Page 29

I swallow past the vulnerable feeling, shoving it somewhere deep. Maybe it’s his strengths, and not my weaknesses, that make it so easy to see, I tell myself.Maybe.
“I’m good,” I say with a sharp shake of my head. “You probably want to steer clear of me enough as it is.”
He chuckles lightly, but there’s a hint of sardonicism to it. Proven when he says, “I’m sure the things I’ve had going on up in here—” he points at his temple with his index and middle fingers, words scrawled across them that I can’t make out, “would give your shit a run for its money. Trust me.”
His words make me crack a smile even though they shouldn’t. I shouldn’t find it comforting that he’s been through something, too. But at the moment? I just do. It makes me feel a little less lost, a little less broken, and I guess I’m desperate enough to take that where I can find it. As messed up as it sounds, as messed up as it may or may not make me, it makes me feel a little less…alone.
“Tight spaces,” I say—much to my own surprise, my throat closing around the words. “I hate tight spaces, feeling trapped.”
He nods with zero trace of judgment. “So, being on a boat made for eight, with—what, fifteen of us—is probably pretty fucked for your psyche, huh?”
I nod in response.
“If you’d said something, we could’ve stayed back—”
“I wanted to try,” I interrupt. “Honestly, it’s not that bad.” I swallow. “Nottoobad.”
The corner of his lips tug with understanding. Shifting forward in his seat, his inked elbows resting on his inked knees, he studies me from beneath dark lashes. Gray eyes dip into the ocean of my own, and my breaths catch in my throat, only loosening once he starts talking again.
“Feel free to tell me to fuck off,” he says, “but what is it about tight spaces that make you anxious?”
How he knows it isn’t a simple fear, a simple reaction born out of a normal life, is beyond me. But it’s easy to see he does. The latent storm in his gaze grows darker, rolling in with the knowledge he somehow holds. It draws me in. In a comforting sort of way. And it’s because of that, maybe, or because I feel open and inexplicably calm when Jude is near, that I tell him.
I tell him everything.
The words spill from my mouth, and I can’t stop them. I tell him about Quinn, and how close we used to be. How he was my best friend, and Addy’s too, even at that age when we should have been butting heads and fighting like cats and dogs. How he was my fiercest protector. My greatest ally, and my biggest supporter.
How at twelve years old, in the sixth grade, he was actually Addy’s first boyfriend, and first kiss, too.
How much we both loved him.
And then—
And then I tell him about the crash. And our overturned car. And the weight of Quinn’s body on top of me, trapping mebeneath him. How I thought I’d die from the suffocation alone. And after that, from the agonizing, incomprehensible pain of losing him.
I wince, my words cutting off abruptly.
Wrapping my arms around my middle, I draw my legs up until my bare feet are resting at the edge of my chair.Five, four, three, two, one. Five, four, three, two, one,I count backward again and again. Not for the sake of the steps but for the sake of my racing heart. For the burn of tears surging behind my eyelids, threatening to spill free.
I swallow past the knot in my throat, past the overwhelming urge to cry.
I want to kick myself for thinking now was a good time for this conversation, my emotions already so close to the edge after last night they’re practically ready to dive off the lip and freefall.
“Sorry never fucking cuts it, does it?” Jude says, clearing his throat. The softness in his voice is jarring, folding the moment into one I want to hold in the palm of my hands. When he runs the backs of his fingers down the length of my arm in a comforting gesture, I’m almost sure I can. “But I am sorry that happened to you. It’s fucked. And I’m sorry for your loss.”
My throat swells with his words, with the feel of his hand smoothing over the surface of my skin, and my nose stings with the pressure of tears once again.
But when my eyes catch Jude’s, they ease almost immediately. Because his gaze has become nearly impenetrable, as hard as a mass of ice drifting at sea. It reels my thoughts from my own pain to what I suspect might be his.
“I lost someone in an accident, too,” he confirms, and my heart—my heart—it stills inside my chest, before constricting, aching uncomfortably with understanding.
I open my mouth, my lips parting, but I can’t find the words. I can’t dislodge them from where they’re stuck in my throat.Helost someone in an accident, too.The knowledge pours over me, through me, coating me in grief. Both his and mine.
I hate it for him; I hate it for both of us.
“We were sixteen when it happened,” he continues, and his shadows that are so close to the surface now push mine at bay. “It was the summer before our junior year, and we… we had just started talking again, after a break of some time. She’d been going through a lot—more than I knew, really—and anyway, she uh… she got in her car under the influence one night, and she didn’t survive it.”
Layers of shock, pain, and sadness bloom beneath one another inside my chest. “My god, Jude. I am so sorry. That’s—that’s awful.” I swallow thickly, wiping a stray tear from my cheek.