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I liked her sloth shaped coffee mug sharing space in our cabinet, the air freshener thing she’d plugged into the bathroom socket. Hell, she’d even hung up a shower curtain, worried, I guess, that someone might walk in on her and get an eyeful.
But did I want her to stay? We could get a shower curtain, and air fresheners. We could take turns setting the coffee pot to brew.
If she stayed, I had work to do. I would have to apologize, if not with words than at least with my actions. I would have to show her that I wanted her there, wanted her with me. With...us. I had no idea how to do this, no idea how not to be an asshole. What if I tried and she decided to leave?
Why would I want to take that risk?
My arms pumped at my sides and I ran faster. No. It would be better to maintain the status quo. Let her decide to leave, sooner rather than later.
At least this way, I’d be prepared, and ready. Ready to start the process of getting over her.
Chapter 22: Baron
“What are you doing?”
Later on Sunday, as I opened the outer door to the dorm and walked in, I bumped into Gale emerging from Jude’s room. I looked over his head as he started to shut the door. Was Jude back? Had he been in there with her?
His gaze flickered beyond me and he pulled the door firmly shut behind him. “Don’t worry about it.” He brushed by me and settled himself on the couch, picking up the remote.
“Is Jude in there?” I pressed. Gale’s lips thinned and he moved between channels, ignoring the question.
“No,” Ezra answered for him, coming out of his room and strolling to the kitchen to pull a beer from the refrigerator. His hair stuck up in spikes, telling me he’d been working on his formula. “She’s at work.”
“So, what were you doing in her room?” I didn’t know why I bothered. Gale and I were barely talking at the moment, because he wouldn’t stop fucking with Jude. He was single-minded in his need to get her to leave, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen him be quite such a jackass.
“I was looking for something,” he answered curtly.
“What—”
“Drop it, Baron.”
I gave up and stalked across the room to my bedroom. “Whatever you’re playing at, Gale… it’s going to backfire.” He didn’t reply and I left him, stewing.
I was getting so tired of all of this shit. He was right to think that Jude’s presence would change things between us, I thought, as I pulled my clothes off and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. What he failed to recognize was that there would have been no tension, no aggravation, no animosity—nothing—without his own actions and attitude. Gale was creating the problem he’d predicted.
The psych major in me wanted to know why. I hunted for a clean tee shirt while I puzzled it out. I thought I had been pretty accurate with my mention of his mother the other day, but then, he’d always had a tendency to self-sabotage when things were going well. Maybe subconsciously, he feared getting close to Jude and then having her leave, for all intents and purposes as his mother had done. Maybe there was a part of him that felt that’s what he deserved, and he was doing everything in his power to bring it to fruition.
I was sniffing at the pits on a shirt I’d pulled from my closet floor when I heard a sharp cry, followed by the sound of something crashing and yelling. I flew from my room to find Jude flat sprinting from her room, an expression of terror on her face. She was still in her work uniform, minus one shoe, and as I moved to head off her mad dash, her hands went to her hair and began frantically shaking it out. “Get them off, off, get it—” she chanted, oblivious to Ezra and Gale, whose smirk was rapidly fading from his face.
I pulled her to me and started sifting through her pale hair, looking for whatever it was she was freaking out about. “What is it, Pinky? What happened?” Her body, separated only by inches, was shaking. When my hands delved into her hair, she lowered her hands to clutch my chest, her fingers curling and releasing reflexively.
“S-spiders,” she said. “They’re everywhere!”
“What the hell?” I looked at Ezra and Gale over the top of her head. Gale’s smirk had faded to a troubled frown, and Ezra had linked his hands behind his head. “What is she talking about?” A tiny piece of something black fell from her hair, but otherwise her hair was clean, soft and thick under my fingers. I bent so I could see her face, cupping her cheeks briefly in my palms. “Look at me, Jude. You’re okay. There’s nothing there. I’m going to check you out, okay? Make sure there’s nothing anywhere else.”
Her breath was coming in choppy hiccups but she managed a nod. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see, maybe, if there were any spiders on her. Starting with her shoulders, I brushed at her clothes, ignoring the way my body instantly reacted to her near nakedness in the ridiculous Sugar Babes uniform. I made my touch as impersonal as I could, and noticed several more of the little black things falling to the floor. I remembered Ezra telling me a while back that he had ordered plastic bugs, but I hadn’t expected this. Although they didn’t move, these were remarkably realistic. Varying between a quarter and a half-inch in diameter, they looked real enough that they would scare the shit out of someone at a glance. Bending, I picked one up.
“Look here, Jude. They’re not real. Plastic. See?”
She opened her eyes, their blue the color of crushed gentians with her tears, and looked at the plastic arachnid in my hand. A shudder wracked her body and without a word she broke for the bathroom, escaping into its confines and slamming the door behind her.
“What. The. Fuck. Galen?” I took the three strides to reach him and flung the novelty at his face. “Why would you do something like that?”
“I didn’t… it wasn’t supposed to—” He broke off, picking up a half-full bottle of Gatorage and flinging it at the wall. “Fuck!”
“How did they even get all over her?” I stalked to Jude’s room and peered inside, and even knowing that the small black dots scattered all over the place in front of her closet were fake, I felt my stomach knot. I stepped inside and looked at the scene more closely. It looked like she had gone to her closet and started to pull something hanging from the upper bar. The spiders… hundreds of them... had been set up on top of the clothing so they would fall on her when she did so.
It was diabolical, especially for someone who had a fear of spiders. Turning, I surveyed the rest of the room, noticing small piles of others placed in strategic locations as I did. On her desk. The handle of a drawer. I flipped the covers back on her bed, and found hundreds more sitting starkly against a pale pink sheet. “Jesus.”
