Chapter 13
The morning was so ordinary it frightened him.
Nate stood at the kitchen counter with coffee that was hot for once.
For once he'd had the ten minutes to drink it while it was.
He watched Jude at the table with a pen behind his ear and the band's three years of stolen money sorted into piles he'd made himself.
Jude worked like he sang, leaning into it a little, humming something under his breath that had no words yet.
The bruise on his face had gone from plum to the faint yellow of an old photograph.
He reached across the table for the highlighter without bracing first, without the small flinch the ribs had been putting in him for two weeks.
Nate watched him not-flinch and felt it in his own chest like good news.
Marcus came through for the coffee pot and refilled Jude's mug without asking.
Jude said thanks without looking up, easy, unhurried, like a man in a house he'd stopped expecting to be charged for.
Benny lay under the table with his chin on Jude's foot.
Somebody upstairs was running a drill into a wall.
It was a Tuesday. It was nothing. It was the kind of nothing Nate had spent his whole life standing guard at the edge of so that other people could have it, and here he was inside one, allowed in, his coffee hot.
He'd never thought it'd look like this. He hadn't thought about what it'd look like at all, just whether he'd ever get here.
He let himself have it for the length of the cup. Then he put the cup in the sink and let himself remember his core mission.
He knew what Rand was now. He'd known it since the bolted table and the word Easton said with cold in his voice.
He'd carried it home an hour and ten down the interstate, into this kitchen, and hadn't really forgotten.
It lived in his back pocket next to his phone, where Ghost's last three messages sat unanswered because answering them meant going to work, and going to work meant this little slice of a quiet life would end.
The folder on the table was the small version.
The big version had a bridge in it and a tag a man two tiers up had bragged about, a count of how many kids it had eaten, and Jude's whole bright unsuspecting world sitting one degree of separation from all of it.
Six more since Davya, and the gaps closing.
That was the part Ghost kept circling at the table at night, the part that'd put the new flat note in his voice: it used to be one every few months, a slow bleed you could almost mistake for how a city loses its kids in any given year.
Now it was weeks. Somebody on the other end had gotten hungry, or somebody on this end had gotten desperate.
Either way, the rooms that smelled like the rooms Jude's band played were giving up kids and then more kids, every one of them the kind a tired precinct stamped runaway and filed where everyone stopped looking.
A few days at most before the math came for the morning he was watching Jude have.
He'd decided that on the drive home: the work could have him soon, and would, but not today, because Jude had earned a stretch of ordinary and Nate was going to stand at the edge of it the same as he always had, except this time he got to stand inside.
"You're staring," Jude said, not looking up.
"I am."
"Creepy." Jude capped the highlighter. There was no apology anywhere near it. That was new too. "You want to be useful, or you want to keep doing that?"
Nate pushed off the counter. He'd take useful. He'd take any version of this he could get.
Useful turned out to be moving the last of Jude's things out of a storage unit Rand didn't know existed, a concrete box across town where Jude had been quietly keeping the part of his life he hadn't let Rand touch.
It took the afternoon. Jude couldn't lift on his ribs, so Nate lifted and Jude pointed.
Pointing was its own small reclamation. Jude in charge of where his own life went, Nate carrying it where he said.
By the time they got back, Nate had drywall dust in his hair and a long stripe of it down one arm, and Jude was dust-grimed and satisfied in the quiet manner of a man who'd spent four hours directing a much larger one and wasn't going to admit how much he'd enjoyed it.
"You realize I did all the actual work," Nate said, at the door.
"You did." Jude went in ahead of him. "You were very good at it."
He wasn't wrong. Nate had carried two dozen boxes. He'd do it again tomorrow if it meant watching Jude point at them like that.
At the bottom of the stairs Jude stopped. Looked at the dust on Nate, then at himself, then back up, and there was a smile his lips did now, a small crooked thing that took Nate apart every time it happened.
"Shower," Jude said. And then, because they said things out loud now, because that was the rule they'd made and kept: "With me. If you want."
Nate wanted. He'd wanted for years he'd quit counting. "Yeah," he said, and it came out rougher than the word needed. Jude heard it. The crooked smile got wider.
The upstairs bathroom at the end of the hall was the good one, the stall big enough that Nate didn't have to fold himself in sideways like he did in the other.
Jude got the water going. The old pipes knocked twice and ran hot, and steam climbed the tile.
Jude pulled his shirt over his head slowly on account of the ribs, and Nate watched the bruise come into view, the long fading map of it down his side.
What his hands got to want was the rest of him.
Jude stepped under the water and tipped his head back into it. The grime went off him in grey runnels. His hair went dark gold and flat. He opened his eyes and found Nate still standing there in the steam with his shirt half off. "You're doing it again," Jude said.
"Doing what?"
"The staring thing."
Nate finished pulling his shirt off and got in.
Nate's shoulders jammed the shower stall walls, cold tile biting his back as Jude crowded in, their wet skin slapping together.
Steam curled thick around them, carrying the sharp bite of soap and the musk of sweat-slick bodies.
Jude's palms flattened over Nate's chest, fingers splaying wide across the heavy muscle, feeling the frantic thud of his heart.
Water beaded on Jude's lashes, dripping down as he looked up, hips already canting forward to grind their cocks together, Jude's slender length sliding hot and insistent against Nate's thicker shaft.
"Okay?" Jude rasped, voice rough.
"Yeah," Nate growled low, one hand fisting in Jude's damp hair, tugging just enough to tip his head back. The other hand slid down to grip Jude's ass, fingers digging in, careful around the bruised ribs but possessive as hell. "You set the pace, baby. I'll follow."
Jude's eyes darkened. He rose on his toes, mouth crashing into Nate's, tongue pushing deep, tasting the salt on his lips.
Nate bent into it, curving his bulk to meet him, water sluicing hot off his shoulders and down between their pressed bodies.
Jude rutted up slow and deliberate, dragging his cock along Nate's, the slick friction making Nate's low groan rumble out from deep in his chest.
Jude swallowed the sound, hips rolling again on purpose, grinding harder, their cocks trapped and throbbing between them.
Nate's head thunked back against the tile, eyes squeezing shut as pleasure coiled tight in his gut.
Steam thickened, water pounding loud, every slide of skin on skin electric, Jude's hands roaming the broad planes of Nate's back, squeezing the heavy muscle over his shoulders like he owned every inch.
Nate let him, braced and yielding, breath hitching as Jude's fingers traced lower, wrapping around both their cocks, stroking them together in a tight fist.
The rhythm built, slow and filthy, Jude pumping them with slick twists of his wrist, thumb swiping over the heads, smearing precum in the spray.
Nate's hands stayed gentle on Jude's hips, guiding without taking, while his own body trembled, thighs flexing, balls drawing up tight.
Jude's breath came ragged against Nate's throat, teeth scraping skin.
"Nate," he moaned, wrecked and desperate, hips stuttering.
Nate gripped him firmer then, both hands on Jude's ass, holding him steady as they thrust together.
The heat snapped, Jude's cock pulsing first, hot spurts painting Nate's abs and cock, the sight and feel pushing Nate over.
He came with a guttural curse, thick ropes mixing with Jude's under the water, bodies jerking and grinding through it, Jude's open mouth sucking at his neck.
They stayed locked, water cooling on their skin, Jude's forehead pressed to Nate's sternum, rising with each heavy breath. Nate's palm stayed spread low on Jude's back, away from the bruises, the steady rush of pipes filling the quiet. "Gonna run cold soon," Jude mumbled into his chest.
Nate huffed, pulling him closer. "Ninety seconds left on this boiler. I know every damn thing worth fixing in this house."
Jude gave a quiet chuckle. “Of course you do.”
They ate with the crew that night.
The table ran on a weekday like it always did: Zain and Seth at one end with phones between their plates, the low back-and-forth of two men who couldn't fully leave the job even when they were home.
Ghost ate with half his attention still on the wall in the back room, which had more faces than it'd had yesterday.
Marcus had made the beans. Marcus always made the beans.
It was one of the things Nate had come to count on without noticing, somewhere in the years, like the draft under the back door and the sound the third stair made and the table going quiet when one of them was carrying something real.
They were quiet now. Not the bad kind. Just the kind where everyone understood that one of their own was holding a weight and they were going to let him hold it until he was ready to set it down.
That was how the crew worked. You didn't ask, and you didn't pretend you hadn't noticed, and you passed the beans.
Jude sat beside him and talked to Seth about a band Seth had seen the week before, ten minutes on the relative merits of a singer with a good voice and bad stage presence.
Nate listened and ate Marcus's beans and let himself have that too.
Jude's knee was warm against his under the table.
Neither of them made anything of it. It just was.
The room was dark. Jude was already half-asleep by the time Nate settled beside him, breathing slow, one hand loose on the pillow between them.
The ribs meant he couldn't lie flat, so he'd built himself an arrangement of pillows and slept in it every night.
Nate had stopped noticing it was there, same as he'd stopped noticing all the things Jude had worked out for how to live in a body that hurt.
He watched the ceiling and let the day play back.
Not reliving it, just accounting for it.
His mother had counted her blessings before sleep; Nate had picked up the habit and never lost it, though she'd have had something to say about what his blessings looked like lately.
The hot coffee. The storage unit, Jude pointing at boxes with a pen behind his ear.
The shower, the steam, Jude's hands flat on his chest. The table, the beans, the ten minutes of Jude talking about stage presence with the easy warmth of someone who'd done it a hundred times, at a hundred tables, and meant it every time.
He had bought the day. He'd spent every hour of it.
And tomorrow he was going to have to answer Ghost.
He reached for his phone on the nightstand, screen brightness low, and read the three messages again. The first was a name. The second was an address on the Windsor side. The third was four words: we need to move.
He set the phone face-down on his chest. The small weight of it sat over the same spot where Jude had put both hands in the shower, flat over the heart, the same spot he'd found the night before with a glass of water still in reach.
Nate had spent years keeping that want in a drawer.
He'd opened it two nights running now. The thing inside hadn't been diminished at all by the waiting. It had only gotten truer.
Jude shifted, got a fistful of Nate's shirt in his sleep, and didn't wake.
Nate looked at the ceiling and thought about what he was going to have to say.
Not to Ghost. To Jude. The man you were with is the thing we've been hunting.
The kids at the parties. The money. The river.
He'd say it plainly. He always did, with the hard ones.
And Jude would hear it, and the ordinary morning Nate had been guarding would be the last one for a while.
There'd be another one eventually. He believed that.
But there was going to be a long hard stretch between here and it, and he was going to have to watch Jude go through it knowing he'd held the information for days.
He hadn't had a choice. The information wasn't his to act on alone. But knowing that wouldn't make it easier for Jude to hear, and it shouldn't.
Tomorrow could have all of it.
He put the phone back on the nightstand. Tonight he kept the watch.
Jude's hand tightened in his shirt, not waking, just holding on.
Nate let himself be held without policing it, without the reflex to make himself smaller.
He lay in the dark with the count of days running behind his eyes and a man's fist in his shirt and the far-off sound of the river, and he guarded the edge of the sleep he couldn't share, because standing watch at the border of someone else's rest was the only way he'd ever known how to love anybody.
In the morning he'd tell Jude. Enough to move.
Tonight he kept the watch.