17. The Risk is Drowning So I’ll Dive Right In #2
“I just don’t think—” I stopped, probably because he was right, and that was more annoying than anything else. “All the murders. You kill these women because why, they’re women?” Wait. “They are all women, aren’t they?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Your family is protected because they’re friends with the LAPD.
Right? So they point to the most obvious suspect and nobody investigates further.
If you get hurt, you get stitched up by your private family doctor and no one’s the wiser.
” Why didn’t any of this feel real? It was perfectly logical.
I had ample reason to believe everything I was saying was true.
I looked at Jude. He looked at me.
“Well?” he said.
“You don’t remember any of it? Because you’re not the one doing it?” I was definitely rationalizing for him, which we both seemed to find supremely embarrassing for me.
“Get back in the car,” he said.
I did, and he drove down the hill, in a direction I never went.
“I guess you did almost kill that one guy,” I said after several minutes of silence, referring to the man he’d fought in the ring, when I’d chased him down the first time. My first glimpse of the monster. “He was a man.”
Jude laughed hollowly. He slid his left hand up on the steering wheel and floated the other for a moment, half a second, before letting it land on the gearshift. I realized I’d been watching its trajectory only after it had chosen where to land.
Teddy called again. I opened his messages window to tell him I was working, then realized the significance of having this particular phone with me.
“You know they can track us,” I realized aloud.
Jude reached over and took the phone from my hands before tossing it over the side of the cliff.
“Jude.” I sighed.
He switched his hands on the steering wheel, let his left hand float free on the wind, and kept driving.
Eventually, a view of the ocean rose up from the edge of the hillside road, coming closer and closer into view.
The moon was a crescent, and I felt only a moment’s pang of guilt.
Coming to terms with one’s humanity was a humbling experience.
I felt terribly sorry for Valerie, for the way she’d met her end, for whatever she’d said or done that seemed so distant from me, my life, my present feeling of aliveness.
“Something is wrong with me,” I said as we got level with the ocean, winding our way closer to the moon’s reflection in the water.
“Yes, profoundly,” Jude confirmed, and stopped the car.
Again he got out of the car without preamble, climbing down a narrow, winding path to a cove in what I felt pretty sure was Malibu.
I wasn’t a beach person myself—few Angeleno natives were if they weren’t born in one of the beach cities.
I’d been to the Santa Monica Pier and the Venice boardwalk, but Malibu was too isolated, too unfriendly and exclusive. It was also beautiful, and unfair.
I shivered again in the sharpness of the cold. With a biting sense of relief, like pouring rubbing alcohol on an open wound.
Jude had taken off his boots and was pulling his shirt over his head. There were all sorts of scars on his back, thin white lines in some kind of design, like a sigil. He must have heard me inhale at the sight of it, because he looked back at me over his shoulder.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
He slid off his jeans and kicked them aside without self-consciousness or performance.
He wore boxers—something about that seemed disorienting, boyish.
Maybe that was what I couldn’t resolve: that a demon bought packs of T-shirts from Costco and probably wore the same underwear he had since he was in high school, discovering his dick.
The devil had gotten too human for me to properly despise, and yet I wasn’t bored like I should have been.
I kept waiting to feel disappointed, unsatisfied by the mundanity of pure evil.
Instead, I felt something loud and inarguable in my chest.
His unpredictability, the coin flip between man and monster, was the equivalent of many forms of longing. If I could say for certain he was evil, would it change things?
If I knew he wasn’t, would I walk?
The danger was somehow physically arresting. The thing I was supposed to run from, to survive, instead I chased down like a shadow. He was like the city to me, Los Angeles incarnate. Capable of every kind of end.
He kicked off the rest of his clothes and walked into the water, letting out a shout of something at the cold.
I laughed through the chatter of my teeth, holding myself as I shivered.
I kicked off my shoes, wading in deeper, carefully remaining on hard-packed sand.
Far away, Jude disappeared under a wave, then crested above it as the tide slid over my bare feet.
“Are you coming?” he called to me.
I pictured myself drifting off into nothing, another body lost to the sea.
“I can’t really swim,” I admitted.
Jude disappeared for a moment under the water, then swam up again, bobbing along like a buoy in the distance. “Really?”
“Really.” My mom had tried to teach me, but it wasn’t all that easy to go swimming. I didn’t have much of a reason to learn. “I almost drowned when I was a kid.”
He started swimming toward me, then surfaced enough to walk. “Did you?”
I didn’t move when he reached me. He looked down at me and I opened my mouth to say something pithy, but he reached down, his cold, wet fingers brushing the hem of my T-shirt. He glanced at me and my stomach flooded with heat. I nodded.
He pulled my shirt over my head. “This?” he asked, resting an ice-cold knuckle on the cup of my bra, brushing it over the bead of my nipple.
I nodded. He reached behind me, delivering me to shivers as he opened the clasp with icy hands.
“These?” His thumb was tucked pointedly behind the button of my jeans.
I nodded. He slid them to my ankles, then got down on one knee, helping me balance as he slid them off from one foot, then the other.
With each piece of clothing discarded he tossed them over to the rocks, in the vague direction of his own clothes.
He straightened slowly, his bare torso passing over mine.
“These.” One finger hooked the fabric of my sensible cotton underwear.
I took them off myself. “I still can’t swim.”
“Then we won’t swim.” He took my hand and pulled me into the water, knee-deep, then up to our waists. The waves bit upward.
“Fuck.” It was so cold I thought I’d die.
“Breathe.” He held me pressed against him; one arm was wound around my ribs. Then, gradually, the other one wrapped around me. “You’re not breathing.”
The cold was gripping, unbelievable. Literally impossible to believe. It was so cold it stung, and I looked up at him with unfettered hostility that shifted almost immediately.