that didn’t stop me from doing it.
“Stop thinking about it. It meant nothing.”
Yeah, yeah, just sex. Apparently guys could separate the emotional from the physical but I had no idea how that was possible.
But I still had questions. “What kind of fighting was that Victor guy talking about?”
He hesitated a moment and flexed his hand, studying his scarred knuckles as if they held the answer to my question. I hadn’t remembered those scars and I hated that too. That he had scars I knew nothing about. Just like he had a life I couldn’t even imagine. “Bare Knuckle boxing.”
My jaw dropped. Shock was replaced with anger. I shoved his thigh with my foot. “What is wrong with you? You can’t do shit like that with your head injury. What if... God, Jude. What if you’d gotten hit in the head?”
He shrugged. “I got hit in the head plenty of times. Didn’t knock any sense into me.” He was trying to joke about this, but I found no humor in it.
“It’s not even legal, is it?”
“It was unsanctioned.”
“So, like, some kind of underground fighting? Like Fight Club?”
He huffed out a laugh. “Not quite.”
“But you fought for money?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why? Why would you do that?” I shook my head, trying to understand but I couldn’t. “That’s just... it doesn’t sound like you at all. What happened to you, Jude?”
“I was fucked-up, baby. I wanted to do anything I could to get out of my own head.”
“How do I reconcile all these different people? It’s like I only know a few different sides of you but not all of them. There was the boy I knew. My best friend. And then the love of my life. My... everything. You were my everything.”
“And you were mine.”
I pulled my feet out of his lap and tucked them underneath me. He frowned, unhappy that I’d distanced myself. Before I could scoot away, he scooped me up off the sofa and pulled me into his lap. “Stay,” he said, his arm tightening around me to lock me in place like he was afraid I’d make a run for it.
I traced his squared jawline with my fingertips. He grabbed my fingers and guided them to his mouth, sucking on them while his hand coasted down my thigh. “Why do you still carry that ultrasound picture in your wallet?”
“You went through my wallet too?”
I shrugged, no apology in my voice when I answered. “I was looking for clues. I don’t know who you are. Why do you keep that photo?”
“I guess it was another reminder of everything I put you through.” He stroked my hair so gently it hurt. “Of how much I’d failed you. It’s one of the many reasons I left and the reason I stayed away for so long.”
Giving up all pretenses of watching the movie, I buried my face in the crook of his neck and placed my palm over his beating heart. How could this man with his strong arms and broad shoulders and a heart the size of Texas have failed me? But he had.
“You said you came back. Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“It was about eighteen months after I left you. It was right before Christmas.” I would have been six months pregnant with Noah. “By chance I saw you coming out of that bakery you like and you were carrying shopping bags. You were with Sophie. And I sat in my truck and watched you through the windshield and I told myself, ‘If she sees me, I’ll go and talk to her. If she looks my way, if she gives me a sign...’ Then you guided Sophie’s hand to your stomach. Your very pregnant stomach. For some reason, I hadn’t noticed it. I guess it was because of the dress you were wearing. You had a denim jacket over it.”
I remember that day. I was wearing a dark blue maxi dress under a fleece-lined denim jacket. Sophie and I had been shopping for baby clothes.
“And you smiled. It was the same smile you used to give me when I made you happy. But I couldn’t remember seeing you smile like that in so long. Not even when we were at the ultrasound. Your smile had been more worried than joyful. Like you knew, somehow, that something would go wrong.”
Oh, my heart. I couldn’t bear the thought of Jude sitting in his truck, having to witness my happiness when he’d played no part in it.
“And it was that smile that made