Page 6 of This Might Hurt

JUDE

This guy can be a real dick. Judgmental, pushy, entitled.

So sour he’d rather run from the police than do a kind deed for someone.

He’s clearly never watched Pay It Forward.

And yet he passed up every chance to leave me there, practically begged me to come, and he’s obsessively watching everything I say and do while pretending he wishes I wasn’t here.

He’s so entertaining that I never want to get out of the car.

Lena’s text with the payment link comes through a couple of minutes after I hang up.

Every Wednesday afternoon my parents leave to run errands and Diane, the fifty-something single mom who has lived across the street from us my whole life, comes over to help my sister.

She sets up Lena’s phone mount and stylus and leaves the room for a few minutes, pretending not to hear us talking.

Little did I know, when I was a snotty thirteen-year-old mowing Diane’s lawn for free, that I was buying the last thin thread that would keep me human after I lost everything else.

I’ll find a store selling prepaid debit cards tonight, buy one with my cash, and pay through the portal with a note reminding them that they promised to finish before the Kearns High commencement ceremony.

She sobbed when she told me someone was going to have to push her across the stage after she fought so hard to get there.

I promised I’d figure it out, even before I had any idea how.

If the company had demanded that I mail them my fucking heart in a bag, I would have done it so Lena could have her moment.

“You don’t understand how medical grants work,” the man in the driver’s seat bursts out, like a pressure valve in his head blew open. I knew he had opinions, whatever he claimed.

“Not really. Out of that entire conversation, that’s the part you care about?”

“Do you think this girl is stupid?”

I open my mouth and shut it again, gaping at him. He doesn’t know that I kicked some guy’s face in a couple of years ago for calling my sister names at a party. It was one of the first warning signs things were going wrong in my head. “Of course not. Fuck off.”

“Then she’s probably already figured it out.

You should lie better,” he insists, seemingly unaware of the murderous vibes leaking over from my seat.

He keeps looking over with painful earnestness like he expects me to take notes.

“Just…tell her she has to submit documentation to some email address you make up. Not text it to you. Make her wait a few days before you have an answer. That’s basic common sense. ”

“Why does it even matter to you?” It’s hard to stay pissed at him.

He has such an interesting face, long and angular and somehow out of time, like he’s a prince that escaped from an oil painting.

And the eyes that looked empty to me in the gas station keep coming more and more alive, more stubborn and sad.

“I couldn’t care less,” he mumbles. “It’s a saying. ‘If you’re going to do stupid things it’s worth at least trying to do them right’.”

I consider for a moment. “Do you mean ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well’?”

He presses his lips together kind of petulantly and shrugs one shoulder.

I want to laugh at him, but I think it would hurt his feelings so I hold it in and try to imagine what his smile would look like.

Ignoring me, he examines the city in the distance uneasily.

The vibes in this car were never great, but they’re becoming worse the closer we get.

Impulsively, I lunge forward and pluck his phone out of the dashboard mount. “Hey, look here.”

His confused, instinctive glance is enough to bypass his lock screen, so I flop back in satisfaction and hunt for his music app.

“Don’t do that,” he snaps, grabbing for it like we’re not driving fifteen over the speed limit on a busy highway.

His version of lightning fast is pretty fucking slow, so I move it out of his reach without even looking. “Chill. What music do you want?” When I open the app, nothing loads and I realize he’s in airplane mode for some reason.

“Jude.” Wow, he said my name for the first time, just like that, angry and a little pleading. I study him, savoring the moment, then go back to messing with his phone. “Put it back.” Something about his voice crosses from touchy asshole to genuinely distressed.

“It’s okay, you’re fine,” I soothe. To my surprise, it works.

He simmers down, resting his hand on the gear shift and shooting me a worried look every five seconds.

He has at least fifty missed calls and texts from a few hours ago, most of them increasingly angry variations of Where are you?

Get back here now. Almost no one cares where I am, so it’s not surprising that I’m rotting out here in the middle of nowhere.

He has all these people, and yet he’s so alone he barely knows how to hold a conversation.

I squint at him assessingly, like the answer might be written on his skin.

“Did you find music?” he asks stiffly, when he notices me looking.

“Not yet.” Flipping through recent texts, I tap on one that stands out—a picture of the fanciest hotel room I’ve ever seen in my life, all dark wood and huge vases of flowers, gauzy curtains, decorations with an East Asian vibe.

When I see the text above it, the taste of iron fills my mouth and I can hear my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

“So, uh…exciting news, some guy named Daxton has picked out a honeymoon suite for you two.”

He goes completely still except for his hands on the wheel. His skin can’t get much paler, so it turns a kind of gray instead. I’m pretty sure he’s stopped breathing, and I don’t feel convinced that he’s planning to start again. “Put the phone back,” he demands hoarsely.

I scroll up the text conversation, but there are only five messages from Daxton—what a fucking tragedy of a name—over the last couple of months, asking boring questions about names I don’t recognize. My guy never answered any of them. “You’re engaged?”

He shakes his head quickly, almost guiltily, then hesitates and shrugs.

I’m unfairly and nonsensically and viscerally pissed off at him for daring to be engaged.

His fiancé misplaced him and didn’t even notice.

If I found him, does he count as mine now?

I kind of want to keep him. “When’s the storybook wedding? ” I ask, not very nicely.

“I don’t know.” He’s barely whispering. I watch his thumb flick back and forth restlessly on the wheel.

Lena used to make me watch this show with her where they tried on a gazillion wedding dresses.

They all looked the same, but she would cheer and rage over every one while I sat there mostly asleep with a beer bottle propped against my lower lip.

So it’s safe to say I don’t get how weddings work.

But even I don’t think that sounds right. “Is he real, or are you shitting me?”

“He’s the head of expansion strategy and supply chain integration for niche high-growth luxury markets,” he recites woodenly, like he memorized that word salad off a notecard.

“He…” I study the picture of the hotel again.

It looks miserable, cold and ornate with almost no lighting.

The kind of hotel room where you lock out the rest of the world and have a lot of very grim, suffocating, soundproof sex.

“Is he nice?” Glancing at the delicate line of his jaw flowing into his neck, I need the answer to be yes.

He glances at me, his eyes all fear and dark water, breathtaking.

“Probably not.” For a moment, he looks so soft and scared that I think he’s going to beg me to help him run away.

But he turns back to the road, his jaw working, and I realize he already has an escape plan.

This, the thing I interrupted, is the escape plan.

I just have no idea where he thinks he’s going.

ANDREW

It’s alright. There's only one thing left now. An hour, maybe. I wish this weird man would tell me things are okay again. It sounded so true when he said it. The first time in my life I’ve ever believed those words.

We keep silent after Jude finds the text from Daxton.

He puts the phone back and sits there, glaring at nothing.

I can’t figure out if he’s angry because I’m pathetic or because he doesn’t want me to be engaged.

Neither of those things seem like any of his business, but there’s something strangely soothing about the way he bullies himself past every boundary a normal person would respect.

He’s made the last hour pass a lot more quickly than the first five, which is either good or bad depending on how I look at it.

“Is this alright?” Buffalo is a much smaller, more touristy town than I was expecting, so I pull up outside the only tiny grocery store we could find on the map.

He asked me to drop him off somewhere that might sell prepaid debit cards, presumably as part of his bizarre money laundering scheme to buy wheelchairs for teenage girls.

“Uh-huh.” Leaning forward, he squints up through the windscreen toward the clouds.

They took over the sky somewhere in the last ten minutes, a dull blanket of gray that’s sinking lower and lower, thickening with rain, laced through with lightning and sullen thunder.

The flashes and rumbles still come far apart, but they’re getting closer.

“This is gonna be a big one,” he muses unhappily. I assume he’s worried about walking to the road and finding a ride. But he turns to me, his brown eyes troubled. “Will you be okay? You might get stranded.”

There have been so many times I’ve felt much less okay than this, but no one has ever noticed before. I wish he hadn’t.

“I’ll be fine,” I insist, but he shakes his head.