“I’m so angry at you,” she sobbed.
“I know, baby. I deserve it.”
“You refused my letters.”
Shit. I pressed my hand against her back. “Soph, I didn’t throw them out of my cage like an angry monkey, okay? I was detoxing. Cold turkey. And there were all these things I was supposed to take care of—a visitors’ list and forms.” I swept her silky hair off her neck and squeezed the muscles in her shoulder. God, the view of her body lying here was so familiar it ached. But the ache was like a sore muscle after a workout—necessary and not altogether bad. “See, I was busy throwing up for three weeks. I couldn’t take care of business like I was supposed to.”
Sophie seemed to calm down enough to listen to me. She sniffed quietly, and her breathing slowed.
“Nobody really explains anything in there, either,” I said, whispering. “I hadn’t signed for your letters yet, and I wasn’t sure if I should. I didn’t think I deserved anything from you. And when I finally got well enough to ask somebody about them, they said it was too late. And I figured it was just as well. I wasn’t any good for you, anyway.”
I could hear her trying to calm down. She took a deep, slow breath. “But nobody else was good for me either. I spent weeks wondering where you’d gone and what had really happened. Nobody ever answered my questions. And nobody wanted to hear that I was sad. No one will say your name at my house.”
Who could blame them?
“And you wouldn’t speak to me. That was just cruel.”
The knife in the center of my chest gave a twist. All I could do was hold her a little closer and apologize again. “I’m sorry I left you all alone. But I chose that shit I was putting up my nose over everything else. I didn’t know how to stop.”
Her voice was raw when she spoke. “You could have told me you needed help.”
As if. Now I told her a big lie. “If I’d been able to admit it, you would have been the one I’d told.” But the truth was exactly the opposite. Sophie was always going to be the last person in my life to know. I’d have let everyone else down first. She’d always put me on a pedestal I knew I didn’t deserve. But it had been my plan to stay there. I would have never let her see my ugly side if I could help it.
Turns out I couldn’t.
“I loved you so much,” she said.
Loved. The word made my eyes sting. Her use of the past tense wasn’t a shock. But it hurt all the same.
Maybe she was waiting for a response from me, but I didn’t have one to give. And now I was just spent—drained both in body and soul. I lay there just holding her, struggling to keep my eyes open.
“I need to go home,” she said eventually. “My father will freak out again if he comes home from second shift and I’m not there.” She sighed.
That woke me up again. “Are you safe there?”
She sighed. “Yeah. It was just a slap when I got in his face.”
Damn it. Wasn’t that how it always began? “Why do you live there, anyway?”
Her voice was flat. “My mother is not doing well. After sophomore year, I moved home to help her out. It’s a long story.”
That was the only kind we had anymore.
Sophie extracted herself from my embrace, sat up and flung her legs over the side of the bed. Then she grabbed her tangled tights off the floor and began pulling them on.
I stumbled to a standing position and shook out her dress. She took it without meeting my eyes. I pulled on my jeans over nothing and zipped myself up. The aftermath. Sophie and I used to curl up together in my bed and fall asleep. This felt tawdry.
After slipping on her bra and dropping the dress over her head, she sat there on the edge of my bed a minute longer, biting her lip.
I sat down beside her.
“Sorry I brought my bag of crazy to your door,” she said softly, her sad eyes finding me again.
“My bag of crazy barely sneezes at yours,” I whispered. “And I hadn’t had sex in over three years, so…”
She let out a strangled laugh, but her eyes got wet again. She jumped to her feet. “I’m going to go now. Maybe I’ll see you at the church.” Stuffing her feet into her shoes, she grabbed her coat off the floor. “Goodbye, Jude.”
I stood up as she put her hand on the door. She hesitated for just a second, so I stepped into her space and I kissed her on the forehead. “Take care of yourself.”
Her sigh weighed a ton and a half. “You too.”
Then she was gone. And I was left with a bed that smelled like her and no reason to hope that she’d ever be back.
Chapter Thirteen
Jude
Cravings Meter: 5-6
“Who had a good week?”
Very few hands went up in the basement of the church.
“Who had a tough week?”