Page 19 of Rust of Control

Jude turned back from the window. His eyes were wet and he let them be.

"Okay," he said. "Two weeks. But Nate." He had to push the next part out past everything that wanted to apologize for asking. "I don't want to wait for everything. There's- there are things we can do. While we wait."

The corner of Nate's mouth went up, slow, the real one, the one Jude had watched him keep in his pocket.

"There certainly are," Nate agreed.

Nate moved the mugs to the floor.

He did it without hurry, with the same unhurried sureness he brought to everything, and the lack of hurry was the most erotic thing Jude had ever watched a man do, because what he was used to was the opposite, used to being rushed and managed and his own wants read back to him wrong. Nate set the mugs down out of the way and came up onto the bed slow, careful of the bad side, his weight settling so the ribs didn't have to brace, one big hand bracketing Jude's jaw as it had the night before, and Jude tipped his face up into it and stopped, for once in his life, looking for the catch.

There was no catch. There was Nate's mouth, finding his again, gentler than anything had a right to be, and then less gentle as Jude pressed up into it, the want he'd kept folded small and shut away for so long spilling out all at once and filling him to the edges. He got a hand into Nate's shirt. He got the other into Nate's hair, which was short and soft at the back of his neck, and Nate made a low sound against Jude's mouth that Jude felt in his own sternum, and Jude understood with a wild private joy that he was allowed to be the one reaching. That nobody was going to laugh.

Nate's hand moved down his side, careful past the ribs, learning him, and Jude arched into it and hissed when the angle pulled the bad side and Nate stopped at once.

"Eye and the ribs," Nate said against his jaw, not pulling back, just slowing. "I'm not breaking Scarlet's rules in the first week. He'll know. He always knows."

Jude laughed. It came out shaky and amazed and entirely his own, the first laugh in longer than he could measure that had nothing performing underneath it. "He said don't sneeze," Jude said. "He didn't say don't-"

"He didn't," Nate agreed, and kissed the laugh out of him.

It went on a long time, longer than Jude had let himself believe he was allowed. Hands and mouths and the slow learning of each other, the want given air and the want held at the line they had drawn, and the line didn't feel like a brake. It felt like the opposite. It felt like the first thing in two years that was his to draw, drawn with a man who had asked before he crossed any of it and would ask again.

When they slowed, finally, both of them undone and neither of them past the line, Nate pressed his forehead to Jude's and stayed there, breathing, his thumb moving slowly on Jude's cheekbone over the patchy place where the glitter used to go.

"Two weeks," Nate said.

"Two weeks," Jude said.

He had waited forever to be wanted like this and a few weeks would not kill him. For the first time he could remember, the waiting wasn't a door held shut against him. It was a door left open, with the light on, and a man on the other side of it in no hurry at all, counting the same days Jude was counting.

Benny, displaced to the foot of the bed, sighed the sigh of the deeply inconvenienced.

Neither of them moved him.

Chapter 10

Rand started texting on the sixth day.

Nate knew before Jude told him, because Jude went quiet in a particular way that afternoon, the quiet of a man rationing himself, and because Jude set his phone face-down on the kitchen table and then could not stop looking at the back of it. Nate had watched Jude not-look at a phone before. He knew what that looked like.

"He found my number," Jude said. He did not pick the phone up. "I changed it. He still found it somehow. I guess one of our band mates must have given it to him, or he threatened it out of them."

"Can I see?"

Jude slid it across. Nate read them the way he read a manifest, standing at the counter with his coffee going cold, flat.

Then, an hour later:

Then, two hours after that, the register switched all the way over, the way Nate had been told it switched:

The same three moves Jude had described through a wall once. The plea, the jealousy, the threat dressed as devotion. Nate had read enough intercepts in six years to know coercion when it was written down. This was written down.

"You don't have to answer any of it," Nate said. He set the phone back down face-down, the way Jude had. "You don't owe him a read conformation."

"I know." Jude's hands were flat on the table. "I keep almost answering anyway. Just to make it stop. That's the part I can't-" He stopped. "He's very good at making it my job to make it stop."

"He's had practice," Nate said. "So have you. We're going to get you out of practice. Behavior becomes ingrained, especially with abuse like that. The trick is to create new response pathways. That takes time. But, now is as good a time to start as any, and some day… the new thought path will be the deeper one and you won’t even notice. It’s the same work everyone does when dismantling that kind of abuse. You’re not, and never have been, alone."