Chapter Forty-Seven I’m Not in the Jude For This
If possible, Jude’s face grows even more shuttered. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Seriously? That’s how you want to play this?” I demand, moving closer so that I’m in his face. Or as close to in his face as I can get when I’m ten inches shorter than he is.
“I’m not playing at all,” he growls back. “I’m trying to protect you. Why can’t you see that?”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I don’t want you to protect me? Maybe I want you to trust me, too.”
“I don’t trust myself, Kumquat. It has nothing to do with you.”
His words hang in the hot, steamy air between us. Part of me thinks that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and part of me is just spinning them around in my head over and over again, trying to figure out if this is just another excuse. Just another lie.
But Jude doesn’t lie, not really. He omits. He clams up. He disappears when you need him most, but he doesn’t actually lie. So what does it mean that he doesn’t trust himself? And more importantly, why?
“Is this what you want, then?” I ask, and for once I don’t bother to hide my bewilderment or my pain. “To just keep pushing me away until I don’t come back? To destroy everything—not just what we used to be but everything we could be as well?”
The mask slips, and for a second I can see the torment underneath. I can see the pain and the indecision and a whole lot of self-loathing that I never knew existed in him. It calls to the pain inside me, has my whole body pulling toward him with a need to comfort even as he tears me apart.
“I just don’t want to hurt you,” he tells me in a voice gone hoarse with agony.
“You’re doing nothing but hurting me,” I counter as the storm continues to rage around us. “You’ve done nothing but hurt me for three long years. How can telling me the truth be any harder, or any worse, than what we’ve already gone through?”
Jude’s whole being seems to recoil at my words.
But then he’s reaching for me.
Pulling me into his big, warm, powerful body.
Holding me so tightly and so carefully that I can barely breathe from all the emotions welling up inside of me.
“It feels like I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you,” he whispers against my ear.
The words go through me like one of Izzy’s knives, slicing what’s left of my defenses to ribbons and tearing me wide open. “It feels like we’ve spent the past few years unintentionally hurting each other,” I whisper back. “Maybe it’s time we try something new.”
He doesn’t answer right away—at least not with words. Instead, his lips graze my temple slowly, gently, before sliding oh-so-carefully down. He presses kisses to the curve of my cheekbone, along the line of my jaw, to the sensitive spot just behind my ear.
And just like that, he has me. All of me. The lover and the fighter. The good girl and the rebel. The skeptic and the woman so desperate to believe that she’s standing in the rain and literally begging a boy—begging the boy—to let her help him carry his burdens.
My arms wrap around him of their own volition.
My fingers clutch at the damp, rough fabric of his sweatshirt.
My body melts into his, and I hold him as tightly as I can. So tightly that maybe, just maybe, I can keep him from shattering, too…if he lets me.
Lightning flashes across the sky, and still I hold him.
Thunder shakes the ground, and still I hold him.
Rain pours from the sky like a waterfall gone wild, and still I hold him.
And I can’t help thinking that I want to hold him like this forever.
But then he lets go. He pulls away. He takes several steps back and tells me, “I can’t,” in a voice gone gravelly with sorrow.
“Can’t what?” I whisper, though I already know what he’s going to say.
“I can’t tell you what’s going on. And I can’t be with you—not the way you want us to be together. It’s not safe.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that,” he answers with an intensity so strong his eyes glow. “I knew it three years ago, when I kissed you. And I knew it this afternoon, in the forest. I just couldn’t stop myself. I ruined everything three years ago. I can’t let that happen again.”
My heart speeds up at his words, but in a very bad way as I think of everything that happened three years ago. As I think of Carolina. “What did you ruin, Jude?”
But he just shakes his head as he steps off the porch and into the rain. “You need to give me that tapestry, Clementine.”
I shake my head even as his words about what happened in ninth grade continue to reverberate through me. Is he just talking about us? Or is he talking about something more ominous?
But before I can ask, he shoves a frustrated hand through his rain-soaked hair and growls, “I don’t want to fight, Clementine.”
“You never want to fight,” I tell him as I walk straight into the wet. “That’s the problem, Jude. I just hope one day you find something or someone worth fighting for. Maybe, if you’re lucky, it will be yourself.”
And then I turn and walk away, praying with every step I take that he’ll follow me. That just once he’ll fight for me and for us.