We read together, then left the library with arms swinging. And even though it didn’t feel like he could reach into my chest, grab my heart, and pull it from my body like a certain news director could, I still enjoyed my time with Phoenix.
“Can I ask you one question?” I stopped when we got to the deli.
He pretended to weigh that for a second. “Okay, go ahead.”
“Why did you come back?”
He looked down and pulled up the long sleeve of his shirt, and a tattoo of a girl I didn’t recognize smiled back at me from his inner forearm. “Time is too precious not to be spent with the people you love most. I learned that the hard way. Because of her.”
Going into Chucks’s apartment wasn’t the most constructive thing to do, considering the little fixation I was developing.
I could smell her skin, the undertone of her vanilla scent, and her ginger-and-jasmine shampoo on every piece of furniture in her tiny apartment. The place screamed Judith. Her personality jumped out of every corner of the rooms.
I saw her in the cider-scented candles lined up neatly on the mantel like soldiers and in the framed pictures from her graduation—her hugging her father with a huge smile on her face and kissing someone I assumed was Milton, the brainless dick. She was in the curtains that were drawn open, inviting the sun to pour into the room, and in the small, organized stack of newspapers and books on the coffee table, as well as the ring stain of a mug beside them that told me her favorite pastime. And in the unlikely picture hanging above the TV, of a girl reaching up to a heart-shaped balloon, watching it drift skyward and away from her.
Snap out of it. She’s a hot piece of ass. The world is not running out of pussies. You have a plan. Stick to it.
“Her mother bought that picture,” her father told me. “It doesn’t go with anything around the house, but neither of us has the guts to take it down.”
He stopped by the picture, staring at it. I grimaced, knowing how it felt to keep everything while you waited for your dead loved one to miraculously reappear. Grief was pathetic. That’s why I didn’t let myself dwell on it.
“Don’t know if your daughter is not brave enough to do anything,” I said with disdain.
Her father considered that for a moment. “Perhaps guts was not the right word. Jude is just very good at remembering. And loving.”
Robert Humphry was an impressive man.
Strong, silent, and polite—the no-bullshit type. I would be jealous of Judith if it wasn’t totally fucked up. Her father was a standup guy, and I wondered what kind of person I would be if I’d had someone to look up to.
Rob knew his daughter better than I did, so he agreed that keeping our arrangement a secret was in everyone’s best interest. Lying to her wasn’t ideal, but we both knew that if Judith found out I was helping them by paying her father’s way into an experimental treatment program for people with advanced cancer, she would throw a fit, accept the offer nonetheless, then let it eat at her conscience.
I’d had Dan find the experimental program, because I didn’t want Brianna to know anything about Jude she hadn’t volunteered herself. Since Robert wasn’t doing incredibly bad for someone with stage three cancer, he was easily accepted into the trial—after a large donation to the clinic.
Getting help from me was going to mess with Jude’s sense of integrity. She was fiercely independent, and I didn’t want this gesture to have the aftertaste of quick fucks and sardonic office whips. Besides, it wasn’t solely about Judith. I wasn’t a heartless prick. Helping Robert was my way to atone for what had happened to Camille.
I’d taken a life, what was the harm in trying to save one?
Robert didn’t ask me many things that weren’t related to the treatment he would be provided. He didn’t ask me, for instance, my motivations for helping his daughter in the first place. And so I spared him the story of our first meeting, in which an hour after I’d bought her drinks, my tongue was already rimming her crack while my fingers plunged into her pink, soaking wet pussy. I didn’t normally eat ass, but hers was too sweet to pass. At any rate, I did not consider it a compliment worth mentioning to her ill father.
We arranged that a cab would pick him up twice a week for the treatment, all expenses paid by me. As far as Jude was concerned, this was an experiment he’d been offered by the insurance company they were now a client of through her employment at LBC, free of charge. It wasn’t farfetched, and this way she wouldn’t have to worry about paying me back or think I was expecting something in return.
This was not about getting my cock sucked, although, truth be told, based on the way she’d looked at me the evening I hung out with Emilie last week, it hardly seemed she’d mind paying in that dubious currency.
After we talked shop, Rob and I ended up chatting for another hour. It wasn’t like I had a ton of things to do on a Sunday when I wasn’t in Florida visiting Maman. It turned out we had a lot in common. We both thought Shake Shack was overrated, that the Rockefeller Christmas Tree should be illegal (or alternatively, that tourists should be illegal. But one or the other had to go for the sake of the city’s citizens’ sanity), and that the Yankees were the best thing to ever happen to our NYC.
On the subway, making my way back to Manhattan, I sorted through my inbox on my phone. An email popped in from my father, and everybody in the office was CCed.