Crash - Williams Nicole - Страница 26

“Watch who you’re calling drunk, bitch,” Allie sneered.

I wanted to turn around and slap her makeup-y little face so bad my hand was tingling, but for once in my lifetime, I wasn’t the hotheaded one. I was trying to hold him back as he lunged forward again.

“No, she’s not drunk,” Jude said, pacing in place. “For once. How’s that whole sobriety thing working for you, Al?”

She huffed. “Like you care. It didn’t matter to you if I was drunk or high or sober. Just so long as I was horizontal and accommodating.”

Now this girl was getting to me. It had been bad enough for her to insinuate I was a loose girl, but now knowing she’d been intimate with Jude in a way I hadn’t yet made me want to hit something hard. The closest thing, save for Jude, was her boney, sneering little face.

Taking a breath, I looked away from her and up at Jude. “Come on, let’s just get out of here. She isn’t worth it.”

“And you won’t be either come morning, sugar.”

I shook my head at him, but he didn’t take my not so subtle warning. Twisting around, he gave Allie a cockeyed grin. “There are two types of girls in the world, Al,” he said, speaking so loudly this half of the gym could hear him. “The kind you screw and the kind you marry. That’s just the way the world was made, so don’t take it out on Luce that you’re one kind and she’s the other.” Allie’s face was flushing the color of her short, street walker dress, and not the embarrassed kind of red, the livid, I-would-kill-you-right-now-if-it-wasn’t-illegal kind of red. “Run along now and find yourself some other guy to screw so you can haunt him at every turn instead of me.”

“Jude,” I whispered, looking up at him. That slanted grin was still on his face, but his eyes were black. I hadn’t known he was capable of delivering such cruel words, and if Allie hadn’t spewed the mouthful of crap she had, I might have felt bad for her. “Come on,” I said, pulling him away from one pissed off ex-lover and a few dozen onlookers. “Let’s go somewhere quiet.”

I didn’t let go of his wrist until we were out the gym door and halfway down a dark hallway, not trusting that he wouldn’t head back to go another fifty rounds with Allie. When we were far enough down the hall we could hear ourselves talk over the music, I stopped. I couldn’t get my first word out before he did.

“Luce, I know I said some things back there I probably shouldn’t have, and I didn’t treat a woman the way a man should, but I can’t and I won’t tolerate someone, male or female, talking about my girl like that.” He stared down at me, his eyes asking for forgiveness as much as they weren’t.

I only heard two words. “Your girl?” I repeated because I needed confirmation.

Grabbing my face, he rested his forehead against mine. “My girl.”

“And the expiration date on that title would be?” I asked because I had to. He was Jude Ryder. Milk left out on the counter didn’t expire as quickly as Jude’s girls did.

“How about we take it one day at a time?” he replied, that warm breath fogging my mind again.

I wanted to kiss him so badly I had to fight every urge and primal instinct to keep myself from following desire to delivery because I needed clarification. I needed answers. “I thought a girl like me, the marrying kind,” I began, giving him a look, “was entitled to more than just one day at a time.”

“You do,” he said, letting my face go and stepping back until he was leaning against the opposite wall. “But I don’t.”

Processing logical thoughts was easier with him four feet away. “Is that one of your go to lines when a girl asks for something more than a twenty-four hour Jude furlough?”

Tapping the back of the wall with his heel, he looked down the hall. “No, that’s what I answer when a girl I’m falling hard for, the only girl I’ve fallen hard for, wants to be in a relationship with someone like me.”

And we were back at the starting line. The whole Jude-doesn’t-deserve-anything-but-pile-after-pile-of-shit thing was wearing on my last nerve. “You know, Jude, you’re half as tough as you think you are,” I said, “and twice as nice as you hope you aren’t. So don’t try to sell me the whole I’m-a-cancer thing again because I’m not buying it.”

His eyes were shining when they looked back at me. “You’re not, huh?”

“Nope. I’ve got you all figured out, Jude Ryder, and I expect someone like you to give someone like me more than just one day at a time.”

“So what then? You want me to make some lame ass comment that we’ll be together forever? We’ll take our dying breaths together beside each other in bed?” he said, his voice soft.

“I’m a realist,” I said. “Lying and making promises about forever is almost as bad as one day at a time.”

“So what, my sweet, beautiful, complicated Luce, do you want from me?”

I was looking at it, but I wasn’t sure if I could have it. I wasn’t sure if a person like Jude could ever be claimed. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Oh, Luce,” he said, grimacing, “just when I thought you were getting better, you deliver a line like that.”

“Ryder,” I warned, “nice try attempting to divert this train, but I’m at the wheel and this one’s staying right on the tracks until you answer my question.”

He hit the back of his head against the wall a few times. “Okay, so something between one day at a time and forever,” he said, searching the ceiling for an answer that would appease me. “But you want an honest answer too, right?”

“Only you would have to clarify that,” I groaned.

He nodded once, meeting my eyes. “How about,” he said, rendering me witless with the look in his eyes, “I’ll be here, each day and every day on, as long as you want me to be?”

I finally got that whole, be still, my beating heart line. “And that’s the honest answer?”

Jude crossed his fingers over his chest. “Honestly.”

“That’s a damn fine answer, Ryder,” I said, walking up to him. It was a moment of intimacy and vulnerability, and passion was certainly there too, but all I wanted was to be in his arms. Mouths joined, hands exploring, nothing else could have made the moment more consuming than it already was.

Tucking me close to him, his arms held me like they were incapable of letting go. “This is a damn fine response too, Luce.”

I laughed into his shirt, wondering how a boy with his reputation could smell like soap and sunshine and could say the sweetest things I’d heard. That’s when, as was becoming a pattern at Southpointe High, I had a revelation.

Our reputations weren’t who we really were, they were who people told us we were. Some of us fell into that trap, while others fought their entire lives to break free of them. Jude was no more the bad boy with a dead end future than I was the skanky slut everyone said I was. The difference between our assigned reputations was that Jude accepted his like it was penance for some wrongdoing.

“So you think you’ve got me all figured out?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Pretty much.”

Jude’s head nodded above mine. “Okay. So when’s my birthday?”

No idea.

“What’s my middle name?” he asked. “What was the name of my first pet? What’s my GPA? How many stitches have I had? What size shoe do I wear?” he continued on, throwing out an unending stream of questions, none of which I knew and all of which were impersonal, one word answers.

“So maybe we need to have a day of Q and A or something to get all the detail stuff out of the way,” I answered, wondering how I could know so little of him, yet still feel like I’d never known anyone better, “but I know enough to know nothing you could tell me about yourself could change that.”

“You don’t know how much I wish that were true,” he said against my head, running his fingers up and down the length of my back.

As I was debating on whether to respond or just let that one hang in the air, a few couples came jogging down the hall.