The Ex-Change novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Vespa Rules

Callie and Jude write three rules on hotel stationery, then ride a Vespa through Rome where she says aloud what her ex never did. Their producer orders a midnight kiss, and Jude refuses on camera.

We wrote the terms on hotel stationery, on the end of my bed, with a pen shaped like a tiny gold key.

Jude sat on the floor with his back against the wardrobe, because he had refused the chair and the bed.

"Rule one," he said. "We touch when the red light is on."

"The red light on the camera?"

"The little one on top. If it's lit, they're filming, and I'm allowed to hold your hand like I'm sorry for your loss. If it's dark, I keep my hands in my pockets."

I wrote it down.

"Rule two. Nobody sleeps in the other's room."

"I wasn't going to suggest it," I said.

"I know. I'm saying it so the network knows I said it."

"Rule three." I tapped the pen on my knee. "Nobody falls."

He looked up at me from the floor.

For a second he didn't say anything.

"Nobody falls," he agreed, and signed under it with a swirl so large it ran off the page.

In the morning he was waiting in the hotel courtyard on a cream-colored Vespa, in a plain grey T-shirt and sunglasses, and the red light on the camera van behind him was dark.

"This is the first exchange date," he said. "We drive. I'm told there's a surprise."

"I've never ridden one of those."

"Then you'll hold on," said Jude, and he held out a helmet.

I put it on. My hair stuck out under the strap in every direction.

He stared at me with the straight, grave face of a man who has met thousands of fans and was not going to laugh.

"Say it," I said.

"You look like a cheerful mushroom."

"You look like a man who got his helmet from a toy box."

He laughed, and the sound ricocheted off the courtyard walls.

Then the red light on the van went on.

I climbed onto the seat behind him and, because the light was on, put both my arms around his waist.

He wasn't wearing a jacket.

I felt the flat heat of him through the T-shirt.

His whole stomach went hard under my wrists the second I touched it.

"Cold?" I said into his back.

"Engine vibration," Jude said quickly. "It does that to people."

The Vespa shot out of the courtyard.

Rome blew past on both sides, ochre walls and green shutters and a woman hanging laundry from a fourth-floor window.

I pressed my cheek between his shoulder blades without deciding to, and he put one hand over both of mine on his stomach and left it there.

The red light was lit.

It was a rule, and I was keeping it.

We stopped at the top of a hill, in a courtyard with a lemon tree and a table set for two.

A crew member put a card under my plate.

I read it out loud.

"Tell your date what your ex got wrong. Be honest."

Jude lifted his glass. The red light came on over my left shoulder.

"I'll go first," he said. "Vanessa got nothing wrong. That's the problem. I was gone three hundred nights a year, and I called it a career. She waited, and I thought that meant it was fine."

"You think it was your fault?"

"I think I wasn't there to ask." He turned the glass. "Your turn."

"Colton never once said sorry first," I said.

It came out before I'd planned it.

"Not once, in four years. When a pipe burst in the kitchen, it was the pipe's fault. When he missed my mother's surgery, it was his schedule's fault. I got very good at saying it for both of us."

Jude put the glass down very gently.

"That's a long list of apologies you've been carrying."

"It was my job."

"It was never your job," he said.

The red light went off.

We both noticed at the same moment, and neither of us moved.

His hand was still on the table next to mine, close enough that the heat came across the gap.

I looked at his forearm, at the black music staff inked on the inside, five lines and no notes.

"No notes," I said, before I could stop myself. "Why?"

"I haven't found the one I want to put there," he said.

My heart did something it wasn't supposed to do.

In my ear, Lowen's voice crackled to life.

"Lovely, lovely, we got all of that. Now. Here's your evening. Midnight at the Trevi Fountain, and the two of you kiss."

I froze with the lemonade halfway to my mouth.

"The audience is begging for it," said Lowen. "Don't make me say it twice."

Jude was looking at me, one eyebrow raised, because he could hear her too.

Then he leaned toward the nearest camera and said, in a pleasant voice that carried across the courtyard, "Not on a script."

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