Cherry 51 #2
But with Eloise it was different, and I started to think maybe I'd misread the room; maybe the unease was my own damage talking — maybe this was simply a party full of rich people and I was the one making it strange.
Then I felt Judah go still.
I hadn't been watching him. I'd been facing Eloise, half-listening to something about a levee preservation initiative. But I felt it — his eyes and then the sudden rigidity of his body.
I turned.
He was fifteen feet away, in conversation with one of the older men from before, and he was looking at me. Not at my face. At the charm on my dress strap.
His expression didn't change. That was the thing — nothing moved in it, not a muscle, and that was worse than if it had. The man beside him said something and Judah turned back to answer. His voice when it came out was exactly the same as it always was. Quiet and measured.
But his jaw had done something. Just for a second. Just long enough.
I turned back to Eloise and said something about the levee initiative that I immediately forgot because I was watching Judah and trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
The next hour had a quality I can only describe as weather.
Something building in the room that had no visible source, pressure without an obvious front.
Judah moved through it with his bourbon — his third, I'd been counting without meaning to — and spoke to every man in the room at least once, and each conversation was short and quiet and ended with the other man nodding in a way that wasn't quite agreement, more like acknowledgment. Like terms being confirmed.
Two more men approached me with small talk that felt like something else. I smiled and answered and kept my hands where they were and each time I looked across the room Judah was already looking back.
At nine-fifteen Darlene appeared at my elbow from nowhere.
“Time to go, sweetheart,” she said. Her voice was its usual self — warm, practical, no room for argument.
“The party isn't—”
“Your evening is.” She had my wrap already, draped over her arm, and her hand at my elbow was gentle and absolute. “Say goodnight to Eloise and come on.”
I said goodnight to Eloise. Let Darlene steer me toward the door. At the threshold I looked back once — I don't know why, some animal instinct — and found Judah across the room, watching me leave.
Then — I watched him cross the room over.
“Darlene.” He smiled at her, placing a hand on the small of my back. With the high-heel shoes on, we were almost the same height.
“I’ll see Ms. Evangeline out,” he said. His voice carried that same measured tone, but there was something underneath it now, a current I couldn’t quite identify.
Darlene hesitated, her fingers still gripping my wrap. “Pastor, I was just—”
“Thank you, Darlene.” The dismissal was gentle but final. “I need a word with Mercy before she goes.”
I watched Darlene’s face perform a complicated calculation, weighing obligations against instincts. She nodded finally, relinquishing my wrap to Judah’s waiting hand.
“I’ll bring the car around front,” she said, her eyes finding mine with a message I couldn’t decode.
When she was gone, Judah’s hand remained at the small of my back, a source of heat through the burgundy silk. He guided me not toward the door but down a darkened walkway away from the party’s murmur.
“The charm,” he said once we were alone, voice low and controlled. “Where did you get it?”
I touched it with my fingertips, felt its gold weight against the silk. “A man gave it to me. Older gentleman. White-haired,” I said, trying to catch his eyes, but he kept looking forward as he led us farther and farther into the dark.
Judah’s jaw worked beneath his skin, a muscle tightening and releasing.
Then — as quickly as it had appeared — it was gone.
The tension, the urgency — all of it. He stopped before me, on a path nobody had walked, and smiled, his eyes a little glassy from drink.
“I apologize I wasn’t much entertainment tonight. ”
“You had other guests to attend to.” I tried to keep my voice light, but it came out more brittle than I intended.
“I did.” His fingers reached for the cherry charm, hovering near my collarbone. “This isn’t... appropriate for you.”
“Why not?”
His eyes met mine then, pale and clear despite the bourbon. “Because it means something you don’t understand.”
The world seemed to contract around us, the air growing thicker. Somewhere within the manor, glasses clinked, and laughter rose and fell like a tide.
“Then explain it to me.” I didn’t move away from his almost-touch. Didn’t flinch when his fingers finally made contact, not with the charm but with the silk strap it was pinned to.
“No.” The word was soft but absolute. “Not tonight.”
He unpinned the cherry with careful fingers, his knuckles brushing against my skin. I felt goosebumps rise despite the Louisiana heat pressing in.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
I did.
He placed the cherry in the midst of my palm and wrapped my fingers closed around it. Then his eyes were back on mine. “Never accept jewelry from men in Louisiana, Mercy.”
I watched his lips. “Not even you?”
His lips curved into the ghost of a smile. “Especially not from me.”
The moment stretched between us like taffy, sweet and dangerous. His hand was still wrapped around mine, the gold cherry trapped in our shared grasp. I felt the weight of it — heavier than it should have been for something so small.
The sound of Darlene’s Buick on the drive made me realize we weren’t alone.
“I have to go,” I told him.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Thank you for coming,” he said, and leaned in to press his lips to the corner of my mouth.
I felt the warmth of his breath, smelled bourbon and something underneath — cloves, maybe. My heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to escape. For one wild, dizzy moment, I thought about turning my face those crucial few millimeters.
“I can’t get the taste of you out of my mind,” he admitted in a whisper, as his mouth moved to kiss me just below my dangling earing.
That sent a shiver through me.
“Judah—” I started, but couldn’t find the words to follow.
“I pray your shower breaks with increasing regularity, Mercy,” he said, smirking, and brushed his thumb against my lips. “Now go. Before Darlene throws a fit.”
I slipped away from him into the night, the gold cherry still clutched in my hand like a burning coal. Darlene’s headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating Spanish moss that swayed like spectral fingers in the breeze.
She didn’t ask questions when I slid into the passenger seat, simply watched me tuck the charm into my clutch with a pinched expression.
At first I’d wanted to throw it out the window, but I didn't, which I think said something about me that I wasn't ready to say out loud.
The house was empty by midnight.
Judah stood at the window of his study with his fifth bourbon and watched the last car disappear down the drive and waited for the sound of gravel to go quiet.
It took longer than it should have. Men like Hargrove never left anywhere quickly — leaving was its own kind of negotiation, every exit a reminder that they could always come back.
When the silence was finally solid, he turned from the window, set his glass down on the desk and looked at his hands.
She'd taken it.
God-fucking-dammit.
He'd watched it happen from across the room and hadn't been able to get to her in time without making a scene that would have cost him more than the alternative.
And so he'd stood there with a conversation happening around him that he'd answered on reflex, muscle memory of thirteen years of being the man in the room who didn't react, and he'd watched Hargrove close her fingers around that gold piece of shit and smile.
Hargrove. Seventy-one years old, three houses and an island — money so old it had stopped having a number attached to it.
He had been coming to these things for fifteen years. Had acquired — that was the word they used, acquired — two women through this particular arrangement in that time, both of them young, both of them gone from public record within six months of leaving Louisiana.
Judah picked up his bourbon. Set it back down without drinking.
The bidding had opened the moment she pinned it to her dress.
That was the custom — theater, all of it, a performance of civility draped over something that had no civility in it anywhere.
Three men had expressed interest before Judah had made his way to Hargrove and said, very quietly, what he needed to say.
Hargrove had smiled the smile of a man who understood leverage and said that the girl seemed to have made her own choice, hadn't she. The charm was hers, freely given.
Judah had looked at him for a moment, and with complete seriousness, had contemplated killing him.
Then he'd named a number.
Not because it was the right thing. Not because it made him something other than what he was — a man paying into the same system he maintained, using the same currency, sitting at the same table.
He knew what it made him. He'd known since he was nineteen years old what the family business made him and he'd made his peace with a heavy ledger.
But she didn't know the room she'd walked into.
That was on him. He'd brought her here — into this house, into this company, into a room full of men who looked at young women the way his grandfather had looked at cargo — and he hadn't told her the rules because telling her the rules meant telling her everything, and he wasn't ready for that yet.
Wasn't ready.
He almost laughed at himself.
He should’ve told her not to accept any gifts.
Should’ve.
He went to the window again. The drive was empty. The oaks were dark shapes against a darker sky, the moss hanging dead-still in the airless heat.
Somewhere across town, in a small apartment above the food bank, she was looking at a gold cherry in the palm of her fragile little hand and trying to figure out what it meant.
He hoped she didn't figure it out tonight.
He needed one more night of her not knowing.