Page 44 of This Might Hurt

ANDREW

I don’t know why my eyes open. Maybe I’m not even awake. I can’t smell anything, see anything, hear anything. My head is pounding, and a sense of foreboding sits on my chest like a dark animal.

Something stirs next to me, a soft breath against my neck, and my racing heart calms. I ease myself into a sitting position and lean across to fumble for my phone where it’s charging under the nearest armchair.

The screen blinds me for a minute when I turn it on.

It’s three eighteen in the morning, which would be five eighteen in New York.

When I tilt the phone, the light catches Jude’s profile.

He’s sprawled on his face in a twisted jumble of sheets, his arms curled and tucked up under his chin.

Some groggy, unfiltered part of me wants to lean over and kiss away the wrinkle between his eyebrows.

I cradle the phone in both hands, struggling to breathe, my nose and throat dry with dehydration.

Something’s burning against the backs of my eyes, like tears, but I don’t know why.

Checking to make sure Jude hasn’t stirred, I mute the sound and turn off airplane mode.

The notification box at the top of the screen pops down again and again and again, too fast to read, and every time I think it’s finished, it keeps going.

Instead of reading the texts, I open my call log and study the time stamps on the last six calls. Archie, Archie, Archie, all in the last three minutes, starting right when I woke up.

Hugh’s dead. I knew it, I felt it. A ripple across the sky.

It takes me a minute to realize I’m shivering. I didn’t expect to feel anything for him. But he was the sun, the gravity that held us in the orbit of our sick, rotting solar system. And that’s the one thing humans have feared most for all of history, right? The day the sun goes out.

The phone starts vibrating so suddenly I almost drop it.

I stare at the name on the screen for five pulses before I slip quickly off the mattress and sprint barefoot down the hall, through the main room, and out the back door.

The travertine has held the heat, clinging to the soles of my feet as I circle the pool and sit on the low wall that divides the dining area from the meditation garden.

Without the lights on it’s terrifyingly gloomy out here, like something could crawl up from the bushes and I wouldn’t even notice.

The phone keeps buzzing insistently against my palm.

Just before the call drops, I hit answer and put it to my ear with a trembling hand.

Archie takes a quick, surprised breath. “Andrew.” His voice creeps through my veins like the sickest kind of relief, the poison and the antidote.

For two days I’ve been lost, everything wrong and unfamiliar.

This is my home. It hurts so much, but it’s the only thing I’ve ever known.

If I told him how I’m fighting back tears over the death of a man who never loved me, he’d understand because he feels the same way.

When I stay silent, my uncle sighs. “You already know he’s gone, don’t you?” He sounds exhausted, like he’s been up all night.

Some kind of pitiful defiance stops me from speaking, like if I don’t say anything he won’t know I’m here. I squeeze the phone, my breathing unsteady.

“He asked for you,” Archie says softly, with none of the anger I expect. “His last words. Where’s Andrew? Bring me Andrew. I think he wanted to give you his blessing.”

It’s probably not even true. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I sniff and wipe my eyes roughly, still shivering. Some part of my brain registers a distant bang, but I don’t look up.

“Come home, Andrew. We need to be a family right now. Whatever you’ve done, it’s okay.

I promise we’ll figure it out.” Back when he broke my jaw when I was fifteen, I couldn’t talk or ride Sid or do anything for weeks.

I lay around my room, wretchedly depressed.

One day Archie came in with some new game console and a couple of controllers.

He sat on my bed with me, let me pick a game, and played it with me the whole afternoon.

The man never told me he was sorry, but at the time I let myself imagine maybe that’s what he was thinking.

It’s the only moment I can remember where he spoke this gently to me.

Feet slap the tile, and I look up to see Jude running toward me in his boxers and hoodie.

Archie’s voice reaches down my throat, finds the words, tries to coax them out of me. “Where are you? I’ll send a helicopter to take you to the airport. You don’t have to do anything else.”

I stare up at Jude as he stops in front of me, panting, and holds out his hand. His eyes look very dark. “Give me the phone,” he whispers. It’s not a request.

“Andrew,” my uncle demands. That’s not a request either, and I can feel myself splitting open, cracking apart between two immoveable forces. When I suck in a breath and open my mouth to answer Archie, Jude reaches out quickly and presses two fingers against my lips.

“Look at me,” he murmurs. When I obey, he nods. “Give me the phone.”

Slowly, helplessly, I uncurl my death grip on the phone and hold it out to him. “Good,” he breathes, brushing fingers through my hair as he takes it away and squints at the screen. When he goes to hang up, I hear Archie’s voice faintly. “Are you there, Andrew?”

Jude hesitates. When he glances at me, there’s an animal in his eyes I’ve sensed but never seen before. I freeze. “No, don’t—”

His thumb skips end call and lands on speaker instead. “Hello?”

I put my hand over my mouth, shaking my head. Jude crouches down between my knees, staring up at me. “Who is this?” Archie asks warily, after a pause.

“Are you scared?” Jude asks my uncle, his voice mild. When I grab for the phone, he catches my hand and tangles our fingers together.

“Who the fuck are you?” The warning in Archie’s voice turns my stomach to water.

“Tell Andrew you’re scared,” Jude murmurs, without taking his feral eyes off mine. “He can hear you. Tell him you’re shitting yourself wondering what he’s doing.”

An endless moment later, the call disconnects.

Jude immediately turns the phone off and shoves it in his pocket.

The silence slips in, nothing but a frog trilling in the distance and the disgustingly loud breathing in my ears—my breathing.

I dig the tips of my fingers into the stone underneath me, feeling the pain as it scrapes my skin.

“Why did you answer his call?” Jude’s voice has lost that terrifying lightness. He’s disappointed, but that scares me less.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I croak, keeping my eyes on the ghostly white tiles between my bare feet.

“Why not?”

“He was thinking about forgiving me. Now you gave him a reason to hurt me.” My adrenaline refuses to ease off; I can’t stop shaking.

“Whatever he said,” Jude offers finally, sounding unsure, “he was lying to you.”

“I know that.” I huff a wretched, breathless laugh. “But there was a chance… You don’t know how they think. My grandfather’s dead and I can’t change what I’ve done. You fucked up my one chance to take it back.”

“Jesus.” He drops into a crouch between my knees and hooks fingers under my chin to force me to look at him. His eyes are puffy with sleep, his hair a mess. “We scared them. You scared them. You have what they need, and we’re gonna rub it in their faces until they beg you for it.”

He thinks they’re scared. I seriously doubt it.

I’m starting to realize I’ve made a lot of very poor choices in the last forty-eight hours, ending with letting him take that phone.

I sniff back all the half-formed tears in the back of my throat, my voice ragged.

“If this falls apart, you get to go back to Ramona. I have to stay there and live through whatever hell—”

His fingers snag roughly in a fistful of my hair as he goes up on his knees and shoves his mouth against mine. It hurts—too harsh, too much heat, the press of chapped lips and oh god I knew his mouth would taste exactly like this.

Less than a second later, his skin is gone and I’m gaping at him with my tongue practically hanging out of my mouth where it pressed forward to meet his.

“Stop it,” he growls, still gripping the back of my head.

“You think I’m gonna leave you? Or let someone hurt you?

Do you ever listen to me, or am I talking to myself all the fucking time?

” He hangs his head between his shoulders with a strangled laugh.

I can’t tell if he’s angry or sad or just really fucking tired.

“No.” I want to lean my head against his, but I think my hair is going to get ripped out if I try to move. “This was my terrible plan. If it fails, I can’t bring you down with me.”

Then he finally lets go, my scalp throbbing.

He drops down onto his ass on the travertine cross-legged and smiles up at me, like I took something complicated and made it incredibly simple again.

“Remember what I said to you last night? I already ate you alive. What happens to you happens to me. But I’m pretty sure you can’t drag us anywhere because we’re already at the bottom. ”

“Jude…” The look on his face makes me trail off.

Daring, determined, a little reverent, like now that he’s said his piece, I’m allowed to punish him if that’s what I want, because he has no regrets.

I slide off the wall and crouch in front of him, our eyes level.

“That was lovely. Now two things. One, please don’t do shit to my family without asking me or I will become a very unpleasant person to be around. Two, kiss me again.”

He blinks, like he almost missed it. So slowly, he pushes himself forward until our noses are an inch apart.

We sit like that for a minute, the smallest sounds of our tongues shifting in our mouths, the stirring of body heat, the way I can barely keep his eyes in focus this close.

I twitch when his fingers rasp lightly against the stubble on my jaw.

This time it doesn’t hurt when his lips find mine, which is strangely disappointing.

But then he easily, almost lazily parts my mouth, slips his sweet, smoky tongue into me like it’s his second home, and everything starts making sense.

He finds my tongue and teases it lightly, showing me what to do, retreating until I do it back to him, fucking training me with his fingers cupped firmly around the base of my throat to hold me still.

I fumble to get my hand up under his hoodie and anchor it where we can both feel it, splayed hot against his ribs.

He moans softly, then pulls away and buries his face in the curve of my jaw.

Breathing hard, I sit with my eyes shut as the warm breeze soothes the sweat on my neck.