Dr. Chen and I had worked on breaking down tasks into single steps. It felt ridiculous to have to mentally rehearse taking a shower and brushing my teeth, but I did what I had to do to keep going after him.After Judah.
That’s how I had started thinking about my life.
There was before Jude and after Judah.
Between those two singular points in time, I was more myself than I’d ever been. I wasn’t wearing the labels of Dr. Hawthorne, Joel’s sister, Mia, or the mother hen my friends expected me to be. I was just myself.
I liked the person I was when I was with him. For once, it felt good to have someone care for me the way I had become accustomed to caring for everyone else.
But after Judah, it felt like I had disappeared entirely.
I couldn’t do this.Especially not after seeing him Friday night.
I hadn’t been prepared to see him. Frankly, I never thought Iwouldsee him again. I wasn’t prepared for how much it would hurt to see him.
But there he was—all buttoned-up in his white dress shirt, black slacks, with a gun displayed front and center.
Didn’t own a gun, my ass.
His hair had grown out from the buzz cut I’d given him at the cabin. He must have shaved off the dye before letting it grow back out, because it was back to his sunlit light brown hair. He had it combed over on top and neatly faded on the sides. His tattoos were completely hidden by the sleeves and collar.
The man standing on the other side of my door hadn’t been the Jude I knew. It had been Judah; he was a stranger. I had never laid eyes on him, save for the choirboy headshot the agents in Las Vegas had shown me.
He was Jekyll and Hyde. Maybe that’s what was hardest to come to terms with: how seamlessly the duality of his personas meshed. They didn’t clash—they harmonized. The soft and strong side. The duty-driven soldier with a thousand-yard stare. The gentle poet. The easygoing playboy with a naughty side. The clever strategist.
He was everything I believed he was.
And more.
It was the “more” that he had lied about. What his true intentions were. Who he was really working for. I couldn’t understand why he had trusted me to hold pieces of him—the dark side I wasn’t supposed to trust—but not all of who he was.
Why? Why? Why?
The thing I hated myself for the most was that I wanted to knowthatman too.
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I rested my head against the steering wheel.
A soft tap rattled the window. I shrieked, jolted, and smacked my forehead on the steering wheel. I rubbed the spot I was certain would bruise right before the first day of school.Just great.
I glanced out the window, expecting to find Vaanya or Marcus on the other side. They were the types to show up and prep in their offices the day before class started. Courtney andCaitlin were the types to roll in five minutes late on the first day of classes after a weekend spent celebrating the last days of summer.
My breath caught in my throat. It wasn’t my colleagues.
It was him.
Which side of him had shown up, I wasn’t entirely sure.
He was in a pair of dark-washed jeans and a gray T-shirt, tattoos on full display.Fuck.
It had been easy to turn Judah away when he showed up at my door. But this was Jude. I couldn’t denyhim.
He wasn’t even looking at me, but my chest ached and I couldn’t breathe just the same. His ass was pressed up against the side of the car, facing away from me like he was scanning for potential threats.
Of course he was looking out for me.
I reached for the keys to crank up the engine and leave him standing in the parking lot when he knocked again.
Dr. Chen hadn’t prepared me for this. We didn’t meet over the weekend. I had yet to unpack all my feelings about Jude showing up at my door on Friday night. I couldn’t handle seeing him twice in the same weekend without a neutral third-party giving me permission to be angry about it, even though he was probably just trying to apologize.
