The realization that this was potentially what Jude would face whenever his brain surfaced made my entire body weaken. Shuffling along the side of the bed, I collapsed onto the edge of it, grabbing his hand up in mine.
This is what happened when you didn’t heed the warning upon warning life threw your way or listened to that voice in your head that told you someone was going to get hurt if we didn’t stop fighting nature.
Jude and I had been riding a runaway train and Jude was the one to take the brunt of the impact when that train crashed into the wall. I knew when and if Jude came out of this, we could try to piece together the rabble, but it wouldn’t be long before we hit another wall. And after falling apart once, we’d shatter with the next crash until finally, there was nothing left of what we’d once been. There’d be no Jude. No Lucy. No us. None of the love we’d shared. Just a scattered mess that could never be fixed.
My hand was wringing the hell out of his, so I loosened my grip on him. The last thing he needed was a hand amputation after I’d cut off the circulation while I worried the night away.
I knew I couldn’t go, but I also knew I couldn’t stay. And this, the cruel irony, was the paramount of Jude’s and my time together. I loved him, but I shouldn’t. I trusted him, but it wasn’t natural. I wanted him, but I couldn’t have him.
With us, it wasn’t like we were suffering from a bad case of wanting to have our cake and eat it too—we were just trying to make the best out of an empty cake plate. You couldn’t create something out of nothing and, while it wasn’t Jude and me that didn’t have something—we had the kind of something people spent their lives searching for—life had given us a big nothing in the future department. There was nowhere to go but right here, one of us having a meet and greet with death, if one of us didn’t secede from the other.
I knew it couldn’t be him, he’d warned me countless times before he was incapable of walking away from me. So it had to me. I had to be the one to get up, turn my back on this man, and never stop walking away.
I’d never faced something with more fear.
Damn it. I was squeezing his hand all to hell again.
Clearing my throat, I tried to bring the words to the surface. They wouldn’t come. Something about acknowledging the permanence of them kept them bottled inside.
Goodbye. It would be the hardest thing I’d ever have to say, and the hardest thing I’d have to live. Jude wasn’t just my first love. He was my forever love. But hell if forces of nature hadn’t aligned against me actually being able to spend my life with that person.
Still choking on the word, Jude’s fingers flickered in my hand.
I jumped in my seat. Staring at his hand, I watched it come back to life, weaving through and around mine. Now something else was getting caught in my throat: relief.
His eyes flickered open the next instant, falling on where our hands were woven together. Following his gaze, I couldn’t determine which fingers were his and which were mine. Another piece of evidence for the Alice in Wonderland theory since his were rough, long man fingers and mine were skinny and soft, all girl fingers. Our hands had merged into one, creating its own Jude and Lucy. A Jucy or a Lude. The idea made me grin.
I felt his eyes move up, waiting for me to meet them. When I did, I wanted to set the world on fire and watch it burn for refusing to let me have this man.
His eyes grimaced with confusion as they scanned the room.
“You were hit, Jude. Hard,” I explained, gripping his hand like centrifugal forces were trying to tear us apart. I didn’t ease up because this time, his hand was gripping mine right back. “You blacked out, sustained a concussion, so the doctors put you into a coma so your brain could take its time recovering.” So much for the managed coma. But it shouldn’t have surprised me—Jude didn’t conform to social standards, a forced upon him coma no expectation.
“The hit I remember,” he said, reaching for his head. “The rest not so much.”
“God, Jude. I’m sorry,” I said, needing to say so much more.
“Sorry for what?” he said, inspecting the IV running into his arm. “That I was dumb enough to look in the opposite direction of a three hundred pound mamma-jamma who wanted to grind me into the astroturf? That was all my bad, Luce.”
“Yeah, but our fight,” I said, scooting closer to him when I should be moving in the opposite direction. “You wouldn’t have been so distracted if we hadn’t just gotten into it.”
“Luce. We fight. I’m used to that. Sure, that fight was the scariest ass one we’ve ever had, but you’re here now. That’s all that matters. No matter how many fights we have, or how much they tip the Richter scale, none of it matters as long as at the end of the day, you’re still with me.”
He shifted in bed, propping up onto his elbows. “And I wasn’t all that distracted from the fight. I was distracted by that D bag I was planning to torture as soon as the game was done.”
Smirking at me, the color began to bleed back into his face. “That was one hell of a phone spiral you launched onto the field. I’m going to start calling you Laser Rocket Arm. If coach saw that, he’s going to dump my sorry ass and drop you into the starting QB spot.”
I smiled at his forearm, tracing patterns over the lines of muscle and vein. “If you keep taking hits like that, you’ll be riding the bench for sure, Ryder.”
He snorted, like he didn’t only believe he was invincible, but he knew it. Lifting his hand to his neck, he searched for something below his gown. His expression dropped. “Where the hell is my necklace?” he said, sitting up in bed and searching the room.
“I don’t think you’ll find it glued to the ceiling,” I said when he investigated the white ceiling tiles.
“Where is it?” he asked, his voice tight.
“Jude,” I said, worried he’d been hit as hard as I’d been worried he had, “calm down. I’m sure it’s around. They probably took it off when you were in the ER and have it tucked into a drawer or something. We’ll find it.”
“Okay,” he said, exhaling, “you’re right. We’ll find it.” Collapsing back onto the bed, he looked exhausted.
“Since when did you start wearing a necklace?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t some huge gold chain with some hubcap sized eagle hanging from it.
“Since I started trying to get my act together,” he said.
“And that happened when?” I teased, narrowing my eyes at him.
He chuckled, that deep, throaty one of his that went right through me, vibrating everything in its journey. As it tapered off, his face twisted.
“What?” I asked, ready to push that red button resting on the table beside the bed.
“I was dreaming,” he said, his eyes going into that far-away place. “I remember it. That’s what woke me up.” One side of his face twisted up higher. “It was the same dream over and over again. I must have had it a thousand times and all I remember is wanting to break past that dream and wake up. But I couldn’t. Something was holding me down. Something was keeping me from waking up.”
That probably had something to do with a team of doctors forcing him into a coma. A coma that had lasted all of an hour.
“What was it about?” I asked, wanting to reach inside him and extract all the poison I could see eating him away.
His dark eyes flickered to mine. “You.”
I swallowed. “Me?” I tried to sound brave, but I’d never sounded so scared. “What was I doing?”
I already knew before he flinched out his answer.
“You were leaving,” he breathed, his arm covering his chest. “You left me. And you never came back, no matter how hard I ran after you or how loud I begged you to stop.” And it could have been the drugs, or the horrible lighting in a hospital room, but for the first time, Jude’s eyes looked like they could have spilled tears. “You left me.”