Page 79 of Hell to Pay

“Not often, but it came in handy once or twice.” He flashed me a devastatingly sexy grin and heat pooled between my thighs. “This is a lot more fun though.”

I couldn’t disagree, especially after the server uncorked a bottle of red wine that tasted like vanilla and blackberries. The wine was followed by a cheese plate complete with succulent figs and tangy olives, then a five-course meal that included radicchio salad, chicken pate inside flaky golden pastry, salmon with caviar, and escargots, which were snails.

And yeah, the thought of eating snails kind of grossed me out, but they turned out to be little morsels of buttery, garlicky goodness.

For once, we didn’t talk about Imperium Fratrum or missing girls or mysterious hard drives. Jude told me how he’d been drawing since he was a kid, how the minute he picked up a pencil it had felt like coming home.

“My parents humored me for a while,” Jude said, taking a bite of the salmon. “Even my dad. He paid for my art lessons and everything. I loved it.”

“What changed?” I asked.

He took a drink of the wine. “I got older, went to high school. My dad said it was time to ‘get serious’ about something, and by ‘something’ he didn’t mean art.”

“Did you have to stop taking lessons?”

He nodded. “My parents fought hard about it, one of the only times I’d heard them fight actually. My dad won. I stopped going to art classes and started fighting with my dad pretty much constantly. I just wanted…”

The candlelight flickered over his sharp cheekbones.

“What?” I asked. “What did you want?”

He reached across the table and took my hand. “I just wanted to be myself.”

“I know that feeling,” I said softly.

“You do?”

I nodded. “I never thought about my mom’s religious fanaticism when I was a kid. It was just…” I shrugged. “It was just the way things were. I didn’t know any different. But once I got to middle school and then high school, I realized we were… weird.”

Jude laughed a little but there was nothing mean in it. He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed it. “If you’re weird it’s the best kind of weird.”

I smiled. “Thanks, but you know what I mean right? Like I wasn’t just different, I wasweird. Everyone else had phones and shared memes on social media and talked about their crushes, and I didn’t even know what some of that stuff looked like. Those things might as well have been a fantasy or… science fiction or something.”

“Did you tell your mom?” he asked. “That you were questioning her religion?”

I laughed. “Noooo. I knew better than that. It would have landed me in the praying closet for days. But I just… knew. Something inside me knew it wasn’t right, all that hellfire and judgement, all those rules.”

“Is that why you went to Brandon Miller’s party that night?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to think back to the night I’d snuck out, trying to remember exactly what I’d been thinking when I’d slipped out my window, dropped to the ground, started walking toward the Millers’ house. “I think I was just curious. And Brandon had invited me, which had never happened before.”

Jude’s expression darkened. “He’s not a good guy.”

“Oh, I know that now,” I said.

“Then again,” Jude said, “neither were we.”

“No.” I squeezed his hand. “Not then. But people change.”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be good. If any of us will ever be good.”

I looked into his eyes, said the thing that came to mind because now, at least, it was true. “Maybe not, but you’re good for me.”

Silence weighed between us, but not the awkward kind.

The meaningful kind.

We turned to less heavy topics over coffee and dessert — bourbon vanilla flan with salted caramel ice cream — but the conversation about Jude’s family lingered in my mind.

---