Page 16 of Rust of Control

Trip set down the crossword.

"How's the shoulder?" he said, not looking at Nate.

Nate's shoulder was fine. He had not mentioned his shoulder in three days. "Better," he said.

"Good," Trip said. He picked the crossword back up. Then, lighter, to the grid: "You remember I told you. Back when his name kept lighting up your phone and you kept turning it face-down. I said that one was going to be a problem for you." He filled in a word. "I didn't say it to be right."

"You're not wrong, either," Nate said, because there was no point lying to a man who had spent a career catching liars.

"No," Trip agreed. "I'm not."

When Nate glanced up, Trip's eyes were on the puzzle, pen moving, the small deliberate incuriosity of a man who had decided where to stop looking and meant to stay stopped.

He had not said anything, either. He had a cup of coffee he wasn't drinking, and he looked at Nate the way he looked at things he'd decided not to fix yet, a beat past long enough to mean something and gone before Nate could be sure it had.

Then he went down the hall, and Nate listened to his footsteps on the stairs.

Jude had gone back upstairs by the time Nate finished with the manifest, and Nate carried a plate up because it was dinnertime and someone had to.

He knocked. Waited. "Come in" was Jude's voice through the door, low and careful in the register the cracked ribs had given him.

The room was dim. Jude had the window cracked two inches at the top, the compromise Scarlet had allowed once the concussion passed: air but no direct light. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with a paperback open on his knee, Benny pressed against his thigh, and the light from the hall came in low across his face and lifted the green in his right eye. The left was still bruised, yellowing at the edges, the swelling mostly down. It looked like what it was.

Nate set the plate on the nightstand. He did not leave.

He wasn't sure when he'd stopped leaving. The knock had been a courtesy once. Now it was the toll he paid to get back into this room, the small honest price of the only forty minutes of his day he wanted, and he'd quit pretending the staying was about the soup.

"You don't have to stay up here," Jude said, and it wasn't a complaint, it was a door held open for Nate to leave through, the kind of out Jude gave everyone because Jude had spent his whole life sure he was a weight people were too polite to set down. Nate knew that out. He'd watched Jude offer it to waiters, to bandmates, to the man who'd put the bruise on his face. He had never once wanted to take it less than he did right now.

"I know," Nate said. He pulled the chair from the corner and sat in it anyway.

Jude looked at him for a second. Then he put the paperback face-down on the bed and reached for the plate.

Right hand. Careful.

They were quiet for a while. Downstairs someone had the game on, the sound muted to almost nothing, and the creak of the house settling was familiar by now, a vocabulary of wood and old pipe Nate had been learning for years. He knew which stair was louder. He knew the sound the radiator made when the building temperature dropped three degrees. He had not ever, until four days ago, known what this particular room looked like in the dark with the window cracked.

"The band played the Woodbridge Box last year," Jude said. He wasn't looking at Nate. He ate the way he did everything now, slow and a little braced, sitting up straight because lying back pulled the ribs, and Nate watched him manage it and wanted to take the plate and the pain and the whole careful effort of him into his own hands. "Before. Twice, I think."

Nate knew the Woodbridge Box. Small all-ages venue off the Lodge, cash door, the owner a guy who had twice filed noise complaints against himself to keep the city off his back. On the case manifest, one degree removed from the promoter name.

"Good show?" he said.

"The sound was bad," Jude said. He gave a half-shrug and stopped it, the ribs checking him. "But the room was full. I liked the room full." A pause. "We're supposed to play there again in six weeks. I don't know if that-" He stopped. "I don't know."

"You'll be past the ribs in six weeks," Nate said.

Jude looked at him then, the unhurt eye gone clear and dark in the low light, and there was something in it Nate wanted to name and wouldn't let himself, because naming what he saw in Jude's face was a way of touching it, and touching it was the one thing he wasn't allowed. He'd lived too many years inside that rule. He was so tired he could have wept from it.

"Yeah," Jude said. "Okay."

He went back to the plate. Nate looked at the window.

He was good at this. He had been good at this the way a man gets good at carrying a stone he's never allowed to set down. He'd watched Jude grow from the kid singing too big in his mother's church into this, and the whole time he'd kept the wanting in the same drawer he kept the dead: shut, labeled, never opened on bright days. The drawer had stayed shut because two men sat on the lid. Rand, who had Jude. And Easton, who was Jude's brother and Nate's oldest friend and the one person who had ever needed Nate clean, no want tangled in it, nothing for Nate to be ashamed of in the small hours. Nate had spent years not jeopardizing that. He had been so careful. He had been careful the way you're careful with a wound you've decided to keep.

The lid had gotten heavier lately.

He didn't know exactly when he'd understood that Jude was free of Rand. Logically, since the alley. In his body, sometime in the last four days. The difference was load-bearing, and he'd been trying not to let it be.