I Slept With My Enemy, Now He Won't Let Me Go novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Jude's Secret

Jude admits he never wanted to leave, the door opens on the whole party, and Neil sets his terms in the pantry. A text arrives: does your grandmother know yet?

Jude did not argue about the note.

He looked at the pillow in his head, Neil could see it, and then he looked at Neil.

"My true thing is worse than yours," he said.

"I doubt that."

"I didn't want to leave."

Neil stared at him.

"I sat on the edge of your bed for an hour," Jude said. "You were asleep. You had one hand over your face."

"Stop."

"I wrote the note four times. Then I left, because I was scared of what you'd say if you woke up and I was still there."

Neil's chest hurt.

He did not trust the way it hurt.

"You're lying to get out of this room," he said.

"I'm telling you the truth to get out of this room. It's what she asked for."

The key turned in the lock.

The door swung open on the dock, the lanterns and the whole birthday party standing in a half circle.

Winifred stood in front with her cane planted and her chin up.

Behind her stood Ansel, smiling, holding two glasses of champagne.

Neil's face went flat before he knew he had done it.

He had spent twenty-eight years learning that face.

"Well?" Winifred said.

"We're done," Neil said. "Open the bar."

"Did you two tell each other the truth?"

"Yes."

"Did you make up?"

"No."

Jude stepped out beside him, hands in his pockets, perfectly easy.

"He still can't hold his liquor, Winifred," Jude said. "Happy birthday."

The crowd roared.

Somebody whistled.

Neil understood what Jude was doing.

He was giving the town the old show, loud and mean, the one they had paid to watch for twenty years.

Neil took the glass from Ansel and put on the smile that went with it.

"Jude couldn't find his own dock in the fog," he said. "Try the bar, Halvorsen."

More laughter.

Ansel leaned in and clinked his glass against Neil's.

"You okay?" he said under the noise. "You went gray in there."

"I'm fine. It was Jude."

"It's always Jude." Ansel squeezed his shoulder. "Tell me if you need a ride home. I'll drive you anywhere."

Neil nodded, grateful, and meant it.

Winifred looked at him for one long second.

Her eyes went to his stomach, and then back up to his face, and she said nothing at all.

She knew.

He had never told her, and she knew.

Neil kept smiling until the crowd turned back to the cake.

Then he walked, not ran, to the pantry behind the kitchen and shut the door.

Jude came in a moment later and shut it again behind him.

The room smelled of lemons and old wood.

They stood a yard apart.

"No," Neil said. "Before you say anything, no."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say you'd do the right thing."

"I was going to say I'm in," Jude said.

"In what?"

"All of it. The baby, the doctor, whatever you decide."

Neil laughed once, short and ugly.

"You don't get to be in. You get to hear my terms."

Jude folded his arms and waited.

"Nobody finds out," Neil said. "Not your sister, not my cousin, not the yard, not the board. I haven't decided what I'm doing about this."

"Neil."

"Second, we stay exactly what we are in public. You hate me, I hate you, the town keeps its show."

Jude's jaw moved.

"Third, nothing happens in private either," Neil said. "That night was a mistake. We don't repeat it."

"A mistake."

"You can leave that part out of the note."

It landed.

He watched it land and felt no better.

"Terms accepted," Jude said, very quietly. "On one condition."

"What?"

"I come to the doctor."

"No."

"It's my baby."

"It's my body."

"I know it is," Jude said.

He said it flatly, without a trace of the sneer he used on the dock.

"I'm not asking to take anything from you. I'm asking to be in the room when somebody tells you it's all right."

Neil looked at the floor.

His grandmother's kitchen clock ticked above the sink.

"Thursday," he said at last. "Ten o'clock. Portland."

"I'll be there."

"If you're late I'll tell the whole harbor you cried at the ultrasound."

"I will cry at the ultrasound."

Neil almost smiled.

He caught it in time.

"Go out first," he said. "Pick a fight with someone on the way."

Jude opened the door and stopped with his hand on the frame.

"For the record, Ashworth," he said, "I'd have read you the note in person."

Then he walked out and said something loud to the cake, and the crowd howled.

Neil stood alone among the lemons with his hand flat on his stomach.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

An unknown number.

He read it twice.

*Congratulations. Does your grandmother know yet?*

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