Lightweight #2
Billy leaned forward, glass dangling between his fingertips. “And?”
“It's about a priest who fucks one of his parishioners.” Judah's laugh was short and hollow. “Romance novel. Apparently quite graphic.”
Billy's eyebrows shot up. “You don't say.”
“Ironic, isn't it?” Judah slid the foreign book back onto the shelf. The room felt like it was breathing around him, expanding and contracting with the music. “She reads that filth, while I—”
“While you what?” Billy's voice had an edge to it now. “Actually do it?”
Judah's eyes snapped to Billy's, hard and cold despite the alcohol. “While I cover for human traffickers,” he said.
Billy went very still, the whiskey in his glass catching the low light. “Don’t go there.”
But Judah did go there. “Thirteen years, Billy. Thirteen fucking years I’ve been doing it and telling myself that I am not like them.”
“We don't—” Billy stopped himself, then tried again. “That's not what it is.”
Judah leaned back in his chair, feeling the leather cool against his neck. “Keep telling yourself that. Helps you sleep at night, don’t it.”
“You want to do this now?” Billy's voice was low, dangerous. “Now, Judah? I’m telling you, don’t fucking go there.”
They both were quiet for a long moment. The music swelled and settled. Never cared for what they say. Never cared for games they play.
“How do you live with it?” Judah looked at him, his gaze exhausted. Bone deep exhausted. “How do you… turn the guilt off?”
Billy's eyes went distant. He took a long drink, and Judah could see the calculations happening behind his expression — weighing how honest to be, how much truth the moment could bear.
“I don't,” Billy finally said. He set the glass down softly. “Turn it off. I just... put it somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Same place you put yours, I imagine.” Billy's smile was thin and sharp. “Right next to all the other shit we don't talk about.”
The record crackled between verses. Metallica had never sounded so mournful, so confessional.
“I’m afraid,” Judah admitted after a while, his voice low, almost blending in with the electric guitar. “The child she’s carrying — what if it’s a girl?”
Billy didn't answer immediately. He took another long drink, emptying his glass, and set it down on the desk with a soft thud.
“I don’t have an answer, Preacher,” Billy said.
Yeah. He didn’t either.
The vase hit the floor at 6:26.
The crash came up through the floor like something had broken loose at the foundation.
I was out of bed before I'd decided to be.
The landing was dark. The hall below was dark. But there was sound — two voices, low, and then a door, and then something that took me a second to place. Music. Electric guitar, low and slow, bleeding through the study door at the end of the east wing.
I stood at the top of the stairs.
My feet were cold. I'd taken my socks off at some point in the last hour — one of those automatic things, the body making itself comfortable while the mind had other plans.
The wood under my feet was cool and the house was quiet except for the music and the low register of voices I could feel more than hear.
I should have gone back to the bedroom. Kept thinking about everything and nothing, and left the rest alone.
I went downstairs.
The hall table was on its side. The vase — the blue and white one that had been on that table for as long as I'd been in this house — was in pieces across the floor. I stepped around them in the dark.
The study door was open three inches.
I put my hand flat on the wood and pushed it wider.
The record player in the corner was running — his grandfather's, the heavy one.
Billy was in the leather chair with his legs stretched out and a glass balanced on his knee, his head tipped back.
Judah was behind the desk. Not sitting right — sideways in the chair, one arm on the desk, looking at nothing in particular with an odd, mournful expression.
Neither of them saw me immediately.
I never cared for what they do. I never cared for what they know.
The guitar moved through something I almost recognized and didn't. The lamp on the desk was on. The rest of the room was wrapped in shadows.
Then Billy turned his head.
“Hey,” he said. Simple. Not surprised.
Judah's eyes came up.
He looked at me from across the room.
I turned my head back at the hallway to look at the pieces of the white-and-blue vase on the floor.
“Why’s the vase on the floor?” I asked because there was nothing better to ask in that moment.
Billy let out a small laugh. “There’s an old legend about Beaumont hinges and hurricanes. I was testing a theory.”
Judah kept watching me, his eyes moving over my face like he was trying to read something written there. He hadn't answered my question.
“It was my fault,” Billy added more seriously when Judah remained silent. “Came in too hot.”
I was still staring at Judah. He was no longer staring back. His eyes were now on the floor.
“I'll replace it,” Billy said.
“You can't replace it.”
“I'll find something similar.” He uncrossed his ankles and sat up a little, refilling his glass from the bottle on the side table. “You want a drink?”
“She’s pregnant,” Judah shot back with a glare at Billy.
Billy raised his hands in surrender. “Right. Right. Forgot.”
I looked at Judah. His collar was open, his jacket gone — his forearms on the desk showing the edges of the ink I'd traced with my fingers in the dark — the burning Garden, the scripture wrapped in thorns. His pale eyes in the lamp light looking at me again.
And nothing else matters.
“You scared me,” I said.
Judah's mouth moved. Not quite a word.
“The crash,” I said. “The table.” I pressed the door frame with my shoulder. “I thought—” I stopped. I didn't know what I'd thought.
Billy looked between us. Then he picked up his glass and the bottle and stood with the casual ease of someone who'd been excusing himself from other people's silences for most of his adult life.
“I'm going to find the kitchen,” he said. “And see what damage I can do in there.” He stopped beside me in the doorway, and his voice dropped an inch. “He’s not what you think he is, doll.”
I looked at him.
His eyes were steady and a little sad and more sober than they should have been given the evidence. “He doesn't mean most of the things he does in ways that hurt people. That's not a defense.” He patted the door frame once. “It's just a fact.”
Then he was gone down the hall, the bottle in one hand, the glass in the other, moving through the dark like he knew every floorboard of this house.
I looked back into the study.
He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said the things.
There were a lot of things.
I pushed off the door frame.
“Go to sleep, Judah,” I said.
I turned and went back up the stairs.
My feet were still cold. The bedroom ceiling had its faded fresco — the same one it always had, figures I'd never been able to fully make out in the dark. Robes and outstretched hands and some gesture that might have been mercy or might have been something else entirely.
I got into bed.
Downstairs, the record player stopped.
The footsteps came at just past two.
Not Billy's — Billy moved through spaces like he had a sponsorship with noise. These were slower. Softer. More careful. The footsteps of someone who knew exactly how loud the third board from the landing was and was stepping over it anyway.
I was awake. Had been for most of it, scrolling through the local tabloid page on the web — and yes, St. Francisville had one. She was hip. She was now.
She was the moment.
The door opened.
He stood in the doorway. Still dressed — the same shirt, the sleeves pushed to the elbow. He'd lost the shoes somewhere. His eyes found me in the dark without searching.
I didn't sit up — I barely turned my head. I stayed where I was, on my side, the sheet pulled to my waist, and I watched him stand there in the doorway of his own bedroom.
“What?” I asked.
He didn't come in.
He put one hand on the frame, just resting it there.
“I'm going to fix it,” he said. His voice was low. Rough and bone-tired. He wasn't looking at the floor or the window or the middle distance he sometimes retreated to when a room got too honest. He was looking at me.
He didn't say what.
I said nothing.
He stayed in the doorway. His hand on the doorframe, still. His eyes on me.
“I love you,” he said.
Just that. Three words in a rough voice at two in the morning, standing in a doorway he wasn't crossing. I thought about saying ‘thank you.’
I didn't say anything.
I don't know how long he stood there. Long enough that my eyes adjusted further and I could see the exhaustion in him clearly — the set of his shoulders, the way his weight was against the frame rather than held away from it. A man at the end of a very long day that had started before the day.
Then he pulled his hand back.
“Goodnight, Mercy,” he said.
The door closed.