Page 5 of Rust of Control

So he stayed where he was and made himself do the harder thing, which was to be honest with himself in the dark.

Here was the honest thing. Some low and disloyal part of Nate had heard those three texts come in tonight, had read can u get hold of rand and the please under it, and had felt, alongside the fear, alongside the clean real fear for a person he loved, a flare of something close to gladness. Because Jude had called him. Out of every name in his phone, at the worst hour of a bad night, Jude’s thumb had found Nate’s. And Nate had wanted that. He had wanted to be the name the thumb found, and a man who wanted that, who warmed at a frightened person reaching for him, had to look hard at himself, and Nate made himself look.

He was thirty-one. He had known Jude since Jude was nine years old.

He had known him as Easton’s little brother first, a quiet kid at the edge of a room full of louder kids, a kid who sang in the church choir on Sundays in a voice too big for the body it came out of. Nate had been seventeen then, and bad at reading, and grateful to Easton for never making that mean anything. Jude had been a fact of the Davros house, the same as the screen door that stuck and the dog that didn’t bark. Nate hadn’t watched him then the way he watched him now. That had come on later, and slowly, the way rust comes, and Nate couldn’t have named the morning it started.

But it had started, and Nate did not lie to himself about it.

He was bisexual. He’d known it a long time, the way he knew his own blood type, a plain fact he didn’t advertise and hadn’t so much hidden as simply never handed out. With women it was easy and uncomplicated, and he had let most people stop reading there, because the rest of it was nobody’s business and because the rest of it, when it involved men, came with a tax Nate had grown tired of paying. Men took one look at the size of him, the shoulders, the hands, and built a Nate inside their heads, and the Nate in their heads was always the one doing the holding-down. They were always wrong. Years ago Nate had stopped correcting them. It was easier to stay home.

None of which he had any business turning over with Jude Davros asleep on the other side of his wall, hurt, and trusting him.

Nate rolled onto his back and laid his forearm over his eyes.

A decent man, here, did nothing. Nate would keep Jude safe and fed and unbothered, he would keep every door in this house exactly as free as Marcus had promised, and he would keep every want of his own behind his own teeth. When Jude was steady again Jude would walk back out into his own life and choose it, whatever it was, and Nate would let him, because the alternative was to be one more man standing over Jude deciding things for him, and Nate would put his hand in a fire before he would be that.

He had it settled. He felt almost calm with it settled.

Then his phone lit on the nightstand, and he turned his head, and the calm went thin.

It was Ghost. Ghost did not text at three in the morning for nothing. Ghost did not text at three for less than a fire. Nate read it twice.

Nate lay there with the screen going dark in his hand.

Sixteen. Third since Easter. He knew the shape of what Ghost wasn’t putting in a text, because it was the shape his whole adult life had bent itself around: a kid, a city that didn’t look hard enough, a road that ran somewhere and didn’t run back. The old place in his chest pulled cold and tight, the place with a boy’s name kept in it, a boy from his mother’s church, a face Nate still saw on the nights he let himself.

He set the phone face down on the nightstand.

The room on the other side of his wall had someone in it now who needed Nate steady. The crew would need him steady in a few hours. He breathed the slow way he had taught himself to breathe, and he put the cold place back behind its door, and he lay in the dark a long while and listened to Jude not sleep, and did not sleep himself, and waited for it to become a morning he could do something with.

Chapter 3

By the third morning Jude had learned the sounds of the house.

He woke to them before he opened his eyes, the way he used to wake to his mother’s kitchen. Pipes knocking somewhere below him. A screen door. Two low voices on the porch and the smell of coffee climbing the stairs, and under all of it the river, which never fully stopped, a wide grey hush at the edge of everything. For three mornings he had lain in the borrowed bed and listened to a house that did not have Rand in it, and for three mornings the not-having had felt less like peace and more like standing in a room where the floor might still be there or might not, and he had not yet worked up the nerve to put his weight down.

He got up. He made the bed, corners tight, the way he left any bed in a place he was not sure he was allowed to stay.

Downstairs the kitchen was full. It was always full; that was what he could not get used to. There was always someone in it. Marcus at the head of the table with reading glasses pushed up into his grey hair and a stack of paper in front of him that he turned facedown when Jude came in, not fast, not hiding, just a man who kept other people’s business off the table at breakfast. Ghost at the counter doing something to the coffee maker that involved a screwdriver. Jack at the end of the table cleaning something with a rag, unhurried, the quietest man in the house. They all looked up when Jude came in, and not one of them looked at him the way the band looked at him.

“Morning,” Marcus said. “There’s eggs. Sit before Ghost takes the last of the coffee hostage.”

“It’s not hostage,” Ghost said. “It’s maintenance.”

“It’s been maintenance for twenty minutes.”

Jude sat. Someone put a plate in front of him. He had stopped tracking who, because in this house food arrived in front of him the way weather arrived, without his having to earn it or ask, and the first morning that had nearly undone him worse than anything Rand had ever said. He ate. He had learned, in three days, that they wanted him to eat more than they wanted him to talk, and that was a mercy he did not have a word for.

Trip came in from the yard. Jude had his name now, had most of their names, had spent two days quietly sorting the crew into a map he could hold. Trip set a basket of tomatoes on the counter and kissed the top of Ghost’s head on his way past, and nobody in the kitchen treated it as anything. Jude had noticed that the first day too. Nobody here treated anybody’s anything as anything. There were men in this house who slept in the same bed and men who had killed people, probably, and it all ran on the same easy current, and Jude kept waiting for the catch.

He was twenty-four and he kept waiting for the catch. He knew where he had learned that. He did not enjoy knowing it.

Nate came down last.

Jude felt the kitchen reorganize itself around it the way a room does when the person it has been half-waiting for finally arrives, and he hated that he was the one half-waiting. Nate had a t-shirt on and his hair was wet and he looked, in the morning, younger and less guarded than he let himself look at night. He got coffee. He took the chair across from Jude, not beside him, which Jude had also noticed. Nate kept a careful distance, always, a foot of air he did not close.

He said, “You sleep?”