Page 69 of This Might Hurt

ANDREW

Jude practically runs back across the restaurant, tripping on the edges of chairs in his hurry.

It was a mistake to sit opposite him and Lena at the table; I felt the space growing bigger and bigger the more they talked, the more she showed him a future that has nothing to do with the one I’ve chosen for myself.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Jude’s face as she explained her plan.

He’s already changing; I can see it happening.

He needed so desperately to be there for someone, to pour into them the overwhelming amount of love he carries.

I was the best he had, but I’m too moody and ungrateful.

I fight him every step of the way. She looks at her big brother like he hung the moon.

Now he’s coming alive right in front of me.

He must have felt the distance too, because when he reaches us, he crashes straight into me without hesitation.

I put my arms around him, feeling his rapid heartbeat, the way he’s been sweating even though the restaurant isn’t warm.

“Are you okay?” he asks Lena. I rest my nose in the back of his hair, pulling him closer against me, and let her handle this conversation.

“It’s fine. They know you’re here, and they’re upset, but I texted my friends to come pick me up and they’ll take me home so I can talk to them.”

Jude stirs restlessly. “Lena, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t you dare apologize to me for any of their choices.

” The iron-willed girl is back, the one that keeps peeking through the sunshine.

Even I find her slightly intimidating. She stares at her lap for a moment, then takes a deep breath.

“There’s something else I need to ask you both.

I wasn’t sure if I should, but now I feel like I have to. ”

I let go of him reluctantly, my selfish body aching to hold on, to drag him away to somewhere I can stop being a good, giving person and just swallow him whole. He takes his chair again, and when I sit in the one next to him, he slips a hand back to wrap around mine. “What is it, squirt?”

She studies her phone with the same sadness I’ve seen so often in him, two kids who don’t understand what their picture-book family has become.

“Mom and Dad have been scaring me a little, even before our conversation the other day. The better my recovery goes, the more controlling they get. I’ve been counting the weeks until school starts and I can get away.

” Her eyes flick to mine, and I feel like I can see an apology there, as if she can sense that this is destabilizing me as much as it’s stabilizing her brother.

“After I fought with them, they started talking about how they were the only ones who can keep track of the meds I take, how they pay for my therapy, how all my equipment is at our house. I honestly don’t feel safe staying here all summer, especially now that they’re so angry about Jude.

I was wondering if there was somewhere—” She stops, looking guilty, her excitement from earlier gone.

“I know this is such an unfair thing to ask when you only swung by for a visit.”

Kind of, yeah. How am I such a terrible person? This all started because I needed to know that no matter what, he would be okay. He would be loved, even if we had to be apart sometimes because of my work. Now it’s quickly spiraling out of my control.

Jude spins around in his chair to look at me. He’s already gone; he’ll do anything to help her. He couldn’t be any other way, and it’s why I love him. “Do you think—Ramona?”

I squeeze his restless fingers and find the most noncommittal answer I can, because this isn’t about me. “You know her better than I do.”

He turns back to his sister. “My friend lives near here. We could stay with her at least for a while until we found something else. But her house isn’t accessible—there’s a gravel driveway, and stairs, and her halls are really narrow.”

“Well, unless we’re hotwiring the big van for some grand theft auto, I’ll only be able to bring my manual chair at first anyway.

If I said yes, and she agreed, could we do it without you apologizing for everything?

Even girls with wheelchairs have the right to run away from home if we damn well want to. ”

“Let me call her real quick.” Jude scrambles up, fumbling for his phone as he tugs his fingers away from mine. “I’ll be right back.” I watch him jog out the front doors and pace up and down in the orange glow from the words Pancake House above his head, talking a million miles an hour.

When I turn back, Lena’s studying me. “This took a turn, didn’t it?”

“It did.” I study my hands in my lap. There’s already a dent in my skin where my wedding ring sat.

“I’m sorry if it messes up your plans. I truly didn’t mean to ask for anything right now.”

“No, I understand.” I shake my head, remembering the frantic voices yelling at her over the phone to stay away from her brother. “I have my share of problematic family members.”

“I hope you’ll consider living with us in the fall. You brought him back to me. Plus, I’ve never seen him adore someone so much in his life.” One of her dimples pops out. “Not even me.”

I breathe out a tired laugh. Part of me wants to tell her that I’ll help pay for the apartment, whether I live there or not.

That I’ll buy them a van, furniture, tuition, whatever they need for the next four years she’s in school.

I need them to be okay. But it’s not what either of them wants from me.

When Jude comes rocketing back through the doors, he’s smiling.

I perch on the flimsy armchair in our hotel room and search my phone for more footage of the funeral.

There’s a video of Archie, Colin, and my mother walking into Saint Bartholomew's—Hugh’s three cursed children, all dressed head to toe in black.

My mom is crying, unsurprisingly, her arm looped through Colin’s to hold her steady.

I expected my uncles to look like they usually do in public—Colin blank-faced and Archie serious but charismatic, sneaking nods and winks to his business contacts.

To my surprise, everything feels off. Colin seems genuinely uncomfortable and Archie looks…

I’ve almost never seen it. A strained, simmering edge of darkness he only gets when he feels publicly humiliated.

I did that. Every single person looking at them as they enter is wondering where I am.

“Did you hear me?”

I glance up, disoriented. Jude’s too excited to sit still, but we can’t pack until tomorrow, so he’s been wandering around the room pointlessly picking things up and moving them around. “What?”

He hops over the bed and straddles my lap, facing me.

I try to resist his big hand plucking my phone away, but he’s too fast as he tosses it over his shoulder onto the bed.

Every atom of me responds to his scent, his body, whatever strange chemical reaction makes us so compatible that no matter what else happens, we could never doubt this bond.

“I said, do you think we can fit her folded wheelchair and her bags and everything in the rental car?”

I didn’t think it would happen like this.

He was supposed to wait to make decisions about his life until I found a way to explain the decisions I made about mine.

I thought he would somehow know to wait for me, because I’m so fucking important.

If I was looking this whole time for my fifth point—the one that proves I really am a bad person—it’s that I hate him for not waiting.

“No,” I say, more sharply than I intended.

“Really?” He blinks at me, confused. “I thought we could squeeze it in.”

“You can’t use the rental car because I need to return it to the airport tomorrow morning, which you don’t know because you never asked whether randomly jaunting off to Ramona’s fit with my plans.

” I don’t want to sound so angry. I’m not mad at him.

I love him. But I can’t get my voice under control.

He pauses from trying to nuzzle my neck and leans back so he can see my face. “Okay, I’m sorry. Will you please come with Lena and me? There. Now let’s go measure the trunk.” He scrambles to his feet and holds out a hand to help me up.

When I don’t answer or move, his teasing half-smile fades. “Andrew?”

“I told you; I need to get back to Carrick House. If I don’t press my advantage, Archie and Col are going to find another way to fuck me.”

His eyebrows go up. “I get it. I can take Lena to Ramona’s on my own. You do your errands, then come back.”

I open my mouth, then shut it again, my head fuzzy.

Pain leaks across his face. “Explain to me what’s going on.”

“The day before we left Carrick, I met with Archie.”

His eyes narrow as he realizes I lied to him. They don’t look angry, just wary.

“He threatened you and Lena if I didn’t get in line.” I hold up my hand when he stiffens. “I lost it with him. I told him I’m going to use my position as CEO to tear the company down around him. And it fucking worked, Jude. He was scared, like you told me would happen. I did it.”

“If you did it,” he croaks, wrapping his arms around himself. “Then why are you going back?”

Frustration leaks hot through my veins. I thought he’d be at least a little proud. “I have to finish this.”

“Finish it? What does that even mean? How long?”

“I don’t know. To take it apart so gradually no one notices, as a new CEO, maybe five years? Ten?”

It feels like all the air just got sucked out of the room.

“Fuck,” he breathes, dropping onto the edge of the bed. He hangs his head, burying it in his hands.

“No, it’s okay.” I fumble off the chair and crouch between his knees, trying to look up into his face.

My hand finds the side of his neck. His skin is burning hot.

“It’s not like that. If you have to stay here, I can come see you every weekend, or alternating weeks.

I can bring you and Lena up in the summers.

We’ll go see shows in the city and I can get her whatever gear she needs to ride Sid. ”

“Oh my god,” he breathes, studying my face with a sick kind of tenderness. “You’re so gone. You think I’d ever take her anywhere near that place?”

“You won’t even try?” I snap, pain surging through me at the disgust in his voice. “I made sure you and Lena would have each other, so you wouldn’t be alone while I did this. Now you get to have what you want, but I don’t?”

He blinks. “Wow.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I scramble, but it’s too late.

“I can’t believe I helped you do this.” Studying my face, he runs an unsteady hand through my hair. “I lied, Andrew. The high, the gun, they just make the hole inside you worse. There’s no winning like that.”

“You don’t understand!” I shove his hand away and stumble to my feet. “If I sell my shares and resign, they’ll get everything they ever wanted. All the shit I’ve lived through, my entire existence, won’t have mattered at all.”

“You matter to me,” he says, after a long silence. Then something terrified dawns in his face, like he just processed this entire conversation for the first time. “No, stop. Don’t do this to me.”

“I have to show them they can’t hurt us.”

I watch his honey-colored eyes shut down right in front of me, no longer warm and expressive. He stands up, his shoulders tense, and rests his forehead heavily against my shoulder. “You said you were mine,” he murmurs hoarsely. “You promised me.”

“I am yours.” My arms wrap around his waist and pull our hips together, but his body is stiff and unresponsive. “You think anyone else could even put up with me? I’m coming back.”

He shakes his head slowly, his face still in my neck. “You’re not. You never left them. And you’re the one who showed me that I’m worth more than helping you destroy yourself.”

“Fuck you.” I push him away before the visceral fear of losing his skin on mine makes me give him everything he wants. “You won’t go with me, and you won’t wait for me, and you’re mad at me for trying to make things work?”

After an awful silence, he pulls his Luckies out of his pocket and heads for the door. “You’re being a fucking dick right now,” he says wearily, propping the door open with a rock he found earlier and leaning against the railing. “Can you please just leave?”

I’m so overwhelmed that my brain reverts to a more primal state—he tells me to do something, and I do it. I never unpacked my suitcase beyond the clothes for graduation, so I stuff my toiletries in the top and zip it up. At the last moment I grab his hoodie and pack that, too.

When I have everything, I step out into the dark.

Dozens of tiny moths flutter around his trail of smoke, drawn to the safety light by the door.

“I’m not giving up on us,” I tell the side of his head, the profile that always looks so innocent when he’s asleep.

“But I’m not sacrificing this for you, either. ”

I rest my hand on the metal rail a few inches from his clenched fingers.

I want to tell him that this has been an awful day.

That I had a terrible fight with my favorite person in the world.

Because only Jude understands me, the light and the dark of me, enough to tell me how to make it up to him.

To tell him how much I love him. Jude is the only one I can confess to that I’m scared this is my fault, and I’m sorry.

Eventually, I can’t wait any longer for him to answer. I turn and make my way down to knock on Grant’s door.