And I’d be lying if I said that looking in the mirror and seeing the push of bone against my skin didn’t appeal to me in a very shallow way.
Nonetheless, I wasn’t outright talking about it with Jude, who would undoubtedly tell me I was beautiful the way I was. My confidence in knowing this wasn’t because of some elevated confidence in myself but in knowing him. Jude may have been distant, almost like a stranger in the way he held his words from me, but I knew the man he was at his core. And I knew how much he wanted to take me in and fix my ‘problems.’
“Is there anything else you want to do while you’re here?” he asked when I was halfway through my fries.
I thought about what Charlotte had said, about my mom and Doug. Part of me did not want to see my mom, to hear what my call to the police had cost her. But I felt, in some strange and probably biological way, that I owed it to her to see her. Say my piece, if she was willing to listen.
“I think I want to drop by to see my mom,” I finally said, sipping my water quickly so I couldn’t take the words back. “It’s been a couple years.”
Ever since I’d left Wyoming, I’d associated my mom with what had happened with Doug. I’d tried to keep him from her and in protecting her, I’d put myself in danger. I knew that she’d been too unconscious to know this, but I imagined there would’ve been questions when the police arrived. I tried not to feel guilty about possibly sending her to jail, but I knew she needed help—and to be separated from Doug.
“You look like you’re not sure about that.”
I wondered if I was that transparent. “The last time I saw her, things didn’t go so well.” That was an understatement if I’d ever heard one. “But I feel like I probably should, since I’ll be in the same area she’s in.”
“Okay.” He sipped his chocolate milk and set it down. “We’ll spend tomorrow visiting them and head back down tomorrow night.”
I didn’t have much choice—not because Jude wouldn’t deviate from my choices but because I didn’t want to be away from Denver so long when I knew what could happen at a moment’s notice.
“Why’d Mila leave him?”
“That’s between them.”
“Why won’t she come back?”
“That’s because whatever she’s dealing with, mentally, is too heavy for her to accept right now.” He sighed and leaned back against the booth seat. “Do you want to talk about what happened two years ago, when you left Colorado?”
We’d never talked about it, not even when he had come to Maine the year before. And while I’d liked that, I’d wanted to know. Why he’d lied to me. Why he’d lied for Colin, especially when our feelings had become what they had. “Yes. Why did you lie to me?”
He dropped his head into his hands, elbows braced on the table, and I watched the shake of his head, back and forth, as he cradled it in his hands. “To be honest,” he began.
“Honesty would be nice,” I said, interrupting him.
“I didn’t want to tell you the things Colin was doing behind your back. I didn’t want you to leave him knowing I’d be there for you.” He paused when a waitress walked past our table and stared down at his plate before meeting my eyes again. “I wanted you to leave him because it was what you wanted. Most conflicts can be resolved—but I didn’t want the conflict to be your reason for leaving him. I thought, and maybe it was wrong of me, that it was best for you to decide in your heart what you wanted without influence to choose one way or another.”
“It was wrong of you. I deserved to know that my boyfriend—” I lowered my voice as the waitress dropped off another chocolate milk for Jude “—was in love with your sister.”
“You did. I should’ve found another way to tell you. But I didn’t want you hung up on him. I knew that your identity wasn’t your own, it was defined by those you spent time with. And I worried that if you left him because of a factor outside of your control, you’d be stuck on wondering why you weren’t. . .” he rubbed his lips together as he considered “. . . good enough. Because you are. You’re enough, and he was blind.” He pushed his chocolate milk away from him and shook his head. “I wanted him to figure his shit out and tell you, so I didn’t come to you with this information that would change your relationship before you were ready.”
“There’s that word again,” I said, drumming my fingertips on the tabletop. “You can’t decide for me what I’m ready for.”
“Then what do you think you’re ready for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly, putting a hand to my forehead. “I don’t know what I’m ready for. I just know that I’m not ready—” I swallowed “—to watch my ex-boyfriend, someone who knew me better than anyone else living did, to die. I’m not ready to say another permanent goodbye, when I’m still not over the last one.” I hated baring myself to him like this, telling him my conflicted feelings for Colin. I knew those feelings were abstract, not because I was still in love with him or even wanted to be with him, but because I was still searching for who I was and the last person to know me so well was leaving me—forever. The truth was that I didn’t know what effect Colin’s death would have on me. Would I feel free? Or weighed down by how we parted? I wished I could’ve talked to him that morning, but I respected his wishes still.
“Have you ever thought of talking to someone?” He asked it lightly, like it was fragile ground to tiptoe across.
“I have before. But it’s expensive and takes effort to find someone who is actually interested in trying to help you heal enough that you no longer need them.” In my last experience, my therapist had only been prolonging my grief instead of helping me see my way through it. I always thought that funny about therapists; if they did their job right, you wouldn’t need to see them again. It couldn’t have been good for business.
“Let me help you.”
“No.” My answer was firm; he couldn’t change my mind. I still felt bad for dragging him along to Wyoming though I, one, hadn’t had much other choice and two, he’d offered to take me. I couldn’t accept financial help to talk to someone about my feelings, knowing many of them had to do with him. “I’ll figure it out.” I looked out the window to the parking lot, taking in the darkening sky and the headlights from the highway as they slashed across the window. In the distance, it was pitch black, with just the briefest bits of lights as cars drove past.
“I wish you’d just let me help.” He said it so softly I almost didn’t hear him.
“You’re doing everything you can to help me,” I said, even though to him he was doing nothing. But the fact that he was driving me around Wyoming and Colorado, reuniting me with my ex-boyfriend—it was more than enough for him to do. “I will do something.”
“When?”
I sighed and rubbed a hand down my face, the weight of this conversation affecting me since we were in public. “I don’t know, Jude. I really don’t.” I knew his impatience wasn’t because he was desperate for me to return to him in the way I felt he wanted me, but more that he was worried about me.
He waved for the check when I’d finished my fries and paid it in cash before he slid from the booth. On the way out of the restaurant, he wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me tightly to him. My chest clenched, my rib cage collapsing in on itself, having him holding me so familiarly. “Promise me,” he said, his voice gruff against my ear.
“What am I promising?” I asked against his chest as he led me to his car.
“To try. If not for you, for me.”
He opened my car door and I slid in, feeling the weight of what he was asking me drop into my stomach.
Back at the motel, Jude told me he had work to do and I ventured out for ice cubes, needing space after what had happened when we’d left the diner. I pulled out my phone at the ice machine and called Maura to check in.
“Nothing much going on here,” she lamented, in between sounds of her banging pots in the kitchen. I figured she was doing dishes with me on speakerphone with the way
I echoed in the room. “You doing okay?”
“Yep.” Maura didn’t know what was going on, why I needed to go home for a few weeks. But it was the first time I had taken any considerable time off in forever, so she knew it had to involve something serious. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back yet.”
“Well,” she said, and sniffed loudly. I could visualize her at that moment, sniffing, one hand on her hips as she tried to figure out what to say. Maura was a hearty, headstrong woman. She might not have known all the right words to say, but if I needed to lean, I could lean on her. “I hope you’ll be back soon. You’ve left me in a bit of a lurch.”
That was the other thing about Maura—she didn’t pussyfoot. “It won’t be long,” I said, already imagining the moment I’d need to say goodbye to Jude. I looked back at the room we were in for the night and wished I could return to the room with a different mindset than the one I had.
“I’ve gotta go,” I told her after a few minutes of idle chitchat. I couldn’t ignore Jude any longer and I couldn’t keep standing out by the ice machine under the yellow light, swarmed by a billion bugs.
“Fine, fine. Just check in once in a while, all right? Don’t wanna worry you’re dead in a ditch or something.”
That made me smile. “Are you worried about me, Maura?” I teased her.
“Nah, just about hiring your replacement. So figure out your shit and come back.”
Jude was propped up on the bed with his laptop on his lap. He was wearing the sweats he’d worn after his shower and a flannel shirt that was similar to mine. He had a little frown furrowing his eyebrows and his lips were pulled down.
I debated asking him, telling myself that he didn’t want or need my help. But curiosity won out. “You look confused.”
He broke his concentration to look at me. “I tried to make a new page for my privacy policy, so it’s no longer a pop-up when you click the hyperlink. But I’ve buried the page somewhere, and can’t find it.”
Tentatively, I asked, “Can I help?”
He was still looking at me, as if deciding whether or not getting help from me was a good choice. I hated that he looked at me like that, like he couldn’t decide anything about me when just two years earlier he’d been so sure, so solid, in his feelings about me. But I let it roll off my back as he scooted over to give me room beside him on the bed. I motioned for the laptop and he handed it over, all warm from being in his hands and on his lap for the last thirty minutes.
“Let me see,” I said, chewing on my bottom lip as I looked through his navigation on his live site, to see if he’d hidden the privacy policy somewhere in there. “You don’t want it linked, right?”
“Right. Well, I mean, I want it to be a link but instead of a pop up on the screen they’re on, I want it to take them to its own page.”
“Okay.” I went through his draft pages, but couldn’t find anything named Privacy Policy. On a hunch, I started going through some of the duplicates he’d had, like About (1), About (2), Europe Travels (3), and Sponsors (2) when I finally found it buried under the sixth copy of My Gear. “Here it is,” I said, renaming the page and its link to “Privacy Policy.”
“I should’ve known,” he said, and I could hear the relief in his voice. “I keep doing that, making dupes of the other pages so I don’t have to try to figure out how to recreate the template, but then I never rename them until I need them.”
I smiled at him, but it felt a little sad on my face. He’d hired me once to do website work, and the last time I’d looked at the back end of his website, it hadn’t been this messy, with dozens of duplicate pages and too many fonts throughout the website. It made me wish to help him again, but I knew I couldn’t—I couldn’t offer it to him and I couldn’t do it.
“Can you help me on the My Gear page for a minute?” he asked, as if he knew that I wanted to help him but not on such a large scale. “I wanted to have those things where you click on a button or text and it expands to reveal more below it. So that it’s not so long and drawn out the way it is.” He showed me what he was talking about and I set to work on his site.
Over the next couple hours I helped Jude with other parts of his website, even deleting a good half-dozen duplicate pages after he realized they weren’t necessary.
Sometime over those hours, Jude turned on the television and a documentary about surviving in the wilderness came on. It was a husband and wife pair, and while she didn’t look like she had the chops to skin a snake or chop down a tree, she did all of those things beside him without complaint.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” Jude said after a while.
“Go out into the middle of nowhere and survive?”
“Yeah.” He reached an arm toward the TV to turn up the volume on the remote, giving me a view of the trees that climbed his forearm. “I think it’d be fun—to figure it out caveman-style.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You would think that’s fun. Having a python slither through your camp sounds like a jolly good time.”
“Sounds like dinner.” He grinned, that bright flash of white causing me to smile back. “And besides, if you think about it, we’re all descended from someone who had to do those things. Maybe not surviving in the forest, but I’m sure they had to do something necessary for survival in such a primitive environment. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here. Somewhere along the line, someone in our bloodline built a fire with their hands. That’s amazing, when you think of it like that, isn’t it?”
I found myself nodding in agreement, but it wasn’t anything I had ever really thought about. “Can you build a fire with your hands?” I asked, looking over his tanned hands as he used them to illustrate what he was saying.
“With a bow drill, sure. A fire starter is easier, but if you want to be a real bad ass, you use a bow drill.”
I had no clue what he was talking about and I was sure my face reflected that. “Why don’t you do it then?”
He turned from the TV to look at me. “Really?”
Shrugging, I said, “Sure. Why not?”
“Well.” He paused and looked down before meeting my eyes again. “The biggest problem would be . . .” He paused to tap a finger over his chest. “This little guy.”
It was easy to forget that Jude wasn’t able to do everything he wanted to do. He was so fit, so strong and steady, I often thought that nothing could tip him over. But the very thing that pumped life into his veins could rob him of that if he pushed himself too hard. “Have you had any problems?” I asked him, which was the first time in a long time I’d asked him directly how he was doing, without Mila telling me herself.
“I haven’t had any problems. But I don’t. . .” he licked his lips before continuing, “. . . over-exert myself anymore.”
I thought of Yellowstone, his red face from the hike down the waterfall. How I’d chalked it up to asthma or something far less serious than it was. “That’s good.” It came out as a whisper and I swallowed, because suddenly he was too close. His juniper scent was washing over me, but not in an overpowering way. Our bodies were touching on the bed and his laptop was still on my lap. At some point he had put an arm behind my head, probably to stretch his limbs and afford him a little more room to lean in as I worked on his computer. But suddenly, it all felt too intimate.
He could curl his arm and I’d fall against him with only a nudge.
I knew I probably had shifty eyes then, looking all around us because his eyes were on my throat and I didn’t know where to look to make this less . . . well, just less.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice lower than it had been.
“You’re too close.” I couldn’t meet his gaze.
“Do you want me to move?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I tried to think of anything else, a million other things, so that I didn’t think about the fact that our faces were a whisper apart, and that all it’d take was the turn of my head for our lips to me
et. A few things ran through my mind, but Jude was pushing through all of them.
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
“Why are you lying?”
I closed my eyes tightly, gritting my teeth to keep from turning.
Don’t turn, Trista.
It was a mantra I repeated over and over in my head.
But then I felt the warmth of his arm at the back of my neck and I couldn’t wait anymore, not for another second.
I turned my head and met his lips immediately, as if they’d been there all along, waiting for me to be ready for them.
Instantly, it felt like I was warming from the inside out. A molten core that spread through all my limbs as my arms reached for him and wrapped around his neck. He pulled me over easily onto his lap so that I straddled him.
I remembered, suddenly, how good this felt. To be in his arms, to be held by him, to be kissed and touched by him. There was a lightness in my heart that I hadn’t experienced in so long that I could scarcely believe it lived in me, amongst the heaviness and the self-loathing.
His fingers snaked through my hair, and his palms held my skull tightly. Even if I wanted to slip from his hold, I couldn’t.
His lips were warm on mine, and when his tongue slipped into my mouth, I felt myself dissolve a little bit in his hands. I ran my hands everywhere, over his chest and up his arms that held me so firmly. His fingers curled where they held my skull, pulling my hair tight. And when he sighed against my mouth, my skin erupted in a billion goose bumps.
I curled more into him when his hands traveled down my spine, coming to rest right over my tailbone. He broke from my lips to search my eyes. The room was dark, but I saw the reflection of the TV in his eyes, the only light I could see. “I’ve been wanting to do that for an entire year.”
Dropping my forehead to rest against his, I said, “Then don’t stop.”
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