. "You don't have to manage me. I want this. I've wanted it since I was sixteen and I'm not fragile."
"Tell me if anything-"
"I'll tell you. I'm good at telling you now. I've had practice this week." Jude kissed him, slowly, and felt Nate's breath go, and walked him backward to the bed with both hands, gentle, in charge of it, watching Nate let it happen.
This was the part Jude had been mocked for.
The wanting to be the one with his hands on the wheel.
The guys who'd laughed, the ones who took one look at him, small and pretty and nervous, and decided what he was for.
Rand, who'd let him think he wanted it and then made it a thing to take away.
And here was Nate, big and strong, lying back on a bed and looking up at Jude with his hands open at his sides, handing his power over, not because Jude had wrestled it from him but because giving it away was the thing Nate had been starving for as long as Jude had been starving to be trusted with it.
Jude moved with deliberate slowness, his fingers tracing the hem of Nate’s shirt before peeling it upward, exposing the broad expanse of chest dusted with dark hair that tickled his palms. He pressed his lips to the center, right over the frantic thud of Nate’s heart, tasting the salt of sweat-slick skin and inhaling the raw, musky scent of arousal that thickened the air between them.
Nate shuddered beneath him, a low, guttural moan vibrating from deep in his throat—the private sound he never let slip around others, raw and unguarded.
Jude’s own cock throbbed in response, straining against his jeans as he committed every hitch and tremor to memory.
He worked lower, the leather of Nate’s belt yielding with a soft creak under his hands, the metal buckle clinking free like a forbidden chord finally struck.
No one stopped him this time. Permission flooded through him hot and electric, making his pulse hammer as he tugged the denim down, freeing the thick, heavy length of Nate’s cock; veined, flushed dark, already leaking at the slit.
Jude glanced up, eyes locking on Nate’s wrecked face, and asked without words.
Nate met him with parted lips and blown pupils, voice gravel-rough. “Yeah. Fuck, yes. Please.”
That plea from a man built like a wall sent a fresh surge of heat straight to Jude’s groin.
He lowered his mouth, tongue swirling over the broad head, savoring the bitter-salt tang of pre-cum as he took Nate deeper.
The stretch burned his jaw, but he welcomed it, hollowing his cheeks and breathing through his nose to catch every earthy whiff of Nate’s crotch.
Nate’s thigh flexed under Jude’s palm, muscle bunching like coiled steel, while thick fingers threaded gently into Jude’s hair, never pushing, just anchoring, trembling with restraint.
Jude set the rhythm, slow and relentless, edging Nate with every deliberate suck and swirl until the big man’s hips twitched and his breath came in ragged pants that filled the room.
When Nate warned, voice cracking, “Close… fuck, Jude, I’m gonna -” Jude stayed locked on him, swallowing the first hot pulse of cum as it flooded his tongue, thick and bitter-sweet, Nate’s broken groan of “Jude” reverberating through both their bodies.
Nate came apart completely, thighs shaking, chest heaving, every spurt painting Jude’s throat while the scent of sex grew heavier, mingling with the faint river breeze drifting through the open window.
Afterward, Jude rose, lips slick, and Nate drew him close with careful strength, ribs cradled against that still-pounding heart.
Sweat cooled on their skin. The dog shifted on the chair with a soft huff, but neither man moved until Nate rolled them, his weight pinning Jude deliciously as he looked down with that open, shattered expression. “Your turn. If you want it.”
“I want it,” Jude rasped, voice hoarse.
Nate descended the length of him with unhurried reverence, tongue tracing every ridge of muscle, breath hot against Jude’s straining cock before taking him in deep.
He was careful of the ribs, one broad hand splayed protectively while the other stroked and teased, building the ache until Jude arched and spilled with a shout, the taste of Nate still on his tongue, the river murmuring outside, and nothing left between them but the clean, shared hunger finally set free.
Later, in the dark, Jude lay with his head on Nate's chest and the three years of Rand's theft still spread on the kitchen table downstairs waiting for him, and he was not afraid of it.
That was the new thing. He had a man's heartbeat under his ear and a folder full of proof downstairs and an anger with firm ground under it, and tomorrow he was going to start taking his life apart from the studs and building it back his own way.
"I'm going to deal with Rand," Jude said into the dark. Not a question. Not afraid. "The money. All of it. I'm not going to let it go."
Nate's hand moved slowly on his back. "No," he agreed. "We're not."
Jude heard the we and let it be true.
He did not yet know how big of a mess waited for him, but for tonight Jude had gotten his hands back around his own life and deserved one night to hold it before the rest of it came.