Page 39 of Ready or Knot

My heart lurches. What had happened that made registering such a painful time for both of them?

“Is it too forward to ask what happened to your sister?” I ask instead. Jude coughs, covering a laugh, and I offer a quick quirk of my lips. “I’ll take that as a yes. Let’s pretend I didn’t ask that and start over.”

He stops trying to hide his laugh, running a hand through his beard, his eyes scrunched in amusement. I bask in the sound, happy that I’m able to make him lose the stoic look.

“How long has she been gone?” I ask when his laughter quiets.

He sets his coffee down. “Eleven years this September.”

“What happened?”

“A drunk driver ran through a stop sign. She was dropping a friend off after a party since she was the only one of her group that stayed sober.” My stomach twists, and I mess with my orbital piercing, spinning it as I bite my lip. “Her friend somehow managed to walk away with just a broken leg, but Iris wasn’t as lucky. By the time I was able to get to the hospital, she was already declared brain dead.”

Jude looks out over the river.

“And no, we didn’t really have any family left. Our mom was an only child and had died a couple years prior from aggressive breast cancer. And she was a single parent.”

“That must have been awful for you to have to shoulder alone,” I whisper, blinking away tears.

He’s silent, looking across the river, his eyebrows drawn low. I reach across the table, holding my breath as I lace my fingers with his, bracing for him to brush me off. Instead, he tightens his grip and sighs.

“It was,” he says. He runs a hand over his beard again before taking a drink. When he sets the cup down, he looks right at me. My breath catches. “And I think some choices I made then will have a direct impact on you.”

I tilt my head, looking past him to the trolly that is getting ready to leave. Someone throws their head back and laughs, the sound startling a group of birds nearby. When I refocus on Jude, his gaze is on our joined hands, and he runs his thumb over mine in the barest touch.

It’s clear he won’t bring up his worry unless I ask about it.

I wouldn’t be Faedra Rose if I backed away from a line.

“Why do you think that?” I ask, and he takes another long drink of his coffee, letting his eyes close.

To his credit, he doesn’t look away from me as he tells me.

“I ended up dating the friend.” His admission is low, gruff. He doesn’t wait for my response before continuing. “People who know more about psychology would probably call it trauma bonding. She was…all I had left of Iris. It wasn’t perfect, but the first year was fine. I didn’t understand how it morphed until I was looking back after five years and realized who I had been was gone.”

I tightened my grip on his hand but didn’t say anything.

“She got her masters and an assistant professor position at the same university where I was working to secure tenure—and now have. We bought a small condo in the Highlands, which is just across the highway.” He points to his left, and I glance at the mid-rise apartments lining the other edge of the interstate. “When we met Logan, Carter and I had written off the possibility of being registered as a pack. But the more we hung out as friends, the more the idea started to carry weight. Logan brought it up maybe a year after meeting him. She and I were in a rough patch anyway. The choice was simple and yet not. It’s…hard to explain. I knew choosing to pursue registering was the right choice for me and my life. But she liked things as they were.”

He blows out a breath and shrugs.

“You know what I ultimately decided. It was anything but an amicable ending to the relationship.” His lips twist into a sardonic half smile, his eyes shadowing with a lingering wound. I tighten my grip again.

“That took a lot of bravery to realize your life wasn’t what you had wanted and start over.” He takes a deep breath with my words, and some tension bleeds away from his shoulders. I give myself a mental high five.

“It was actually Iris that gave me the courage to do it,” he says, setting aside his coffee and reaching across the table, palm up, in silent question. I don’t hesitate, placing my other hand in his and leaning forward, focusing on the way the light catches the gray in his beard, making it seem to shift colors with each small movement he makes. A pulse of heat shoots through my core.

“Really?” I ask, trying to distract myself.

He runs his thumb over my fingers, featherlight, and I clench my thighs.

What was with my body being suddenly so responsive?

“There’s a small box of Iris’s things that I kept. I was going through them one night while Melanie was out late with friends. I couldn’t tell you why. I hadn’t touched that box in years. But tucked between the pages of a notebook she’d used to write poems in, I found a list.” He pauses and glances at the river, his shoulders dropping as his look turns thoughtful. “It was a bucket list of sorts. Except after each item, there was a reason why it couldn’t happen. Her age. Her ability. Her lack of funding. Her designation. All these dreams, and she found a way to justify pursuing none of them under the guise of waiting for a time when she was better prepared. It was the loudest wake up call I’ve ever gotten.”

A breeze picks up, and I tuck my hair behind my ear before tracing the bones of his wrist, the flowing script of the small Latin tattoo.

“Does she still work at the university with you?”

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