Unaware of my inner turmoil, he smiled at me across the island as we ate our dinner. And oh God, that smile was so beautiful it made my heart hurt. He made my heart hurt. I’d been chasing his ghost for so long that some days I had to pinch myself to make sure this wasn’t all just a dream. He was here. Solid and strong and capable of carrying the weight of the world on his broad shoulders again.
Noah was asleep and Jude and I were lounging on the sofa watching a movie but all I could think about were those text messages and the picture I found in his wallet. The one he’d been carrying around with him for six and a half years. The night I’d miscarried I found the presents he’d left under the tree and for some crazy reason I’d opened them. And it had killed me that he’d gone out and bought presents for a baby that would never be born. Considering that he hadn’t been there for me when I needed him, I hadn’t known what to make of that.
I’d been devastated and sad and so lonely and a big part of me really had hated him for everything he’d put us through. But I remember looking at the baby presents and picturing this muscle-bound, tough-looking guy buying a downy soft, pristine white baby blanket decorated with yellow stars. And I pictured him in the bookstore buying “Goodnight, Moon.” It had hurt so much to think about him doing that. I’d had no idea how to reconcile the man who sat outside the door waiting to be let in with the man who would do something so heartbreakingly sweet. That was the thing about Jude.
The good outweighed the bad, and now the scales were tipping in his favor again. But there was still so much I didn’t know about him.
“I saw the texts on your phone,” I said casually, my eyes on Iron Man and not on him. His feet were propped on the coffee table, my bare feet in his lap, his magic hands massaging them.
“You read my texts?” He sounded more surprised than angry. Like he couldn’t imagine me snooping around and reading his messages. I guess he never realized how often I did it when we lived together. Or how I’d turned our apartment upside down, searching for the drugs he hid and the bottles of whiskey stashed in drawers and ceiling vents.
In those days, Jude was such a skilled liar. He was capable of looking me in the eye and swearing on his life that he wasn’t doing drugs anymore. But what he’d neglected to tell me was that he’d stopped believing his life was worth living. One time I’d asked him to swear on my life. Unable to do it, he’d just walked away.
“Who’s Bianca?” I asked. I was still a jealous lover.
“She’s…” He winced and I knew. Damn him. “Someone I used to know.”
“You slept with her, didn’t you?”
He nodded and I silently cursed him for being so damn honest. Would it have killed him to lie? I tried to pull my feet out of his lap but he grabbed my ankles and held them in place.
“Did you love her?” I rubbed my foot against his crotch, ready to kick him if necessary.
He laughed, knowing what I was thinking and kept a firm hold on my feet to protect himself. “No. I’ve only ever loved one woman in my life.”
Slightly appeased by his response, my shoulders relaxed and his crown jewels were safe. For now. It was stupid to get jealous. Stupid to try to envision what Bianca might have looked like or what he’d been like with her. But that didn’t stop me from doing it.
“Stop thinking about it. It meant nothing.”
Yeah, yeah, just sex. Apparently guys could separate the emotional from the physical but I had no idea how that was possible.
But I still had questions. “What kind of fighting was that Victor guy talking about?”
He hesitated a moment and flexed his hand, studying his scarred knuckles as if they held the answer to my question. I hadn’t remembered those scars and I hated that too. That he had scars I knew nothing about. Just like he had a life I couldn’t even imagine. “Bare Knuckle boxing.”
My jaw dropped. Shock was replaced with anger. I shoved his thigh with my foot. “What is wrong with you? You can’t do shit like that with your head injury. What if... God, Jude. What if you’d gotten hit in the head?”
He shrugged. “I got hit in the head plenty of times. Didn’t knock any sense into me.” He was trying to joke about this, but I found no humor in it.
“It’s not even legal, is it?”
“It was unsanctioned.”
“So, like, some kind of underground fighting? Like Fight Club?”
He huffed out a laugh. “Not quite.”
“But you fought for money?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why? Why would you do that?” I shook my head, trying to understand but I couldn’t. “That’s just... it doesn’t sound like you at all. What happened to you, Jude?”
“I was fucked-up, baby. I wanted to do anything I could to get out of my own head.”
“How do I reconcile all these different people? It’s like I only know a few different sides of you but not all of them. There was the boy I knew. My best friend. And then the love of my life. My... everything. You were my everything.”
“And you were mine.”
I pulled my feet out of his lap and tucked them underneath me. He frowned, unhappy that I’d distanced myself. Before I could scoot away, he scooped me up off the sofa and pulled me into his lap. “Stay,” he said, his arm tightening around me to lock me in place like he was afraid I’d make
