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I lifted my wine to my lips in reply. If Jude wanted to talk, he’d come to the wrong person.
He sat down next to me, his bare feet dangling in the pool. There was a foot between us, but it could have been a mile.
“Do you think we could have stopped him?” he asked, taking me by surprise. I’d expected him to want to talk about us, and I had no interest in that. But Ben? I could talk about Ben all night.
“We can’t know. I’ve examined my actions and inactions from every angle over the past three years. I’ve tried to make sense and find a place to lay blame, but there isn’t one. I think...I wish I had done so many things differently, but I’m not sure the outcome would have been any different.”
Darkness began to shroud us. The lights from the pool cast an eerie, otherworldly glow over Jude’s features, and I was assuming mine as well. His eyes darted around my face restlessly, consuming what he could of me.
“You still sound like a damn scientist. Do you not feel this? Don’t you fucking lay awake with aches and memories?” he asked, almost desperate.
“Of course I do.” I blinked at him. He had truly lost his mind if he thought he was the sole proprietor of this island of grief. “But I don’t owe you my feelings. I didn’t come here for you. In fact, I came here because Aviva promised neither you nor Claudia would be here. But then, I should have expected a broken promise when it came to you.”
I poured another drink, the wine sloshing around the sides of the glass I’d filled to an obscene level.
He sighed, his head falling into his hands. “I thought we could talk. I really did.”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Jude. I don’t even want to remember your name.”
That wasn’t true, but I’d had enough wine and my insides had been scraped so raw, I couldn’t avoid lashing out. I hadn’t been able to when he’d made a mess of our lives, nor when he married the girl I’d once found him in bed with.
Funny thing was, it didn’t make me feel any better.
“I deserve whatever you want to throw at me.”
I turned to him and really took him in. How thin he was. How he’d cut his hair so it spiked in the front. The sharpness of his cheekbones. The blood vessels in his eyes. He was my Jude, but not. Still painfully beautiful, but there was a brutality to his beauty now. It didn’t just hurt to look at him. No, it was dangerous, too. Looking at him for too long would drag me down into a pit of spiny rocks and despair.
“You do, but I don’t have the energy or will to give you my anger. You know exactly what I would say. I’m sure you’ve said those things to yourself a thousand times. It doesn’t change anything.”
He nodded, eyes downcast. He reached out, brushing his pinky against mine.
“My marriage was based on alcohol and grief. It lasted exactly ninety-two days, but it never should have happened. When I woke up the next morning with a ring on my finger, all I could think about was you reading about it.”
My chest constricted with the memory of the day I’d finally decided to let him go and move on. I’d let him go, but his claws still clung to my flesh.
“Did you fuck her?” I asked.
He raised his head, eyebrows pinched. “Wha…?”
“You’re telling me it was a massive mistake, yet it lasted three months. You didn’t have it annulled the second you woke up in a panic, so you must’ve been fucking her if you tried to make things work, right? How long did you wait to fuck Claudia after we broke up? Since you brought the subject up, I’d really like to know.”
His finger hooked with mine. “Stripes…”
I pushed his hand away. “Not long, huh?”
He stayed quiet, but had the decency to appear contrite.
“Fuck you, Jude,” I whispered.
“I don’t know what to say. It wasn’t like that. We barely—”
I shook my head. “This is why I didn’t want to talk. We have nothing to say to each other. There’s only pain here. The rest might as well have been buried with Ben.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said firmly.
I turned to him with narrowed eyes. “Let’s say I was up for forgiveness, then what? Should we be friends? Get back together? Fuck buddies?”
He winced. “Tali, come on…”
