Crash

“Well,” I said, sitting up and scooting close. “Hurry and figure your shit out, Ryder.” I pressed my lips to his, pulling back as everything inside me started to boil.

“Yes, ma’am,” he smiled, running his thumb down my cheek. “I just want it to feel right, okay? I want it to be perfect.”

That would be nice if we lived in a perfect world. “If you’re waiting for everything to feel right and perfect, I’ll save you the suspense and tell you that’s never going to happen,” I said, weaving my fingers through his. “But if you can look at me and say you want to be with me and I can look at you and know I want to be with you, then carpe diem, baby. Because that’s as perfect as it will ever get.”

He nodded, giving my fingers a squeeze. “You’re so damn smart, Luce,” he said, kissing my forehead as he stood. “I’ll see you in the morning,”

Now this was just getting absurd.

“Yes,” I said, grabbing his hand, “you will.” I patted the space beside me, throwing the covers down.

Jude studied the bed as if it were an equation.

I guessed what equation he was trying to work out in his mind. “Right or wrong?”

One side of his face lifted. “I’m not sure,” he confessed.

“Well, I am,” I said, tugging his hand.

He stalled one more second, but whether he just gave in to me or decided on his own, he crawled into bed beside me and wound his arms around me so tight I couldn’t breathe quite right.

I hadn’t experienced such peaceful sleep since that day, almost five years back to the day.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was early. Like the sun’s just thinking about rising early. On a Sunday morning, I usually slept another three hours, but this one I didn’t want to. I doubted I could have anyways.

I woke up with the same pit in my stomach I had each of the past four years on this day, that feeling that I wasn’t sure if I was going to throw up or pass out. The feeling of that day happening all over again, and then Jude’s arm wound around me a bit tighter in his sleep, and today everything seemed easier to handle.

He’d stayed. All night. He hadn’t let me go once.

He moaned something indecipherable in his sleep, tucking his face into my neck.

His beanie was still on. Topless and asleep, the man still kept that old hat in place. That couldn’t be good for a head; it needed to breathe every few years. Not sure why it felt like I was doing something I shouldn’t, I slid the hat back from his forehead and pulled it off.

His hair was so short and so light it almost looked like he was bald. And then I noticed the puckering and scarring of skin from the crown of his head to the neck that was familiar. Scars I’d been a couple inches of hair away from having. Burn scars. I ran my fingers over them, wishing I could erase them from his skin and the event that made them from his mind.

Trailing my fingers down his neck, I looked down at his back and, in the almost morning light, the maze of scars that scattered all the way down his back glared back at me. White scars protruded down his back, some small, most large, like he’d been torn open in a hundred different ways and closed back up by someone who didn’t know how to use a needle and thread. I doubted cadavers came out with fewer scars.

I felt sick, sicker than I’d felt waking up to this day, as my fingers drew a line over each raised scar, not able or wanting to imagine what had happened to the man sleeping beside me.

Suddenly, he jolted awake. His eyes were peaceful for the shortest second before he noticed the look on my face and what I held in my hand. Grabbing one of my wrists, he shoved it away before bolting out of bed, snatching his grey knit hat at the same time.

“What are you doing?” he cried, adjusting the hat back over his head. He was angry and he was hurt.

“What happened?” I whispered, sitting up in bed.

He lunged across the room, grabbing his long-sleeved gray thermal and tugging it over his head, not answering.

“They did the same thing to you,” I guessed, wishing these conclusions weren’t so easy to draw. “Those boys burnt you too.”

Jude wrapped his hands behind his head, his jaw clenching. “Not the same ones, but a few just like them,” he said, his voice tight.

“When I first moved to the boys’ home,” he said, forcing each word. “About five years ago.”

“Why?” I leaned forward, trying to grab his hand.

He swung it away. “It was a welcome present.”

“Oh my god,” I breathed, wondering if the devastation in Jude’s past ever ran out. “And the scars?”

Jude’s eyes settled on me. They were black. “You don’t want to know.”

He was right, but also wrong. “Yes, I do,” I whispered.

“I don’t want to tell you,” he replied, his chest rising and falling.

“Okay,” I swallowed, accepting Jude had just as many internal scars as he wore on his skin. “I’m sorry, Jude.”

“I don’t want your pity,” he said, “and I don’t want to rehash my whole childhood while you do that girl psychoanalysis bullshit. I’m a cancer, Luce. I told you that from the very beginning. You don’t need to know the nasty details to accept that.”

“Yes, you do,” I said, going against every instinct screaming at me to go embrace him. “You need the details so you know how to cure it. Let me help you,” I said, reaching for him again.