Page 174 of Still Bruised
“Now you tell me this?” Jude asked him.
“You didn’t ask,” Cary replied, grinning.
“I was wondering why only a couple of hundred showed up. Our class was over six hundred, right?” Jude asked.
“Yep,” Cary said.
“Why’d you come?” Jude asked him.
“Because Foster asked me to,” Cary said.
Jude looked at Foster. “Why’d you make him come to this?”
The only answer Foster gave him was a shrug.
“To help shield you from trouble, if it brewed,” Mia said from across the table. “It’s the only reason Roan and I are here, too.”
Jude looked around at everyone. “You didn’t have to come for me.”
“You really think we’re going to let you walk into this place again and not be here?” Anton asked, lifting a brow.
Jude froze. “I didn’t mean for anyone to come out to something they didn’t want to attend. I’m sorry.”
“They wanted to be here for moral support,” Foster said. “Because they care about you. You have some amazing friends.”
Jude sat with that a moment, trying not to get emotional. “I do. I have some of the most amazing friends that I definitely don’t deserve.”
“No, you don’t deserve us,” Anton said before grinning. “But we love you anyway.”
Jude grinned.
“We could all go to McMurphy’s and have a couple of drinks there,” Cary said. “Less junior high dance and more pathetic drunken adult playground.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jude said.
“What about my dance?” Foster asked. “I was promised one. Actually, I was promised them all.”
Jude chuckled. “Can all the dances be wrapped up in one—and then we leave?”
“I guess,”Foster muttered before grinning. “The next slow one is ours.”
A couple of minutes later, the lights came down, and a slower song began. Foster held out his hand, and Jude took it. Foster led him to the dance floor and drew him close once on it.
Jude felt stares coming in their direction, but he didn’t care. Let them look.
He was dancing with the man he’d fallen in love with.
The first boy he’d kissed.
Maybe the last boy he’d kiss, too, if he played his cards right.
As the other people faded from his vision, he melted against Foster, swaying in his arms. Foster pressed a kiss to his forehead before tucking his head under his chin. It was just the two of them, holding on tight.
And never letting go.
Foster heldhis boyfriend’s hand on the way out of the reunion. Jude was lighter than he’d been when he walked in, even though almost no one had spoken to him the entire night—other than those at the table. Still, it seemed to have been cathartic in some way. Maybe simply having the courage to walk back into that building where he’d been hurt and shown them all that he’d survived their worst.
Before he opened his door, Ashley jogged up to him.
