Page 4 of Rust of Control

Jude was quiet again. Nate let him be. Out past the glass the long dark blocks ran by, and the one lit gas station, and the river off to the right put its cold smell into the heater air. Nate drove them through all of it and didn’t reach over. The wanting to was its own pressure, low and steady, worn so far into him it had stopped being news.

He drove them down toward the water.

The safehouse stood on the last street before the river, a wide brick former factory with a chain-link yard and an overhead light burning yellow into the cold. Nate had texted Marcus from the clubhouse lot, three words, bringing someone in, and the light was Marcus’s answer. He left it dark when the house was closed to strangers. He left it burning when a bed was already being made.

Nate parked in the gravel and didn’t reach for the door yet.

“This is where some of the crew lives,” he said. “Me, and a few others. I’ll tell you what’s inside before we walk in, so none of it comes as a surprise.” He kept his voice even, a man laying out a floor plan. “There’s a man named Marcus. He’ll be awake. He runs this house and he is the closest thing I have to a father. He will not ask you a single question tonight. Nobody in there will. You get a room with a door, and the door locks from your side.”

Jude looked at the house through the windshield. The light put a little warmth on his face and his face didn’t quite believe it.

“There’s people in there,” Jude said. It came out small.

“Asleep. Every one of them is someone I’d trust with you.” Nate made himself say the rest plainly, because it was the true reason and Jude had earned that much. “I could have taken you to my place. It’s quiet, it’s mine, there’s nobody in it. But there’s only one of me. Tonight I wanted you under a roof with a whole houseful of people who would put themselves between you and harm and not ask why first. That is what this house is for.”

Jude was quiet a moment. Then he nodded, the small worn-out nod of a man with nothing left to guard himself with.

The house met them warm.

The hall smelled of last night’s garlic and old woodsmoke. Boots stood paired along the baseboard, there were more coats than hooks. Jude stopped just inside the door. Nate let him stop, and let the house do the talking. It was better at this than he was.

Marcus stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug he wasn’t drinking from. He’d pulled a sweater on over whatever he slept in, and he didn’t have the look of a man just woken. He had the look of a man who’d put the light on and waited.

He took Jude in. Not a stare. Marcus had spent thirty years reading people from across a courtroom and he didn’t need to stare.

“You’ll be Jude,” he said. “Nate’s talked about you. I’m Marcus.”

Jude’s eyes went to Nate, just for a second, at Nate’s talked about you, and Nate kept his own face still and let it pass.

“Top of the stairs, second door on the left,” Marcus said. “There are clean sheets on the bed already. This house keeps two rooms ready at all times for exactly tonight. You don’t owe anyone here a story, you don’t owe rent, and you don’t owe a soul an explanation if you decide to leave. The bedroom door locks. The front door opens. Both of them answer to you and to nobody else while you are under this roof.”

Jude’s throat worked. For a moment Nate thought the kindness might undo Jude faster than Rand’s cruelty ever had, because Jude had a wall built against cruelty and nothing at all built to meet this.

“Okay,” Jude said, rough. “Thank you.”

“Take him up,” Marcus said to Nate, and it was gentle, and it was everything.

The second room on the left was small and plain and clean: a bed, a lamp, a chair, a window that gave onto the black moving shape of the river. Nate stood in the doorway while Jude set the messenger bag down on the chair like he wasn’t certain he was allowed to set it anywhere.

“I’m right through that wall,” Nate said. “Knock on it, or just say my name. I’ll be awake before you finish saying it. I don’t sleep much regardless.”

Jude looked at him from the middle of the little room. Under the smeared eyeliner his eyes were doing something Nate couldn’t afford to name, something that wanted to be hope and didn’t have the strength tonight to stand all the way up.

“You’re being so-” Jude stopped. Tried again. “I called you in the middle of the night.”

“You did.”

“And you came.”

“I’ll always come when you call,” Nate said, and heard the size of it land in the small room, and didn’t reach for anything lighter to set on top of it.

Jude’s mouth moved with no sound. He looked down at the bag on the chair.

Jude had nothing left to say tonight, and Nate didn’t make him find any.

He didn’t sleep, and hadn’t expected to.

He lay on his own bed on the other side of the wall from Jude, in his clothes, and listened to the house hold one more person than it had held that morning. Jude wasn’t loud. Jude was a held breath through the wall, the small shift of a body learning a strange bed, once the small sound of a phone screen woken and checked and dimmed again. Nate lay still and counted each sound and didn’t get up, because crossing that wall was Jude’s to ask for, and a rule was worth nothing if the man who set it broke it in the first hour.