Page 42 of This Might Hurt

They fly open again at the sound of Jude yelling “Geronimo!” I fling my arms over my head to protect myself from the king-sized mattress plummeting toward me off the third-floor balcony. It slams down in the middle of the coffee table with a brutal cracking sound.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” I yell up at him, scrambling to my feet. “Are you feral?”

He leans over the balcony with a grin and spreads his arms wide. “I didn’t like any of those rooms.”

“I… Jesus.” I want to be pissed, but I’m mostly grateful I don’t have to sleep upstairs.

“Don’t mess with it. I’ll sort it out when I get down there,” Jude offers chivalrously. “Give me a few more minutes.” He leans way too far over the railing and squints at my thin dress shirt. “It’s freezing in here. There’s a hoodie in my bag if you want.”

Ignoring his instructions, I get up and cross to the lopsided, bare mattress. I hope he reconnoiters some bedding, because I have no idea where it’s kept.

Thankful for a task to focus on, I drag back the heavy armchairs until there’s space to scoot the mattress off the table onto the floor.

I can’t believe he got something this big over the railing by himself.

He fucking destroyed the table; it’s bent down the middle, like the frame cracked, and the mirrored surface is spiderwebbed with cracks.

After considering a moment, I shift it very carefully toward the window so there’s no risk of broken glass near the bed.

Once I’m finished, I sit cross-legged on the corner of the mattress and reach for his bag.

A toothbrush falls out, a cell phone charger, a book with a page dog-eared near the middle.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro—another sad one.

I wonder if he likes them because your body can only carry one nerve signal at a time, so you can give yourself a new pain if you don’t want to feel the old one.

Underneath the book, I push my hand into a mess of wrinkled clothes.

I’m starting to realize there’s a comfort in the coarse weave of cheap cotton, something tactile and secure I can’t find in linen or cashmere.

The oversized hoodie I pull out is a rusty orange with It was me, I let the dogs out printed on the front.

I’m not fucking wearing that, so I fold it and set it down next to me.

Just as I’m about to put the bag aside, I remember the last thing I watched him pack yesterday morning. Listening for a moment and hearing nothing, I carefully slide my hand back in and fish around until I find a hard, angular shape.

Do you want him to feel scared?

Then what do you do, good boy?

Moving carefully, I ease the gun out of the bag.

The low light gleams along the barrel as I turn it over.

It’s slightly bigger but much lighter than I expected, like a kid’s toy.

He fucking points this at people, for real, and they do whatever he tells them.

I remember how it felt pushed up under my jaw, and I still don’t know if I liked it because I wanted to die that day, or because he showed me a kind of power that answers to no one.

Keeping my finger well away from the trigger even though I’m sure it isn’t loaded, I use both hands to point it at the armchair in the corner. The skin on my palms prickles, anticipating the snap of a recoil, as I angle my head and close one eye like I’m in a movie.

“Pow.” I jump out of my skin at the voice behind me. Jude leans in the doorway with his arms full of sheets, a grin quirking the corner of his mouth. “You love that thing, don’t you?”

“I don’t understand why.” I study the utilitarian, almost ugly shape of it.

“It’s the high, I told you.” He crosses the room and drops the sheets on the mattress with a soft thump, the only sound in the whole house. “Have you never shot a gun before?”

“I’ve held a rifle. My uncles tried to take me hunting lots of times, but I wouldn’t go.

They hate that I’m vegan, so they wanted to make me kill something.

” I meant to censor that memory into something gentler, but it’s hard to control my words around him.

When I look up, he’s watching me with flared nostrils, his jaw tight.

“Do you have any ammo for it?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

“A little.” One of his eyebrows creeps up. “You want to shoot it?”

“Is that a problem?”

His face relaxes. “No, it’s hot. Here.” He flops onto the mattress next to me, sinking deep into the memory foam, and digs through the front pocket of his backpack for a black plastic box with a clear yellow lid, barely a quarter full.

Watching my face, he pulls out a single bullet and holds it up between two fingers for me to see.

“Let me load it. I don’t do this much but at least I’ve practiced. ”

I pass him the gun gingerly and watch him eject the magazine. Once he’s loaded it, he clicks the it back into place. “You wanna take it outside?”

“Just give it to me.”

He huffs out a bemused sigh. “Okay. Careful.” I try to look confident, but it must be clear from the way I’m holding it that I’m out of my depth. He shifts onto his knees and leans his weight into my back. “This isn’t a great idea.”

“Since when have you ever given a shit?” Still keeping my finger away from the trigger, I point the muzzle across the room at Colin’s original Remington oil painting of a cowboy in the desert. “Could I shoot that?”

“Are you asking for permission?” His voice right against the back of my head makes my cock stir. “Is that what you want to do?”

A small shiver runs through me that he’d never notice if we weren’t pressed together. “Yes. Are you sitting behind me to help me or to make sure I take the bullet if it ricochets?"

He chuckles and squeezes my shoulder. “First pull the slide back to chamber the round, then aim. The safety is that little tab built into the—”

It takes my shocked brain a full five seconds to process the awful, deafening crack, followed by the high-pitched shatter of glass, Jude jolting against my back. That wasn’t me. Maybe a bomb happened to go off right then. Maybe it killed us both.

The feeling of strong hands prying the gun out of my fingers brings me back.

I gape, wide-eyed, at the second-floor balcony, nothing left of the glass barrier but a jagged hole surrounded by cracked shards still clinging to the railing.

Trying to slow my racing heart, I press back into the steady body behind me. “I—uh. I missed.”

“You did,” he says, a little breathless. Having presumably put the gun somewhere I can’t get to it, he wraps an arm around my chest.

I reach up and squeeze his wrist tight. “My ears hurt.”

“You’re okay. It’ll stop.” He doesn’t let go, just holds me as the ringing in my head subsides. “That was pretty fucking cool, though. Look at it.”

I shift my weight impatiently, casting around for the gun again even though my heart is still rattling around in terror. “Now I need to shoot the painting. My uncle paid three million for that.”

“Jesus,” he breathes. I don’t know if he means the cost of the painting or the frantic way I’m already searching for more things to break. “I’m not giving it back to you after that demonstration of gun safety,” he warns, blocking me with his arm.

“That was your fault.” I throw myself face first on the mattress, high on more adrenaline than I’ve ever had at once in my life, on a marriage license in the car glove box, on the way he talks to me.

Jude stands up and uses his boot to roll me off the mattress onto the floor. After listening to him wrestle with the sheets for a minute, I sit up and help him make the bed in silence. It looks like a hack job, with me not knowing how to do it right and him not caring, but at least it will be warm.

When Jude looks up from struggling to put a duvet inside a duvet cover, he catches me scanning the room for where he hid the gun. “Hey.”

Fuck, I can’t take it when he calls to me like that. Like I’m some kind of fucking dog, but his best, most perfect dog. I try not to meet his stare, but I can’t help it. “How many nights have you barely slept?” he asks, giving up and throwing the duvet on the bed without the cover.

I count back three nights before I lose track and shrug.

“Yeah. You’re buzzing. You need to settle down.”

“Can you seriously be calm after today?”

He sighs deeply and flops down on his ass in the middle of the mattress. “We need rest.” When I point at my face, like exactly how restful do I look right now?, he gestures at the 98” television looming over the empty fireplace. “You got a remote for that thing?”

“If you tell me where you put the gun.” I don’t even know if I’m joking or not, but when he doesn’t answer I point toward a drawer in the coffee table he just massacred and watch him wrestle it open.

We’re lucky that the absurd amount of broken glass we’ve created in the last hour is all on the opposite side of the room from the bed.

“Take it from the king of not sleeping,” he comments drily, “watching TV helps. Just shut up and sit down.”

I watch him turn on the TV and flip through channels over and over at the same annoying pace he uses with the radio.

Tired of watching commercials flick by at light speed, I search through the backpack I brought from home for a t-shirt and joggers to change into.

By the time I come back and sit down, Jude has settled on something I vaguely recognize.

I think it’s called Friends. We never watched television at Carrick.

Grandfather was the snobbish chess and cognac type, my mother went to bed early, and the other two were too busy being assholes.