Phone still in hand, she turned in her chair and watched Jude as he scrubbed at a stubborn pan in the sink. His jeans hung low on his hips, and he’d taken off the shirt he’d donned before dinner, probably to keep it from getting wet. His muscles flexed with the work, making his tattoo dance along his spine.
Slowly, Libby stood and crossed the kitchen to his side. She touched his arm. “Can please I see it? Your tattoo?”
Exhaling hard, he looked over at her, held her gaze for a long moment.
“Are you ashamed of it?” She couldn’t think of another reason why he’d be so sensitive about it.
“No. Never.” For some reason, his gaze dropped to the cell phone still in her hand, and he stared at it like it was going to give him answers to all of life’s hardest questions. Finally, he shrugged, dried off his hands on a towel, and gave her his back. Her fingers itched to touch him, but she feared he’d shy away and she’d never find out what his tattoo said. She kept her hands to herself and read the words he’d thought important enough to ink permanently into his skin.
Meredith, my love…
She jerked backward in shock. A love letter. He had tattooed a love letter to his spine. Her throat worked, but for a long moment, she couldn’t produce any sound around the surge of pain that froze her vocal chords.
“Who’s Meredith?” she finally choked.
“My mother.”
All the air left her lungs in a burst that was too close to a relieved sob for comfort. “Your mother.” She reached out with trembling fingers and traced the outline of the ballet slippers hanging from one side of the broken angel wings. It was so obvious that she wondered why she hadn’t she made the connection sooner. His mother was a dancer. And the dog tags on the other half of the wings? His father had been career Army.
A memorial to the parents he’d loved and lost far too soon.
“The words—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “My father wrote them. His wedding vow to her.”
“Jude,” she breathed and circled around to face him, but he was staring at the floor. She always accused him of being childish, all that time never forgetting that he was very much a man. But in this moment, he looked so much like the vulnerable child he must have once been, and she wanted nothing more than to hold him close. Comfort him. She touched his cheek and miserable blue eyes lifted, met hers, clung.
“Do you want to tell me about them?”
He shook his head.
How absurd to feel disappointed. He was obviously wrestling with a personal demon that she had no right to help him slay. His problem. His life. It shouldn’t matter to her. She’d spent eight years convincing herself it didn’t matter—that he didn’t matter. And look how that turned out. It took only three weeks with him to negate those eight years.
Despite it all, she still loved him. Had never stopped, probably never would—and she could never tell him. The only thing permanent in Jude Wilde’s life were those tattoos. Hanging on to him would be like trying to hang on to a hummingbird as it darted from flower to flower. Unfair to them both.
On impulse, she set the cell phone on the counter and wound her arms around his waist, laid her cheek against his chest, and held him. Maybe it could only be for the space of a heartbeat, but she held on and let herself enjoy it. He returned her embrace hard, and his whole being seemed to shudder. Whether from relief or something else, she didn’t dare guess.
“I sneaked out that night,” he murmured into her hair. “The night my parents died.”
She squeezed him tighter, but kept her mouth shut. It surprised her that he’d confided even that much, and she didn’t want to seem like she was pressuring him.
“I wanted nothing more than see Jurassic Park,” he continued after a seemingly endless moment of silence. “I begged them all summer to take me to the theater, but they wouldn’t. Mom said it wasn’t a movie for a ten-year-old. Hell, she wouldn’t even let Reece watch it, and he was thirteen. It seemed so important to me at the time. So important.
“One of my friends got it on video for his birthday, and a group of us planned to sneak over to his house later that night to watch it. I’d seen Greer sneak out enough times to know exactly how it was done, so off I went in my dinosaur PJs, ready to get the shit scared out of me by T-Rex. I never considered what my parents would think when they came to tuck me in and saw my bed empty, my window open, my shoes and coat still in my closet.”
“They thought someone had taken you,” she concluded.
“Yeah. They left Greer at home with Reece and the twins and went to the police. They filed a report, then launched their own search, driving up and down the streets, calling my name, looking for any signs of me. By that point, I was already back in my room, sound asleep. Reece found me, tried to get a hold of them to tell them I was all right…but this was ‘93. Not everyone had cell phones back then.”