Page 11 of This Might Hurt

Everyone who touches me is cold and hard, like death, but he’s all heat.

I dig my nails into my palm, waiting for him to move.

My nose rests right against his damp hair.

He probably hasn’t showered in a few days, so it just smells like him, the unique, pure chemistry of his body.

Some deep part of me recognizes it, the voice that’s been whispering in my head all afternoon. This one matters.

When he starts to sit up, I hook an arm around him, tight against his shoulder blades, and hold him still.

I don’t know why, except that this is the last chance I have to understand why I’m supposed to stay alive, and he hasn’t given me an answer yet.

He grunts quietly, surprised, his body softening as his nose tucks in against my shoulder.

“I’m going to hate you forever for this,” I tell him. “The worse things get, the more I’m going to blame you.” When I open my eyes, everything’s bright yellow in the sunset—the car, the rain on the window, his skin.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs. “Everyone already does. I can take it.”

“Who are you?” The tips of my fingers dig into his shoulder. He’s built of long, lean muscle, but I can feel all his ribs.

He pushes against my grip until he can lift his head and look down at me.

“I’m Jude.” The man is smiling crookedly again, but it doesn’t reach his exhausted eyes.

The right one is already starting to swell and bruise.

“Clearly I don’t make things better.” He cocks his head a little, and I realize how close our faces are.

“I already told you this. You should listen when I talk to you.”

I shove him away. “I hope you spend the rest of your life regretting that you could have had millions of dollars in credit cards.”

His thighs still grip my sides as he sits up, his head bent sideways against the roof of the car.

Reaching past me, he fishes his shorts out from between the seats and extracts the lighter and his carton of cigarettes.

I lie still and watch as he sets the chilly metal lighter in the middle of my chest and studies the damp cardboard with a troubled expression.

Instinctively, I pick up the lighter and flick the flame with my un-ruined hand.

Humming a vague sound of appreciation, he cups a hand around mine and bends down to ignite the cigarette, which catches easily despite the damp.

Leaning back, he sits there for a long time with his eyes closed, then finally exhales the mouthful of smoke.

I study the knuckles of my hurt hand, already swelling and leaking blood from a deep abrasion.

Grimacing, I force myself to wiggle each finger while he observes silently.

“So tell me,” I say, “if you know everything—how am I supposed to live like this?”

He huffs out another trail of smoke, his lean shoulders sagging as he stares out the window.

“You just…you have to. That’s how the world works.

Every single person is too important to disappear.

” His eyes slide back to mine, eerie in the half-dark, somehow determined and hopeless at the same time like someone who threw their body between a speeding train and the person they’re trying to save.

I don’t look away this time, because I need him to answer for real. “Then how?” My voice is almost gone now.

His eyebrows scrunch together as he bites his dry lower lip, deep in thought.

His long fingers idly trace my jaw, cup the side of my face, curl behind my ear, restless and unsure as he takes another pull of his cigarette.

When I break eye contact, his thumb taps my cheekbone until I meet his stare again.

“You’re stubborn,” he offers drily, the corner of his mouth twitching.

“Stay that way. Sometimes when we run out of other reasons, all we have left is to be too stubborn to die.”

I cough out a weak laugh that sounds like a sob, or maybe it’s the other way around.

“Why are you so fucking annoying?” My nose is running, so I swipe it roughly with my good hand and turn my face away, toward the door.

For some reason all I can see is his skinny ass happily capering out of the store in Buffalo with a paper tray in each hand, shoving one at me with a light in his eyes like he was put on this earth to make sure I was never hungry.

“Why the fuck did you buy me a hot dog?” I murmur, not looking at him.

His body sags heavily against my legs as he rolls his head back with a groan. “Jesus, I didn’t know you were vegan. You don’t have to rub it in. But I won’t forget now. I never forget anything.”

Everything’s quiet for a minute besides the occasional roar of a car whipping past. “Fine.” I reach up and he lets me take the cigarette out of his mouth. It still feels awful when I inhale the smoke, but now that my whole body feels awful it blends into the misery in a soothing kind of way.

Jude checks his phone as I alternate pulls with dry, irritated coughing. He closes his puffy eyes and rubs his palms roughly up and down his face a few times, then shakes it off, looking more awake. “You ready?”

I drop my head back against the seat and let him take the cigarette. “Don’t ask me that.”

He studies me, then reaches out and rests his palm on my face, his long fingers splayed across my vision. He has really big hands, and for a second I feel like a little kid who has someone strong and all-knowing to protect them from everything that scares them. “You’re going to be okay.”

Then he’s gone, scrambling off me and over the center console back into his seat.

I want to tell him that he’s full of shit, that a starved drifter robbing gas stations knows nothing about being okay.

But I’m asleep before the car even gets up to speed with the last shreds of sunset caught in his hair.

I dream about suffocating, over and over.

Sometimes it smells like my uncle, sometimes like the man I’m supposed to marry.

Sometimes like nothing but my own misery.

One time I jolt awake, gasping. Jude’s hand is already on my hip, like it’s always been there.

I stroke my fingers up and down between his stretched tendons for so long I lose track of time and drop away again. Or perhaps that was a dream, too.

My throat feels dry and raw when I wake up to a cool breeze on my face.

I swallow painfully and blink, trying to understand why I’m naked with my face buried in leather that smells like Archie and cigarette smoke.

When I sit up, a knife-point of pain stabs through my hand and up my arm, enough to make the world spin for a second.

I can’t bend my fingers anymore. The pain centers me in my wretched body with a cruel insistence, and I realize that I feel normal again.

Empty, very far away. No resistance anywhere.

The relief is unspeakable, no longer having to fight against myself with such monumental effort. I can be an object again.

When I look up, everything’s dark except for a two story white Victorian house with light leaking out through lace curtains. I can sense more than see Jude’s body standing by my open car door. “Where are we?” I grate out, rubbing my gritty eyes.

“North Wyoming. My friend lives here.” His quiet, throaty voice soothes my headache. “Grant texted that he’s going to be here in a few minutes. Do you want to go inside and change?”

“No.” I’m not going into some stranger’s grimy-looking house without my bodyguard.

I study the neat lawn and cozy planter boxes on the porch, a rocking chair.

Maybe it’s not grimy; maybe that’s uncharitable.

Every house under a certain income level looks grimy to me.

I truly don’t know how to tell the difference.

Jude huffs a laugh. “You gonna go home naked?” I can see that the black eye I gave him is really starting to come in now.

I shrug one shoulder.

“Give me a sec.” Grabbing his wet clothes in a messy armful, he stuffs everything into his backpack and goes bounding up the lawn with no hesitation, in nothing but boxers and sneakers.

I wrap my arms around myself and listen to the crickets chirp as I try to figure out what I’m going home to.

My grandfather in the hospital feels so impossible I almost laugh.

What does a force of nature need with IVs and heart monitors?

The world belongs to him, and it has no power to send him away.

But that’s the joke, I suppose. One germ from a stray sneeze or one particle of food breathed down the wrong way is all it takes.

If Archie’s coming home, it has to mean something.

The family is about to descend into chaos with me trapped at the very center.

The boy who has no idea what he’s sending me home to comes weaving down between gopher holes in buffalo check flannel pants and a baggy white t-shirt full of holes, holding a bundle of worn out cotton in his hands. “Here.”

I want nothing less than to put on his clothes, but if Grant finds me like this, he’ll get even more upset than he already is.

Jude turns his back with uncharacteristic politeness as I struggle out of the car and drag on a pair of black sweatpants that barely come down to my ankles.

The t-shirt is bright green with that snarling cartoon dinosaur I saw on his backpack—Kearns High Raptors.

The date underneath is from eight years ago.

“Andrew?”

My head jerks up uneasily. No one has ever said my name so carefully, both syllables cradled by a flat, small town accent and that hint of scratchiness. I grimace as the clumsy seams and shitty fabric of the shirt scrape at my skin.

As if I had answered, he folds his arms behind his head and stares up at the sky. “Who’s gonna hurt you?”

I watch the road, looking for cars as I try to fix my hair. The memory of what I yelled in the car feels vaguely embarrassing now. “No one.”