His Horizon - Con Riley Page 0,36

before setting it down. Rob taking a big-brother role with Louise still felt weird, and he might’ve been right about giving Lou space, but only seeing her for himself would loosen the coil of tension that pulled ever tighter inside Jude.

It hadn’t quite been an hour since Rob left his note, but Jude left the pub regardless, taking another narrow street that rose steeply from the harbour, the cottages crowded close together, walking so fast he almost went past his destination, a shopfront full of seascapes. He doubled back just as the front door swung open.

“Marc?” he asked, wary, this broad, dark-haired man very different from the skinny goth he’d gone to school with.

Marc’s French accent confirmed it was the same person. “Jude.” He crossed thick arms, and narrowed eyes devoid of the eyeliner Jude remembered.

“Where’s Lou?”

“I’m here.” Marc stood to one side, and Jude saw her. He stepped towards her only to be stopped when Marc blocked him, one heavy arm dropping like a portcullis. Marc braced against the doorframe and then reluctantly gave Jude just enough space to pass through.

Jude found the next few steps the hardest he’d ever taken.

Lou looked slighter somehow this morning, surrounded by tall canvasses. He barely noticed the paintings that caught the wind-whipped spirit of Porthperrin or the portraits of the people who had lived there. Instead, he focussed on the shadows below Lou’s eyes—a smudged palette of mauve and bruised greys—and the way she hugged herself so tightly. He didn’t even notice Rob until he stepped between them, dividing Jude from his sister as Marc had attempted.

“Lou wants a bit more time,” Rob said, one hand raised as if to catch his elbow to guide him back to the doorway.

“No.” Jude dodged around him on legs that felt like jelly. “Lou, let me explain—” He froze, just a few metres between them, waiting to hear if she would let him. “Please.”

Finally, slowly, she nodded.

Behind him, the bell above the gallery door let out a merry tinkle. If it had done the same when he arrived, the sound hadn’t registered. Maybe that was due to his heart beating like the clappers, far faster than a brisk walk from the Anchor merited, as if he’d sprinted the distance and more. He did hear Rob say, “Come on, Marc,” and the door close again, but he didn’t look back to confirm they’d both gone. Nothing could make him turn away from Lou, not even the fear that she’d blank him.

He started by saying what was most important. “I’m sorry.” He drew in a breath that felt ragged and rough. “I’m truly sorry I didn’t tell you, but I’m not sorry for being the way I am.” He couldn’t be, no matter how often he’d wished it away when he was thirteen or fourteen, closing his eyes each and every night to hope that he’d wake up in a world where it didn’t matter. “I would have told you I was gay if—”

At that, a tear spilt, Lou almost shouting. “If what?”

If he hadn’t thought she’d look at him like he’d physically hurt her. He tried to verbalise that. “Lou, I couldn’t—”

This time she did yell, words sounding about as torn from her as his had felt. “Couldn’t what?”

He told the truth as he knew it, closing his eyes as he said, “Lose you as well, Lou. I couldn’t stand to lose you as well as Mum and Dad.”

“Even before?” she asked, her voice quieter and closer, only a few feet distant when Jude opened his eyes. “Even before they left? You didn’t tell me then either, Jude, did you?”

He shook his head. “I’d already lost them, by then.” He shrugged. “At least that’s what it felt like.” When she didn’t interrupt, he continued, opening up a box crammed full of beliefs that he’d kept locked for so long. “I felt like I lost them as soon as I knew that I was….”

“Gay,” she said, her voice shaky. “When was that, exactly?”

“I don’t know.” He looked anywhere than at her, gaze catching on a painting of Marc’s family cottage. “Probably around the same time Marc’s family moved here.”

“He says you never liked him.”

“Marc? It wasn’t him that I didn’t like.” Although in hindsight the distance he kept at school probably told another story. “Some of the things the other kids said got to me. About make-up meaning he liked boys. It was stupid, but the idea of anyone saying the same about me scared the crap