Page 73 of This Might Hurt

JUDE

I dream that my parents find out about the gas station robbery and call the police to drag me away. They keep telling me I can get out of jail if just one person wants me. But Lena, Ramona, Andrew—they’ve already moved on with their own shit. None of them ever come.

“No!” I lash out, clawing for anything to hold on to. My elbow slams into something living and solid and I jerk my eyes open, my head pounding. “Buckley?”

“Ow.” The mattress shifts under me.

I flail against the sheets and roll over to find my missing husband’s face exactly four inches from mine, all scrunched up from sleep.

I let out a strangled noise. He’s cupping a hand gingerly around his nose and cheek.

“That hurt,” he complains, without an ounce of anger.

His eyes are devouring me like he hasn’t eaten in a year.

“What the fuck?” I breathe. I was supposed to find him; that was the promise we made.

He had no obligation to come back, and yet he’s here, like he sensed my need even though I never texted him.

That fucking sex bond. If I wasn’t about to cry, I’d laugh.

I reach out and rest two fingers in the hollow of his throat, both of us overheated and sticky with dried sweat.

He’s real. When he swallows, I can feel it.

“I’m here,” he announces in a whisper, like we’re kids hiding under the covers. His hand splays against my chest, his fingertips curling against my skin.

“Why are you literally here, sleeping in my bed? That’s fucking weird.”

He grins, wide and unconscious with all his teeth. I’ve never seen him smile like he’s not afraid before. He looks fucking high, just from being next to me.

Then blood starts trickling out of his nose. “Oh shit,” He sits up quickly, blankets falling off his naked torso as he cups his hands under his face. The freak got into bed in his underwear instead of saying hello.

“Here.” I crawl over and snag a box of tissues from the side table. He accepts big fistfuls of them and presses them to his nose, tipping his head back. “I’m sorry I whacked you.” The nightmare is already fading, like tatters of cloud breaking apart after a storm.

“‘S okay,” he mumbles, checking the tissues as I rub his bare thigh. In less than two weeks I forgot how all-consuming it feels to be near him, like nothing else exists in the world. I can’t breathe.

“How—” I pull my hand away and lean back against the headboard, making space between us. “How long are you visiting?”

His eyebrows furrow as he studies me up and down for a long moment. “I resigned. Ramona wouldn’t let me upstairs until I did it, but I had it prepared before that.”

“What?” I sit up. “For me?”

I expect him to say yes, with that intense passion he gets when he wants to prove a point, to have someone tell him he did the right thing.

Instead, he frowns down at his hands. “Not quite,” he murmurs carefully.

“Part of me still believes we could have figured out a way to make it work, if that was best for us both. But I resigned because I think this is how I become someone that matters. It was never going to be with them. I had to let go. And I’m sorry I hurt you on the way to figuring that out. ”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

As soon as I saw his weird-ass self in my bed, I knew he would apologize.

But there are a lot of different kinds of apologies, some more selfish than others, and his track record for dealing with big feelings isn’t the greatest. The fact that he got there on his own almost, almost means more to me than the fact that he showed up in my room. “Thank you. I’m sorry that—”

Oblivious to my words, Andrew scrambles out of bed on all fours and starts hunting around in the discarded pieces of his expensive suit.

His keys and wallet fall out onto the floor as he digs through the pockets.

I admire his long, gorgeous, naked limbs as I wait for him to finish whatever the fuck he’s doing.

He comes stumbling back a moment later with something cupped in his fingers, his face very serious, and sits on the bed right next to me. “Hold out your hand.”

“I was trying to…” I sigh. He’s fixated. Nothing else will happen until he finishes this. So I offer up my flat palm. Heat slides through me when he wraps a firm hand around my wrist.

“This is for when you feel ready.” His solemn eyes search mine, so that I can see he means it. “Don’t let me pressure you.”

I make a small, unconscious sound when he drops my wedding ring into my palm, the comforting weight of it.

I’ve melted down at least five times this week because he never gave it back that day in Kearns.

I curl my grip possessively around it, then check his left hand. “You’re already wearing yours.”

“Yeah.” He offers a small, slightly bitter smile. “I don’t have any doubts about your commitment, but I understand why you wouldn’t trust me. I fucked things up pretty well.”

“Hey,” I say, when I know my voice isn’t going to break.

Andrew’s gaze jolts up from the comforter at the word he has always responded to so strongly, his eyes wide and submissive.

I feel shitty to realize I gave us both this intense language of affection and then took it away again.

I reach up and stroke my fingers through his tangled, fluffy hair.

“Listen to me for a second. I’ve been trying to say that I’m sorry, too.

I shut you down because you wouldn’t do things exactly how I wanted, and I ignored you when you tried to show that you were still committed to us. ”

He glances toward the window, pain flashing across his face.

“It made me sad that you couldn’t hear what I was trying to tell you.

But I meant what I said. I don’t have any doubts.

” He holds up his hand with the ring on it, like I already forgot.

When he glances at the one in my palm, his shoulders sag.

“You’re a lot better at making me feel safe than I am for you.

I want to change, I’m just—” He searches for words, then shrugs with a troubled sound.

“You’re a bitch.”

He blinks at me. For the first time, his expression relaxes into a slow smile that isn’t frantic with two weeks’ worth of pent up anxiety.

Slowly, in case I don’t like it, he leans over and presses his face in the crook of my neck.

Every good feeling floods my body as I pet the hair at the nape of his neck and kiss his forehead. “Say it.”

“I’m a bitch.” The way he sounds so thrilled about it makes me grin.

“Good. Now don’t worry about it anymore.” I turn the ring around, watching the light from the window play off it, then slip it onto my finger, nestled into the spot it already claimed.

“Stop, I’m serious. Don’t you fucking dare.”

Andrew shoots me the kind of wide-eyed look a dog has when it’s creeping away with the pizza it just stole off the table, then dips his hand back into the half-open Chinese takeout container and pulls out another one of the vegan spring rolls we ordered.

“I’m hungry.” He eats half of it in one bite before I can make him put it back.

“Those are for everyone. How many were in there before you started stealing them?”

“Six,” he mumbles through another bite.

“There were eight, two for each of us. And when we get home, you’re gonna try to eat mine, aren’t you?

” I steer Andrew’s Jeep around a long curve in the road between town and Ramona’s house.

We were sent on this food-gathering mission as soon as we emerged from my bedroom, because I think the ladies were worried we’d start getting horny once the shock wore off. “I thought you’d be extra good today.”

Rolling his eyes, Andrew reaches across the center console and holds the last piece of spring roll in front of my face.

I bite his fingers hard when I take it, so he remembers I’m still in charge even though I cried over him all week.

Instead of pulling his hand back, he brushes the damp tips of his fingers against my chin, then slowly along my throat, and my lungs quit functioning.

Moving deliberately, his eyes still fixed on the road, he slides his arm down and wraps his fingers around the bulge in my sweatpants.

The grip is light, but he presses the heel of his hand right below my cockhead.

My hips thrust instinctively into his palm before my brain can even catch up. “Andrew—”

Brows furrowed in concentration, he starts grinding against me in slow, careful twists of his hand.

There’s no pull off in sight, but we’re in a fucking Jeep so I just YOLO it and drive straight off the road into a lumpy patch of grass.

We both stare out the windshield, Andrew’s hand no longer moving but still cradling my junk.

“Put the takeout on the dashboard.”

He slides it off his lap with his free hand in a wobbly tower of Styrofoam boxes and settles it in the center of the dash. “The food’s gonna get cold,” he murmurs without looking at me, his whole body tense and buzzing.

“Shut up.” I unclip my seatbelt and throw myself over the console.

I’m kissing him before my body weight even lands on his lap, his fingers tangled deep in my hoodie.

He’s so soft and good, so inevitable. He tastes like stolen spring rolls.

The kiss slides out of control in an instant, his fist curled against the back of my head and my hips rocking rhythmically into his.

I start bullying his tongue, pushing it around where I want it, using my teeth, and I can tell from his pleading noises he likes that even more.

He keeps lifting his hips, struggling to rut our bulges together with little grunts of frustration until he finds the right angle and starts humping my thigh with unhinged enthusiasm.

Catching his wrist, I push his hand down the front of my sweats.

“Shit,” I moan at the shock of his skin on mine. “Andrew, look at me.”

He hesitates, trembling and breathing hard, his fingers wrapped around my cock. I hold his dazed eyes in silence, curious what he’ll do. After a long moment of searching my face like I’m the answer to everything, he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue.

“God, yeah.” I grip his jaw hard, shove two fingers deep inside.

He must be really worked up, because he somehow takes them to the back of his throat without gagging.

“You’re mine. I’m gonna fill you up with me until you beg me to stop, then make you take more.

” He gulps in a breath when my fingers come out.

I spit rough this time, on the back of his tongue, and when I force him to swallow with more fingers down his throat, his whole body jerks and spasms with a low, breathless moan.

I lean back, staring down at him. “Did you just come?” He shudders again, his eyes unfocused. “Jesus Christ. You’re so fucking perfect.”

Instead of answering, he dips a hand into my sweats again, jerking me off languidly until I curse and spill all over his fingers.

He licks them clean, holding my stare, then wraps his arms tight around me and leans his head against the window.

“I missed you so much,” he murmurs, closing his eyes.

“I just wanted to talk to you. That was the worst part.”

“I know.” I trace a finger down the bridge of his nose, across his cheekbones, along his eyebrows. “There was a really important question that came up while you were gone.”

“Yeah?” He sounds worried.

“Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

He opens his eyes, studying me skeptically. “This is something Lena found on TikTok, isn’t it?”

“So?” I poke him in the chest. “Would you?”

“How would I know the worm was you? And if love means something totally different in worm culture to human culture, how would I communicate my feelings?”

“Wow. You are not a fun person to play this game with.”

The food is getting very cold, so I readjust my messy dick and start to take my un-loved worm self back to the driver’s seat. I should have known he’d answer like that. Some tiny, unreasonable part of me just hoped he would break his uptight brain, just for me, just for a moment.

He catches my elbow before I can escape from his lap. “Jude.”

“What?” I brace myself for more weird questions about worms.

This time, he skims his fingertips along my cheek so lightly and hesitantly you’d think I was some holy thing.

“I’d love you even if you were a rock at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

I’d spend my entire life trying to build a submarine that could find you.

And I probably wouldn’t succeed that quickly, so I’d figure out how to come back so I could keep trying. ”

I gawk at him, stunned. His eyes have always been a window to sad places and lonely things, but right now they’re nothing but the bright horizon outside the car window, the midday sun. “How would you know I was there?” I croak.

I expect the damn because you swallowed my jizz thing again, and I’m ready to argue that rocks can’t do that, especially ones at the bottom of the ocean. But he smiles like he has it all figured out. “Because you’re written in my DNA. You always have been.”

“If it was the other way around,” I offer hoarsely, trying not to let every word he says destroy me, “I’d drain the ocean as revenge for keeping me away from you.”

“That would kill the entire planet.”

I shrug. “And I’d have you.”

If someone had told me a couple of months ago that I’d be making out with a cute boy in his Jeep, I would have come up with a much more boring story of how we got here.

I would have come up with a much lower-maintenance boy, too.

And then I would have given up, because that’s really fucking boring, and no random boy would ever have saved me like this, or let me save him back.

We kiss again more gently, pressed against the door with my fingers tangled in the flannel he borrowed from my closet.

And the whole time, I can’t help thinking about him spending life after life trying to invent something that might not even be possible, just so he can search for his rock at the bottom of the sea.