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“Uh… thanks for your permission?” Lips pursed, she pulled her arm free and brushed past me.Shit. That didn’t come out exactly right.
“Wait…” Shoulders dropping, she turned around, arms crossed over her chest. I gestured into my study room. “Come sit. Let me try to pull my foot out of my mouth.” After a squinty-eyed moment of consideration, she conceded and followed me into the small room. I pulled a chair out for her and then sat in the one opposite. Books and print-outs were scattered across the table, along with a candy bar wrapper, a bottle of water, and my laptop.
“You really were in here working, weren’t you?” Jude mused, setting her book and a massive handbag down on the table.
“Did you think I had made it up? Who’s Lens?” I was pretty sure that was the name I’d heard.
“Eleanor. My younger sister.” She paused, looked up at me. “She goes to high school a couple hours away from here.”
"Oh, yeah? How old is she?”
“She’s fifteen. She’s struggling a little bit… with some family stuff.” Her tongue darted out and licked the corner of her mouth. “That’s what you heard me dealing with a few minutes ago.”
I had a feeling if I asked outright Jude would not tell me the first thing about her family. I also had a feeling that it was her family who was responsible for the shadows I saw sometimes beneath her eyes. I wanted to know about them; I wanted to know everything there was to know about Jude Tiernay.
So I told her about my own family, instead. “Did you know that my parents adopted Gale when we were seventeen years old?”
Her lips parted. “Really?”
“Really. It’s not my story to tell, but suffice to say he had a pretty rough childhood. His mother died when he was fifteen, and after he was placed in a foster situation that wasn’t really working out, my parents ended up adopting him.”
“My God. I had no idea.” She sat back in her seat, a shocked expression on her face.
“It’s not something we share with a lot of people. Like I said, it’s Galen’s story to tell, not mine.” I tugged at my ear. “But I wanted to tell you, because it seems like you carry a lot of the responsibility for caring for your sister.” She merely looked at me, face impassive. “I guess I just wanted you to know that I see you.”
We didn’t say anything for a stretch of seconds that felt like hours. I felt like she was assessing my words, stripping them beyond surface meanings to ascertain the sincerity beneath. Finally she gave a brief nod, as if to herself, and turned her hands palms up on the table. When she spoke, she studied her hands rather than me.
“Thank you. I do appreciate it, Baron. I haven’t had anyone to talk to in a while.” She laughed, but it was a bitter, broken sound. “Truth is, my family is fucked up. My dad’s in prison. Mom left. The uncle that’s fostering Eleanor is...” Her voice shook. “...he’s scum. Jesus, I sound like a country song.”
My mouth crooked up. “Pa’s in prison, Ma’s run off, and the baby’s gonna starve to death?”
“Something like that.”
“And how does Chandler fit into all of this?”
She closed her eyes. “It’s my ticket to the end game. I was at Columbia, about to start my last year when all this happened. When the state sent Eleanor to live with our uncle, I knew I had to be as close as possible. Chandler is it. The only school within a two hundred mile radius that offers a comparable classics major.”
“So you’re here so you can stay reasonably close to your sister—”
“And work a job, and graduate, and try to fix up this house so it’ll be ready for May when Eleanor moves in...” The hands on the table clenched into fists.
“It sounds like a lot.” The pieces were starting to sort themselves neatly into a grim puzzle.
“It is,” she agreed. “And it’s why I’m really not interested in a relationship right now, although I appreciate you not being upset when you caught Ezra and I… kissing.”
I snickered and she blushed. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” I laughed harder when she crumpled a piece of paper and threw it at me. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Anyway… I assume this all has something to do with the dorm?”
Her face tightened infinitesimally. “Maybe.”
“You can trust me, Pinky.”
Her fists tightened, then deliberately unclenched and spread flat on the table. “I want to.” The words were a whisper, accompanied by the slide of her chair as she stood. “The last man I trusted fucked me over, though.” She slung her bag over her shoulder. “Thanks for the chat, Baron.”
“Anytime. Jude?” She was already at the door, but turned and waited. “There’s this field party thing on Halloween. Band, beer… all the usual stuff. You wanna go with?”
“With you?”
Yes.“We’re all going. So not really a date. Not unless you want it to be, which you just said you didn’t—”
