AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I ignore him, gazing at the scribbles on the wall—the rambling poetry, the fake journal entries…it looks like my handwriting. Sort of. Almost.
Except the loops on the g’s and f’s aren’t quite right.
Just like when Jude used to forge my signature on the notes he’d write to excuse himself from school.
I let out a sigh that comes from the very bottom of my soul.
“You must think I’m so fucking stupid.”
Something in my tone tips him off that this time isn’t like the other times. The look of innocent confusion falls off Jude’s face with unsettling speed, replaced by an even more disturbing blankness.
The hanging lightbulb casts deep shadows around his eyes, so they resemble nothing more than holes in his bone-white face.
“Well…,” Jude says, “you weren’t supposed to come in here yet.”
Even his voice sounds different—lower, flatter, missing some softening element.
My scalp prickles and I want to take a step back, but I force myself to stay right where I am, to pretend like I’m in control of this situation.
“Where did you think I’d go?” I try to sound strong, confident. “Out to the woods to find whatever you buried?”
“Whatyouburied,” Jude murmurs.
My exposed skin goes clammy as a fish.
My brother’s expression contains none of what I would consider characteristically “Jude”—no mocking humor, no mischievousness, no affection. His face is as tight and smooth and featureless as a skull.
I lick my lips. “I haven’t buried anything.”
Jude gives the smallest of shrugs.
“It’s your boots covered in mud. And your fingerprints on the shovel.”
“And my ex-boyfriend under the dirt.”
Jude’s mouth curves into the ugliest of smiles. His hands are tucked in his pajama pockets as he blocks the one and only doorway out of the barn.
Coldly, he says, “I never liked Gideon.”
“He never liked you, either.”
It was one of the biggest conflicts in our relationship—Gideon never seemed to have anything nice to say about Jude, which really bothered me at the time. He was always pressuring me to make Jude get a job, stop giving him an allowance, crack down on him about his schoolwork, and tell him in no uncertain terms that Gideon and I were moving in together, that he was going to have to move into the dorms at college or get his own apartment…
Those were the conversations I was supposed to have with Jude once Gideon and I got engaged. But instead, right after Gideon put that ring on my finger, I started to notice the smell of perfume on his coat…and then I found the first bobby pin in his truck, on the floor mat of the passenger side, like it had been left there just for me…
“Gideon never cheated on me,” I say out loud. “The hair clips, the lipstick, the perfume…that was you.”
Jude smiles, and this smile is the most disturbing one yet because there’s so much pleasure in it.
“Baccarat Rouge…,” he says. “I’m sure you wondered.”
He crosses to the workbench and opens a drawer, pulling out a small glass bottle. He sprays the perfume in the air, instantly filling the barn with the hateful scent of jasmine. It mingles with the sweetly rotting smell of old blood. My stomach heaves, the chicken breast from dinner attempting another appearance.
I remember the hundred times I smelled that perfume on Gideon’s clothes, in his car, even on his sheets…
“Did you have his key?” I croak, my throat choked with suffocating sweetness.
“I had copies of all his keys. That wasn’t the hard part.” Jude frowns. “The hard part was how many timesI had to plant evidence on him before you’d actually break up with him. Fucking pathetic, Remi.”
