I laughed. "Well, that's the closest you'll probably ever get to wetness, anyway."
He snorted. "Right."
Jude and I went into my bedroom and sat down on the bed.
"When will Jason be back from work?" he asked.
"A little after eight," I said.
It was six o'clock then.
"I'll stay here with you until he comes back," said Jude. "You shouldn't be alone right now."
"Thanks," I said. "You're a good friend, Jude."
Sensing I'd had enough of talking about what had happened, Jude breezily changed the subject to something ridiculous. For over an hour, he and I critiqued Britney Spears' latest video, which Jude thought was "tasteless."
He sighed dramatically. "I used to love her so much," he said, "but I don't know what's happened to her lately. She's just betrayed her roots."
Since I'd never liked Britney Spears at all, not even when I was a kid, I found this hilarious, and we spent another fifteen minutes debating whether Britney had any actual roots to betray. I didn't think she did. She was a product of marketing and record companies. She didn't have anything personal to say.
By this time, Jude and I were laying on my bed. I lay flat on my back and Jude lay on his side, propped up on his elbow.
He looked shocked. "What about when she did 'My Prerogative'? That was personal."
"That was a cover!" I said.
"Still, she made it her own," said Jude, shaking his head solemnly.
I threw a pillow at him.
He caught it, laughing, and checked the clock. "It's almost eight," he said. "Jason will be back soon."
"Good," I said.
"He's going to be pretty pissed off at Mr. Sutherland, isn't he?"
Oh. Yeah. He was. I hadn't thought about that before. I nodded. I thought about what Hallam had said the night before about Jason becoming more and more violent. I looked up at Jude.
His eyes were dark and large like Jason's, but they didn't have the intense luminosity of Jason's. In Jason's eyes, there were depths. Layers and layers of pain and anger. Jude just looked kind. Safe. Happy. I wondered if Jason's eyes would look like Jude's if nothing had ever happened to him.
"Jude?" I said.
"Yeah?"
"You remember this morning when you asked me if Jason ever scared me, and I said he didn't?"
"Yeah."
"I lied. Sometimes he does scare me."
Jude was quiet. He just looked down at me, his expression concerned.
"Not because I'm afraid he'll hurt me," I said. "He'd never hurt me. But other people . . . He just gets so, so mad. That guy at the party he beat up is just one guy. There have been others."
Jude nodded, still not speaking.
"You asked me if I'd forgive him if he murdered someone," I said. "I know Jason, and if something bad happened to me, he would. He'd kill someone." He has, I thought, but I didn't say that out loud.
"Azazel—" started Jude.
But at moment, the door to the apartment burst open, and I heard Jason hurrying back the hall to my bedroom. "Azazel, where are you?" he called. "I called your phone three times—"
He broke off as he entered my bedroom. He looked at me and Jude, lying together on my bed. I watched emotions flit across Jason's face. Disbelief. Hurt. Anger. And then he put his hands in the air and backed out of the room.
Jude shot me a look. "Um," he whispered. "He knows I'm gay, right?"
"He knows," I said.
Jude nodded. "All the same, I think I'm gonna go." He got up and walked out of my bedroom.
"Be careful," I called after him.
"I will," he called back. "Hi, Jason," he said as he walked through the hall. Jason didn't respond. "Oh," came Jude's voice, echoing through the house, "you must be Lilith. Nice to meet you."
"Hi," she said. "You're Jude?"
"Yeah. I'm actually on my way out."
"Too bad," said Lilith.
And then the apartment door opened and closed.
I got up and went to my door. "Jason, come in here. I need to tell you something."
His face was stone, but the rest of his body was twitching. His hands were clenched. His jaw was set.
"Jason, come on," I said. "This is a big deal."
He shook his head. "No," he said. "I don't want to hear it."
"You don't even know what it is," I said.
"I know what it is," he said.
"No, you don't."
He wouldn't look at me. "I worried," he said, "I always worried, because I knew that you kissed me while you were still dating Toby. But I told myself that didn't matter. I told myself that what we had was different than that. I told myself—"