Page 6 of Rust of Control

“Some.”

“More than yesterday?”

“Some more than yesterday.”

“That’s the answer I’m looking for,” Nate said, and the corner of his mouth tipped up, barely, the way it did when he was pleased and trying not to show it, and Jude looked at his eggs.

This was the danger. Not the clubhouse, not Rand, not the men who had probably killed people. The danger was a wet-haired man across a kitchen table at nine in the morning asking whether Jude had slept, and meaning it, and Jude’s whole chest going warm and traitorous about it.

Jude had been in love with Nate since he was sixteen years old.

He was very clear-eyed about it. He had carried it so long it had stopped being a secret and turned into a feature of the landscape, a hill he no longer noticed climbing. He had been a kid with a stutter and a brother who got arrested and a crush on the brother’s enormous patient best friend, and he had understood even then that it was a closed door, and he had made his peace with the door the way he made his peace with everything, by writing it into songs where nobody would know who they were about. Nate was straight. Nate had girlfriends, a parade of them over the years, kind women who never lasted, and Nate was Easton’s best friend, which made Jude a kid brother in perpetuity, a role he had aged into and never out of. Jude knew all of it. Knowing it had never once changed the temperature of his chest when Nate walked into a room.

He finished the eggs. He drank the coffee Ghost had held hostage and then released. He let the morning hold him, and he tried not to think about what he had decided in the dark last night, what he had to do today, because if he thought about it at the table he would lose his nerve, and he needed his nerve.

He had to go back to the condo.

He told Nate in the yard, because he could not have said it in the full kitchen.

“I need to get my stuff.”

Nate had been coiling a hose. He stopped. He didn’t say anything right away, which Jude had learned was Nate thinking, not Nate disapproving, though it took everything in Jude not to read it as disapproving and start apologizing in advance.

“Your stuff,” Nate said.

“From the condo. My laptop, my meds, the- I have a hard drive with all the demos on it, fifteen months of work, it’s not backed up anywhere else, I know that’s stupid.” The words came too fast. He made himself slow down. “And my passport. And clothes. I can’t keep wearing Ghost’s shirts.”

“Ghost doesn’t mind.”

“I mind.”

Nate looked at him. The yard was cold and bright and the river went by behind the chain-link, and Jude held still under the look the way he was learning to hold still, without performing.

“Okay,” Nate said. “I’ll drive you. We go when Rand’s not there. Kit can tell us the band’s rehearsal schedule, or I can have Ghost-”

“He’s at his grandmother’s till Thursday.” Jude heard himself say it and felt the small sick drop of having the schedule memorized, of knowing to the hour when the condo would be empty because he had spent two years learning to move through his own home in the gaps between another person’s moods. “LA. His grandfather’s having some thing with a label. He flew out Monday. The condo’s empty.”

Something moved across Nate’s face. Jude could not read it. It was gone before he could try.

“I’ll drive you,” Nate said again.

“You don’t have to come up. You can wait in the truck. It’ll take me twenty minutes.”

“I’ll drive you,” Nate said, a third time, in the voice that did not leave a gap to argue into, and Jude let it go, because he wanted Nate in the truck outside more than he wanted to admit, the way a kid wants the hall light left on.

The condo was on the eleventh floor of a building downtown that Rand’s grandfather paid for, and it was beautiful. Jude had hated it for a year and a half without once letting himself finish the thought.

Nate parked across the street. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “You’re not back in twenty-five, I’m coming up. You don’t have to do anything in there but grab the bag and walk out. You don’t owe the place a goodbye.”

“It’s just stuff.”

“It’s just stuff,” Nate agreed. “Twenty minutes.”

The lobby doorman knew him and said good evening, Mr. Davros, the way he always did, and Jude rode up alone in the mirrored elevator and did not look at himself in it. He let himself in. The condo was dark and cold and smelled like Rand’s cologne and the orchids the cleaning service kept alive, and the city was enormous and glittering through the floor-to-ceiling glass. Jude stood in the doorway of the beautiful empty place and felt his whole body want to apologize to it.

He moved fast. He had a duffel from the closet and he filled it fast and quiet, the way he did everything in this condo: laptop, the hard drive off the desk, the meds from the bathroom, a fistful of clothes he did not look at. His passport was in the drawer of the nightstand on his side, the right side, the side by the window, and he was reaching for it when he heard the front door.

He knew the sound of that door. He knew the weight of how it opened. Two years of learning to read that door went still and cold in him at once, and the stutter woke up at the back of his mouth before he had a single word to use it on.