by Amity Cross
“Chinese?” I prodded.
“Chinese it is,” he declared, throwing the other menus back. “What’s your poison?”
“Special fried rice,” I replied. “Do they have that?”
His eyebrow rose slightly. “Is that all?”
I shrugged. “I like plain.”
He cocked his head to the side, his lips quirking in amusement. “Plain?”
“Plain.”
As he called in the order, I perched on his couch, nestling into the plush pillows. There was a copy of this week’s script on the coffee table, so I picked it up and began to leaf through it for something to occupy my shaking hands.
It was a nice couch. All soft and squishy. I could imagine cuddling up on this couch…
“Food’ll be about half an hour,” Jude said, snapping me out of my indulgent thoughts.
“Cool.”
He sat on the couch, leaned his elbow on the back, and shoved his hand into his hair. Holding out his other hand for the script, I passed it to him, silently cursing the fact that I now had to shove my hands underneath my legs to hide the effect he had on me.
“You want to help me learn my lines?” he asked.
“I doubt you need my help. I’ll stick to the writing.”
“Touché,” he said.
I peered at him, my mind wandering. He needed to shave, not all of it, but it was beginning to get on the other side of unkempt. The unsexy side. It would be so easy to just lean forward and press my lips against his...
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
I blinked hard. “What?”
“I can always tell when your mind is going hell for leather,” he declared. “You’re not as stealthy as you like to think.”
“I’m not?” Danger, danger!
“Nope, so what is it?”
“Is it in your contract not to shave?” I asked, voicing my thoughts. “Because you look a little scruffy.”
“Yeah,” Jude replied, glancing up at me with a smile. “It’s my character’s look. Just like Kit Harrington from Game of Thrones can’t cut his hair. It’d ruin the whole thing.”
“Really? His hair is sexy, though.” I just said the word sexy in conversation with him. Shit.
“What about my stubble?”
“You can’t run your hands through stubble,” I retorted, trying to save myself.
“You can run them along it.”
Shit, this conversation was getting dangerous real fast. I felt my cheeks begin to heat, and instantly, Jude’s lips began to quirk. He had to notice, being a manwhore.
“You’re sexy when you blush,” he murmured, casting the script aside.
“Stop playing, Jude,” I said, rolling my eyes. Picking up the script, I tossed it at him. “You’re not funny.”
“What if I’m not playing?”
I froze, my entire body beginning to tingle. Shit. “What about Tessa? Aren’t you…”
He sighed sharply, running his hand over his face. “I seriously don’t know.”
I scowled, suppressing the urge to roll my eyes at the ludicrous notion. “You don’t know?”
“We had an epic fight yesterday,” he said, confirming that Tessa hadn’t told him about our interlude after all.
“Oh…”
He slouched back into the couch and pulled in a deep breath before letting it go. “I don’t want to talk about that just yet,” he said, glancing at me. “Is that cool?”
I nodded. Fine by me.
The intercom buzzed then, signaling the arrival of dinner, and I waited as Jude let the delivery guy up and paid. Wandering back from the door with the plastic bag in his hand, he nodded toward the other end of the apartment.
“C’mon.”
“Where are we going?”
“Bedroom,” he said absently before walking off.
Bedroom? It was like I was about to cross a line into the red zone. Red for desire. Red for lust. Red for love.
“I spend most of my time in there,” he explained as I followed him through the apartment.
Somehow, it felt like I was being invited someplace extremely private, and I wondered what I did to be allowed such a reward. Was I here because I refused to be anyone but myself? Or was it something else? Tiptoeing into the bedroom after Jude, I paused to take it all in.
A king-sized bed with a black leather headboard took up most of the space to the left, and a flat-screen television had been mounted on the wall to the right so he could watch from bed. Directly opposite from where we came in there was no wall, just floor to ceiling windows that opened up onto a little terrace, and beyond that, the Atlanta skyline glittered in the dark, all cream, orange, and yellow smears of human existence against the night sky.
I assumed there was a bathroom someplace, but all I could see was the view that filtered through the sheer curtains.
“Nice, huh?” Jude asked, sitting on the end of the bed. He began to pull out our food, placing it on top of the covers.
“It’s beautiful,” I replied, crossing the room and peeking through the curtains.
“Come here and eat before it gets cold. We can gawk at the lights later.”
Turning, I moved toward the bed, noticing that there were magazines and scripts stacked on the floor and a laptop beside them. On further inspection, there was an empty glass on the nightstand, and the chair in the corner had clothes piled up on it. He did spend most of his time in here.
Glancing at the bed, the covers were all rumpled like he’d just flung the quilt over the top of the mess underneath, smoothed it down a fraction, and then let it be.
Jude’s bed. Jude slept here. Jude and Tessa did the nasty right there. I felt a huge, steaming pile of vomit begin to rise in the back of my throat. I didn’t want to sit on a bed with the man I was crushing on knowing that he’d slept with my mortal enemy right there. It was like he wanted me to sit in an emotional wet spot.
“What?” he asked, staring up at me.
How was I meant to explain it to him without causing offence? I couldn’t.
“I know you don’t like her, Lux,” he said, watching me as my lip curled.
“You do?”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
I eyed the bed, wishing he spent more time in the living room.
“She doesn’t come here,” he said. “She’s never…”
He was implying that they’d never had sex in his bed, and I wasn’t sure if I should dwell on the fact that the notion was screwed up or do a little happy dance and dive-bomb onto the mattress.
Kicking off his boots and sliding back on the bed, he patted the mattress next to him. I couldn’t just stand there, so I slipped off my shoes and sat next to him.
“Why wouldn’t she want to be here?” I asked. “It’s pretty great.”
“It’s too manly, she reckons. And I’m too messy.”
The more I ventured into Jude’s world, the more confused I was at his relationship with Tessa. Nothing about them suggested they were a good match. She didn’t want to hang out at his place? That was insanity. If I was with Jude, I’d want to be here all the time. Just being around his things was an insight into the kind of person he was, and I wanted to uncover everything. Didn’t she want to know about those things?
We ate in silence after that, just enjoying the view out of the massive windows and each other’s company. It was a strange feeling sitting here with him without anything to fill the space around us. It wasn’t awkward. It was companionable.
Picking at the last of my rice, I felt Jude move next to me, and he cleared his throat.
“What does your name mean?”
I glanced at him, and he reached out for the box in my hands, shoving the rubbish into the plastic bag on the floor.
“Well, it pretty much means light,” I explained. “In Latin, in Ancient Greek, in all kinds of languages.”
“Why did your parents call you that?”
“They didn’t,” I said, eyeing him carefully.
“Did they name you something embarrassing like Doris and you changed it the moment you were legally able?”
“No, nothing like that.” And here it came, the awkward explanation that would have him saying he was sorry. Because everyone was sorry when they found out I was an orphan with no family. “I never knew my parents. They gave me up for adoption when I was a baby.”
“Shit, really?” His expression fell, and he shifted closer, his warmth doing strange things to me.
“I don’t know who gave me my name, but I do know it wasn’t them. I like to think it was some nurse in the hospital who gave me a cool name to remind me that there’s light in the world because not all babies get adopted. Some get shoved into the system and handed around like a stupid game of pass the parcel.” And with every stop, a layer was peeled away until there was nothing left.
“That was you?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Lux, I’m—”
“That day in the elevator…” I said, cutting him off before he could say the word I hated most in any language.
“Yeah?”
“Why did you take my card?”
He shrugged. “You didn’t put the hard sell on me, and you weren’t impressed that I was me.”
“That you were you?” I asked, knowing exactly what he meant.
“Lux.”
“Sorry. I’m not good at this, but I’m trying.”
“I can tell.” He sighed before running his hand over his face. “You get a little bit of fame and suddenly people want to be your friend because of what you can do for them. They don’t want to know you. They just want what you have.” He shook his head and leaned back against the headboard. “You didn’t seem to give a shit even though I could open doors for you.”
“I thought about asking you,” I murmured, picking up a script from the floor and worrying the staple in the corner.
“But you didn’t.”
“Nup.”
“Is there a reason you’re shy?” he asked carefully, turning the conversation back onto me. “Did something happen to you?”
I knew he was only trying to be kind, but all of a sudden, I felt like crying. Nothing bad had happened to me, not in the grand sense of the word, but nothing great had happened, either. My life was just one long line that went on and on without spiking up or down. It’d been the ultimate definition of mediocrity…until the day I met Jude Atwood in an elevator.
He’d completely and utterly changed my life. He was the spike and the incline. I wondered if he really understood the gravity of what he’d done that day by taking my card.
“You don’t have to answer that,” he said when I didn’t answer right away.
“No, it’s fine,” I said, lowering my gaze. “I got bullied a lot because I was always the new girl. I wasn’t very confident to begin with, so I learned how to hide in plain sight. If I wasn’t remarkable or didn’t do anything special, then the spotlight would never be on me. It’s the attention that drew the bullies like bees to honey.”
“So you never really got to fit in because you were always moving around?”
“Kinda.” I wasn’t sure how to explain it without making it into a big deal. “I didn’t have a bad upbringing. I mean, I was shunted around a lot, but I never got placed with a bad family. I just didn’t quite fit in anywhere. I was always just outside the box. Different but not different enough to be special. Writing was a way I could live when I was too afraid to. I could make up this life where I fit, where I fell in love, where things still got rough, but there was always a happy ending.”
“You could be in charge of your own destiny.”
My first reaction was to say something smart. “Wow, that’s deep coming from you.”
Jude tapped his temple, a cheesy grin on his face. “Hey, it’s not all bad up here. Though, I know exactly what you’re saying. It’s like that with acting. I go out there on set and bring your script to life. I’m that guy, I’m in that world, and his life is mine. Sometimes I think...” He shrugged.
“What?”
“Nah, it’s stupid.”
I twisted around on the bed so I could face him. “No, tell me.”
He frowned, his green eyes finding mine. “Sometimes, I think I play these parts so well that I forget who I really am.”
I tilted my head to the side. Parts? Somehow, I felt like there were so many things he wasn’t saying even though he’d just said everything.
He lay back on the bed, his expression beginning to close off. Was he referring to his relationship with Tessa? I mean, I always suspected it might be for show, but I never had any proof. But then again, he could be referring to something else entirely. Speculating on things I knew nothing about would only get me into deeper trouble than I already was in.
“Lots of people lose themselves in this world,” he went on. “They get caught up in the fame, the moment, the parties… It’s hard to keep focused on real life.”
“Are you?” I asked. “Focused, I mean.”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. Things have changed…” He ran his hand over his face, suddenly looking tired. “Honestly, I feel a little lost.”
Boldly, I dropped the script and lay down on the bed next to him. We stared up at the ceiling, an inch of space between us.
“You’re one of the most successful people I know,” I said. “You’re the star of a hit TV show, you could go anywhere or do anything, you look like that…”
“Like what?” he asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Like you’re cut from marble, smart-ass.”
“I like your smart mouth, Lux Dawson.”
My cheeks heated to levels that totally blitzed the surface of the sun.
“You know why I like this?” he asked. “Being here with you?”
“Why?” I had no clue.
“This… This is real.”
I knew what he meant. In a world that was constantly filled with fake people and their backstabbing climb to the top, finding something that was real and genuine was like finding a diamond in a slag heap. I was real, Jude was real, and the fact that we’d found each other that day in the elevator was a million in one chance.
“The other week, I should’ve just told you straight up about me and Tessa,” he said out of the blue.
I flinched at the memory of our scrap out the front of Mad Mimi’s café. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“After we fought yesterday, I went back and told her that I wanted some time apart.”
I scowled, feeling like my heart was being raked over hot coals, but I didn’t have the courage to tell him to stop.
“Tessa and I,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “When it was good, it was great. But when it was bad, it was pretty fucking terrible.”
“You don’t need to explain it to me,” I murmured. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
There was a pause as Jude processed the notion before he grunted.
They weren’t together, but they weren’t broken up, either. I didn’t want to risk this thing that had sparked between us. I mean, rejection or the semblance of something special? It wasn’t romantic, but it was still something a little deeper than a passing friendship, wasn’t it? If I was forced to choose, I’d pick the semblance time and time again…no matter the cost.
“Lux?” Jude whispered.
“Hmm?”
“I can feel you trying to keep me at arm’s length.”
“I—”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
I closed my eyes, my throat feeling thick. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him to kiss me. We couldn’t. He didn’t want me like that. Friendship was all this was. I was a shoulder, an ear, a confidant. Would I ever be his equal?
“You’re easy to talk to,” he went on. “And I think you find me easy to talk to, too. Am I right?”
“Yes…”
The mattress moved underneath me as Jude changed position. “Whatever’s stopping you from thinking you’re not
good enough, don’t let it win because you are.”
I bit my bottom lip, not sure how to reply without revealing myself. Finally, I turned my head, but he wasn’t even looking at me.
“Jude—”
“Just lie here for a moment, Lux,” he whispered, his gaze on the ceiling.
“Why?”
“Sometimes it’s just nice to be still with someone…you know? Our world is crazy, always changing, always on the edge of falling apart. I just want to be still for a moment. With you.”
And just like that, one of the biggest layers of Jude Atwood’s soul was stripped away and handed to me on a silver platter…and another piece of my heart was his in return whether he wanted it or not.
Episode Sixteen
Dangerous Liaisons
There was this feeling you got when you rise from sleep to find yourself in an unfamiliar place.
For a split second, you wonder if this is a dream world or if it’s cold, hard, reality.
In the harsh light of morning, Jude’s apartment seemed different altogether. It had lost its mysterious quality, and the sparkle had faded. Outside, the Atlanta skyline was grey and drab, a stark contrast to the stars it shone with last night.
At some point, Jude must’ve pulled a blanket over us because I didn’t remember even falling asleep, and it took me a full five minutes to realize the warmth wasn’t coming from that. It was coming from a body pressed up against my back.
Jude was lying behind me, an arm around my middle and another underneath the pillow, cradling my head. My body began to go haywire as it surfaced completely from sleep, and I closed my eyes, willing this moment to go on and on forever.
Carefully turning so I could see if he was awake or not, I paused, taking in a new angle of him I hadn’t seen before.
He was sound asleep, his lips were parted, and his eyelashes rested on his cheeks. I didn’t think he could be more handsome than he usually was, but like this… I wished with everything I had that he was mine so I could curl up beside him and run my fingertips along his jaw, that we could just lay here and tell each other all our secrets and kiss and kiss until our lips were swollen.
But he was someone else’s even though they were taking time apart, and the only thing I could do, the only right thing, was to walk away.
