Page 24 of Rust of Control

Jude met him at the dirt drive because the safehouse was the home for now and Kit was not crew, and they sat on the steps in the cold with the river going by grey at the bottom of the yard. Kit put the folder between them without a word and waited, which was how Jude knew it was bad. Kit talked when things were fine. Kit went quiet when they weren't.

"I pulled the band's statements," Kit said. "All of them. Three years back."

"Rand handles the money."

"Yeah," Kit said. "I know. That's the problem."

Jude opened the folder.

He had been told, for two years, that he couldn’t do the finances. Rand had said it gently and said it often, baby, you can't even read a bank statement without a panic attack, let me worry about it, and Jude had let him, because the numbers swam and the panic came up the second they did and it had been easier, always easier, to hand it over. He had handed everything over. He understood that now in a way he had not let himself understand it before; he had given himself away brick by brick, until there was no room left in his own life he was allowed to stand in alone.

He looked at the statements. He waited for the panic.

It did not come.

Something else came instead, and it took him a moment to place it because he had so little practice with it, and when he placed it he went very still on the cold step. The numbers did not swim. They sat there, plain, and they told a plain story. Money had been coming into Hollow Bright's account and going back out of it to places that were not the band, in amounts that climbed, on a schedule. Show money. Merch money. The advance from the festival last summer that Jude had been told fell through and had not fallen through. Gone, in pieces, to an LLC with a name like a law firm and to cash withdrawals that stopped just under the number that makes a bank ask questions.

"He's been stealing from us," Kit said, low. "From all of us. Sy's been picking up shifts at the restaurant. I told myself it was the economy. It wasn't the economy."

And here was the thing Jude would think about later, sitting in Dr. Aronson's office on the phone two days on, trying to name it: the panic did not come, but the anger did. It came up from somewhere south of the panic, somewhere he had not known he kept anything, and it was not cold in his chest the way fear was. It sat low and level and hot in his gut and it did not shake his hands. His hands were perfectly still on the folder. He had never once been angry with his hands still. Anger, for Jude, had always been something other people were allowed and he was not, the spark that got you hit, the heat you swallowed until it turned into the cold-tap-on-the-wrists kind of night. This was different. This had solid ground under it.

"That festival advance," Jude said. His voice came out level too. "He told me it fell through. He sat at the kitchen table and told me Electric Forest’s people pulled out and I made him tea about it."

"It didn't fall through."

"No," Jude said. "I can see that it didn't."

He closed the folder. He did not throw it, though some new clean part of him wanted to, wanted to send Rand's three-year story under the grey water and watch it go. He set it down on the step instead and squared the edge, and the anger settled into something with weight to it, something he could pick up and carry, and that was the part that scared him. Fear didn't keep. Fear you could outrun up onto a stage. This was going to be with him now, a part of him. He found that he didn’t mind like he thought he would.

"I have to look at all of it," Jude said. "Myself. Not you telling me, not Nate telling me. Me."

"Okay." Kit watched him. "You sure?"

"He spent two years telling me I couldn't read a bank statement." Jude stood up, the folder under his arm now, the way Kit had carried it. "I just read three years of them on a porch in the cold. So yeah. I'm sure."

Nate found him at the kitchen table that night, surrounded by it.

Jude had spread the whole three years across the table and was working through it the way he worked through a setlist, methodical, a pen behind his ear, and he had not heard Nate come in until there was a glass of water set down by his elbow, not in his hands the nightstand way, and Jude looked up.

Something had changed in Nate. Jude saw it the way he saw everything, fast and complete, the second he looked up. The careful foot of air Nate had kept even through the kiss, even through the bed, was gone out of his shoulders. He stood differently. He looked at Jude like a man who had set something down somewhere an hour north and drove home lighter.

"You went to see Easton," Jude said.

"I did."

"And?"

Nate pulled out the chair beside him, close, and sat. "He gave me hell. About as much as I had coming. More, maybe." A corner of his mouth. "And then he gave me his blessing, which I told him I didn't need and he told me I had it anyway." He paused. "He said to tell you something. He said: tell him I said yes."

Jude went still.

He had forgotten he'd ever asked. It came back now all at once, a winter four years ago, a visiting room like the one Nate had described, Jude nineteen and miserable and finally saying the thing out loud to the one person who'd known him longest, do you think he'd ever, Easton, do you think Nate would ever look at me like that, and Easton, who loved them both, who could see the wreck coming from a mile off, had been kind and had been honest and had said, no, J. I don't think so. Don't wait on it. Don't break your heart on a straight man who'd carry you on his shoulders but never see you. And Jude had folded the want up small that day and put it away, on his brother's say-so, because his brother had never once lied to him to make him feel better.

Tell him I said yes.

Four years. The verdict reversed across four years and a bolted table, sent home through the same brother who'd handed down the first one.

"I asked him a long time ago," Jude said. His voice had gone thick. "Whether you'd ever. He said no. He said don't wait on it." He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, fast, the way Easton did, the way they'd both learned from the same kitchen. "He told me not to break my heart on you."