“Anything,” he answered fervently.
That fervency had me tearing up again. I didn’t want him to make this harder by being amenable. I didn’t want to ask him these questions, but that was the point. It wasn’t about me anymore. I slid my hand up over my belly, and his eyes tracked the movement, almost helplessly, like he couldn’t look away.
And when he did watch, he looked miserable. It took me a second to voice the question in my head.
“Do you see where we went wrong?”
His face went blank in part confusion, part shock. “Have we?”
My hands shook slightly, and I knit them together in front of me. “I had no idea what kind of stuff you were dealing with, with your parents.”
“It’s not exactly my favorite topic,” he answered evenly.
“And I get that.” I licked my lips. “But … at their farm, when we stopped, and then tonight, I was kinda tossed headfirst into the fire, you know?”
“Believe me, if I’d known they were at the pub, I never would’ve come.”
I felt my brow wrinkle as I studied him—the set of his jaw, the line of his mouth, the tension in his shoulders. “Yeah, that was … awkward.”
“Again, I apologize for how my parents acted, if that’s why you’re upset.”
He was at a loss, that much was obvious. Jude wasn’t entirely sure what he should be saying, and maybe I didn’t know either. But what I did know was that we’d done a stellar job of burying ourselves in each other while ignoring all the things that swirled just outside of that bubble.
I ran a hand over my belly. “I don’t even know if upset is the right word, Jude.”
“You looked pretty upset when you walked away from me without another word.” He lifted his eyebrows, and my face warmed in embarrassment at how I’d acted. “And when you did, I saw that side of Isabel you warned me about. She looked like she wanted to feed me my bollocks from a blender, just for going after you.”
It was the kind of thing I wanted to smile about, but even that felt too hard.
“She’ll never not protect her family, even if she disagreed with me leaving like I did.”
He swallowed. “That’s a good trait to have in a family member.”
I nodded.
“I don’t quite know what that’s like,” he said quietly.
“The things your parents said to you,” I paused, shaking my head, “and the things you said back … it was awful. I wish they could see how selfish they’re being.”
“Me too.”
I chose my words carefully. “But I think it just all felt like a giant blinking sign of how little we really know about one another.”
His jaw clenched.
“My time here, Jude, it’s like … it’s like being on vacation, you know? It’s fun and exciting, and I’m doing something I love to do, but it’s still not real life.”
“It felt pretty real to me,” he said in a rough voice.
The look in his eyes was full of unsaid things. And maybe my gaze was the same. Something big and important changed when we slept together, and he felt it too.
“I know. A lot of it did. But this whole time I’ve been here, the whole time we’ve been making up the little rules that gave us permission to do what felt good and right, we were avoiding everything hard and scary.”
He exhaled a dry laugh. “I don’t know about you, love, but I’ve come face-to-face with a lot of hard in the past few months. Do you think it’s easy to get your arse benched?”
My mouth fell open. “Today you did?”
Jude slicked his tongue over his teeth before answering, but eventually gave me a reluctant nod.
“Oh, Jude,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
As he propped his hands on his hips and stared at the ground, my stomach churned uncomfortably because I had to come to grips with the fact that Jude hadn’t confided in me about anything important. Not one thing.
Not about his job.
Not about his family.
On an elemental level, the part of us that was instinctual and immediate, I knew him.
How he looked when he woke up in the morning.
How he smiled when a fan approached him.
How he kissed me.
How he made me feel, how thoughtful he was, how easy he made it to fall in love with him.
But all the foundational things that made him that way … they were a complete mystery.
“I know not everyone likes to talk about what’s stressing them out,” I said carefully, “or how they feel about it. But Jude, you didn’t even tell your brother I was pregnant, and you like him. I wish you’d see that not everyone is like your parents. There are people who want to know what you’re going through, so we can support you, so we can know you.”
Jude stared at me; his thoughts hidden. “You think you’ve got me figured out then?”
“I want to, Jude.” I held my arms out. “But we’ve talked about nothing. We’ve ignored all the important things, and we … we just …”
My speech-making skills faltered, as thunderclouds formed on his handsome face. “We just, what? Got to know each other naturally? That’s how you categorize all the nights we spent together. Wasted. Nothing. Unimportant.”
“No,” I said in a rush, “no, I just mean … we didn’t talk about anything. Your job, your family, my family, the future. What are we going to do when I go home?”
“Well, you’ve got it all cleared up, I suppose. Why don’t you explain to me how this whole sharing thing works, and I’ll follow the bullet points as best I can.” He held up a hand. “Just make sure the words are small. Not all of us go to Oxford.”
He was like a lion, sitting back with a bloodied paw, swiping at anything that came close. Maybe I hadn’t been the one to injure him, but in his mind, I was digging straight into the wound all the same. All I could do was shake my head. Anger wouldn’t help right now, even if I wanted to tell him he was acting like a freaking child.
“Tell me what you want to hear, love, and I’ll say it.”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped. “Not like that.”
He pushed off the desk, where he’d leaned his weight. His eyes had a strange flatness to them. They were cold, behind the normally warm color. “Maybe it’s best you’re leaving soon then.”
I sucked in a breath. “Why are you acting like this? Jude, we have to be able to talk to each other about the hard things, and I-I avoided that because it’s what
I do. I storm out when I should stay and I don’t push to have uncomfortable conversations. I’m not perfect.”
“You felt pretty perfect to me,” he said silkily. Like he was wearing a mask, his lips curled up in a slight smile, but I wanted to slap it off his face. “Don’t worry, love, all the distractions were my fault. Not the best idea, I’d wager, considering it just mucks things up now when we have to be adults.”
Disappointment was … I wasn’t even sure what it was. It wasn’t a rock in my gut because it felt so, so much bigger and more painful than that. I wasn’t a poetic thinker, but all sorts of dramatic proclamations ran through my head because like I’d told Isabel, I’d started falling in love with him before I even realized it happened.
And maybe this, this version of Jude that was smooth and slick and studied—was armor, but I didn’t want the man I gave my heart to, the man who I’d made a child with, to use that armor with me.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.