I Slept With My Enemy, Now He Won't Let Me Go novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Locked In
At Winifred's 80th dinner, Neil and Jude are locked in the old boathouse office. To get out, Neil admits the drunk night and the pregnancy. Jude says he left a note. There was no note.
At her eightieth birthday dinner, in front of sixty guests, Neil's grandmother had him locked in a room.
She did it with a smile and a cane.
"Neil, Jude, to the old boathouse office," Winifred said into the microphone. "You two have until I'm tired of waiting."
Two staff members took Neil by one arm and Jude by the other.
The whole room laughed and clapped.
Neil did not laugh.
He and Jude had fought in front of this town since they were eight years old.
Everyone thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened at a birthday.
The staff walked them down the dock to the little office over the water.
The door shut behind them.
A key turned on the outside.
Neil went straight to the handle and yanked it twice.
"Open this," he said to the door.
Nothing happened.
He tried the window, which had been painted shut for thirty years.
He called his cousin Ansel, who was somewhere in the dining room, and put him on speaker.
"Ansel, she's locked us in. Find the key."
"Don't panic," Ansel said, warm and easy. "She's eighty and she's enjoying herself. I'll work on her. Sit tight, and don't let Jude get to you."
"He always gets to me."
"I know. I've got you. Ten minutes."
He hung up.
Neil put the phone away and turned around.
Jude leaned against the wall by the old chart table, long legs crossed at the ankle, in no hurry at all.
He had a pale scar through his left eyebrow, and he was smiling.
"You look pale, Ashworth," Jude said. "Scared of me?"
"I'm scared of the next ten minutes with you."
A small, dry voice came through the door.
It was Winifred.
"Listen to me, both of you," she said. "I'm not opening this until each of you has told the other a true thing he has never told anyone."
"Gran," Neil said.
"A real one. I'll know if it's a fake."
Her cane tapped away down the dock.
Neil stared at the door.
Jude pushed off the wall and sat on the edge of the table.
"Fine," he said. "You go first. We've known each other twenty years, Neil. What could you possibly have that I don't know?"
Neil looked at him.
Twenty years of racing him, bidding against him, hating him in every harbor bar in Maine.
There was one thing.
His hands were cold.
He had spent his whole life making sure that nobody saw his body.
He had been born with both, and he had been raised to keep it behind a locked door.
Only Winifred knew, and a doctor in Portland.
Now the one man he could not stand was sitting on the table, waiting.
"I'm intersex," Neil said.
The smile stayed on Jude's face for a moment and then stopped.
"I have a man's body and I also have a womb," Neil said. "I've known since I was fourteen. Nobody else here knows. Not the yard, not the board, not the town."
Jude said nothing.
His fingers had stopped moving on the table.
"That's one," Neil said. "She said a true thing. I'm giving her a better one."
He made himself keep going.
"Three months ago, after Founders' Night, I woke up in my own bed with you gone."
"Neil."
"I was drunk and you were drunk. You made me come twice, and then you left without a word."
Jude's face had gone white.
"I didn't plan it," Neil said. "I didn't plan any of it. I found out five weeks ago."
His voice shook for the first time.
"I'm pregnant, Jude."
The silence was loud.
Water slapped the pilings under the floor.
Jude stood up slowly.
He crossed the room and stopped an arm's length from Neil, close enough that Neil could see he was shaking too.
"It's mine," Jude said.
It was not a question.
"You're the only person I've slept with in four years," Neil said. "Yes, it's yours."
"Three months."
"Twelve weeks."
"And you were going to tell me when?"
"I wasn't."
Jude took that like a punch.
"Because I left," he said quietly.
"Because you left and you didn't even say goodbye. You just walked out and sneered at me across a boardroom three days later."
Neil's voice cracked on the last word, and he hated it.
Jude's hand went up to the scar on his eyebrow, the way it did when he was cornered.
"That's the fight with the boy from the lower school in tenth grade," Neil said. "Nobody ever learned what that was about."
"It was nothing," Jude said.
He lowered his hand.
"Neil, I didn't leave without a word."
"You did."
"I wrote you a note. It took me an hour. I put it on your pillow, under your watch, and I went out the back so your grandmother wouldn't see me."
Neil stared at him.
"There was no note."
"There was a note."
"Jude, I woke up alone. There was nothing on that pillow."
For the first time in twenty years, Jude had no comeback.
Outside the door, soft and close, someone shifted on the planks.
"Five more minutes," Ansel's voice said, warm and easy. "Gran says she's nearly done."
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