Page 55 of This Might Hurt

JUDE

We almost fall asleep naked in the middle of the floor, him on his back and me with my head on his shoulder and my leg slung over his hips. He reeked of fear before; now he just smells like me.

“Jude,” he whispers finally, tracing the backs of his knuckles gently up and down my chest. I force myself out of a half-doze as he nudges me again. “It’s coming out.”

When I realize what he means, I can’t stifle a laugh. “Sorry, that’s how it works.”

He knocks lightly on my forehead. “Shut up. I asked you to fill me and in about thirty seconds it’s all going to be gone. Fix it.”

“Oh, I see.” That permanent hazy, possessive hunger leaks through me as I sit up. “I apologize for my grievous failures.”

“Apology not accepted,” he mumbles as I fold his right knee up to his chest. He tenses and whines when I work two fingers back into his loose, messy asshole.

He’s leaking on their perfect carpet, which feels viscerally satisfying even though I guess it will inconvenience the cleaners more than anyone else.

Once my fingers are slicked in the cum his body kept warm for me, I let his leg go and crawl up to lie against him. “Here. Only the best for you.”

He eyes my glistening fingers with a mix of distaste and hunger.

I’m about to tell him he doesn’t have to when he grabs my wrist in one demanding hand and wraps his mouth around my fingers so deep he almost gags on them.

The sensation of his tongue shoving between them while he swallows and sucks has my cock stirring even though it should be dead after coming twice in an hour.

He lets me go, then drops his head back and closes his eyes. “Better.”

I stroke my damp fingers through his hair. “Your body’s gonna absorb me so I’ll always be there in your cells, no matter how old you get.” I’m certain that’s not how biology works, but we make our own rules.

“I know.” He cracks his eyes open and studies me with a surprising warmth, the corner of his mouth tipping up in a small, slightly feral smile. “You have to swallow my cum later. So we can track each other’s location at all times.”

“Wow.” I crack up. “Is that what it does?”

He nods, his grin finally relaxing into something real. “Now I can never get lost, because you’ll know where to find me.” Sighing, he reaches up and drags two fingers down the slope of my nose. “I’m not tired. Are you?”

I am, but I just shrug. Then an idea hits me.

“Get up.” The quick kiss I was intending to drop on his mouth gets caught, his fingers curling around the back of my neck, the deepest I’ve ever kissed someone, like falling into a hole with no bottom.

Once I fight free of it, I sit up and wipe my damp lips.

He stays splayed out lazily while I dig through all the parts of his closet to find where they put our stuff. “Let’s go see your horse.”

He sits up immediately, his face brightening as I drop a pair of my sweatpants and my biggest t-shirt on top of him. “Really?”

I grab my Mothman hoodie and start to pull it up my arms when I see him staring at it longingly, so I throw it to him and grab his black windbreaker for myself. “Can we sneak down from the balcony?”

“Absolutely not.” He tugs my hoodie down and tries to fix his hair in the full-length mirror on the wall. It’s a good thing I like big hoodies; the oversized thing fits him perfectly.

“It’s not that far down. I’d catch you, like Romeo and Juliet.” That definitely doesn’t happen in Romeo and Juliet, but maybe he doesn’t know that.

“I weigh more than you,” he points out drily.

“Fine.” I grab his hood and pull it up over his head. “Get us out of here without anyone noticing.” It’s not late enough to guarantee that everyone will be asleep yet, but Andrew doesn’t seem concerned. “Are there secret passages here?”

“No, because it’s a house from the 1980s pretending to be from the 1880s.

” He leads the way out along the hallway in the opposite direction we came from, then down a narrow back staircase.

Two or three turns later I don’t have any idea which way we’re facing or how to get back.

We duck through some kind of mudroom, tripping over shoes and boots, then out into the gravel courtyard.

“It’s a half-mile walk,” he explains, taking out his phone flashlight and shining it at my feet.

“I take no legal responsibility if you trip in a rabbit hole and die.”

I expected to follow a road, but instead we strike out along a dirt path that weaves back and forth down a sloping field dotted with trees. I can see a few yellow security lights glowing at the foot of the hill. “This property goes all the way over there?”

“Mhmm. I never knew my grandfather’s wife, but when he was building this place her one condition was that she didn’t want to smell or hear the horses while she was sunning herself in the garden. So they dug out the bottom of the hill and put them there.”

“What do they call the level above first-world problems?”

He chuckles quietly. “Innes problems.” His fingers grope out my wrist in the dark and slide down to lace between mine.

It’s the most mundane thing we’ve ever done, so of course this is the one that fucks with my head.

The day before Lena’s accident, I gave her a piggyback ride over a giant puddle in the grocery store parking lot.

Every day I think about how, if I had never put her feet back on the ground, if I had just held onto her forever, none of this shit would have happened to us.

And here it is again—the hope that if I hold on, he can never get taken from me, balanced by the knowledge that I’ll have no choice but to let go anyway.

“Jude.” He sounds pained, and I realize I’m crushing his hand.

“Sorry.” I loosen my grip, but he squeezes gently and bumps his shoulder against mine.

Our shoes crunch in the dirt as we pick our way down the dark hillside.

I used to take my sister up to the Bighorn Mountains on the weekends sometimes and we’d hike like this, fighting about when to stop for snacks.

She’d walk way too far to prove she was stronger than me, then whine about how her feet hurt until I carried her.

All the way down she’d make me stop while she pulled the caps off the tops of the baby evergreens so they could grow taller.

In other words, roughly the same experience I’d expect if I ever took Andrew on a real hike.

When we finally make it to flat ground, I gawk at the massive horse barn in the moonlight.

It’s more pristine than some actual mansions, built of multicolored stone to match the house.

Letting go of my hand, Andrew pushes the button on an intercom next to a door at the end of the building.

After a long pause, an elderly man’s voice comes through the tiny speaker. “Hello?”

“Hi Dennis, it’s me.”

Almost immediately, the red light under the intercom flicks to green as the door clicks. Andrew opens it, then pauses and touches the button again. “How’s Sid looking?”

“Excellent, sir. Very feisty, no changes since you last had him out.”

“Thank you.” Andrew gestures me into a dimly lit hallway. “Dennis is the stable manager,” he says in response to my confused face, like that explains why they have some dude trapped in their barn answering their summons 24/7.

My damp shoes squeak against the dark, rubbery flooring as we pass through a second door into a much bigger space that smells like the horse shows we used to see at the fair every summer.

I can hear breathing, and the shifting of large bodies, but it’s totally dark except for a few LED lights set low along the walls.

“Here, he’s on the end.” Andrew’s whisper sounds adorably excited. He hooks a finger in the pocket of my jacket and drags me down the row of stalls that feels like it goes on forever.

“How many horses does one place need?”

“My grandfather bred racehorses; I think he cared more for them than his actual children. I’d have to ask Dennis, but there are about nine here at the moment.” His voice turns sad. “I suppose they might be sold now.”

When we reach the last stall, Andrew flicks a switch and a muted overhead light comes on inside. “Jesus.” I stumble back a step. I expected a horse, obviously, but this one is pitch black and massive and right there with its face up against the door.

“Hi, baby,” Andrew croons, his face lighting up. He scratches the long nose with two fingers as the horse makes eager little rumbly sounds that remind me of Buckley purring. “I’m here. I missed you so much.”

Flashing me a smile, he unlatches the stall door and slips inside fearlessly, shutting it behind him.

I pictured some sleepy old nag, but this one is like those epic main character horses from a movie, with the long mane and all the gleaming muscles, the ones who kick and bite anyone who isn’t the little girl who magically tamed them with love.

Sid is staring adoringly at his little girl, the six-foot-two billionaire with the nasty attitude.

Andrew sticks his hand out through the bars and points to a row of hooks.

“Can you hand me his halter?” I grab the biggest red nylon contraption and put it in his hand.

He slips it over Sid’s ears with effortless confidence, murmuring nonsense syllables of praise, while the big horse tosses its head impatiently. I’ve never seen him so at ease.

“There are treats in a bag by the door,” he says as he buckles the halter in place.

“Fill up your pockets.” Since it’s his windbreaker, I have no problem stuffing it with crumbly biscuit things that look like a giant version of the pellets Lena and I used to feed our guinea pigs when we were little.

When the stall door rattles open, I back far away and watch the two of them strut into the barn with their early-2000s inspirational movie main character energy.

ANDREW