Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (18 page)

“You know what makes the cactus so great?” he asked, completely ignoring what I’d said.

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me, tent guy.”

He smiled a little, but not much. “A cactus can survive in some of the driest places on earth.” He looked at me again. His eyes may have been shadowed, but I could feel his gaze like the touch of his hand. “They can survive in drought. And not many … things … can.”

Once again, I felt he was pulling me into the truth he saw so plainly.

“When do you want me to start working on your website?” I asked, desperate to change the subject. I couldn’t very well charge off the roof as I’d done when I charged out of the front door of the apartment.

You couldn’t see it, but there was a definite shift in Jude from that. “Tomorrow?”

“Okay.” Because I didn’t know what else to say, I asked him a question this time. “Why do you know so much about mythology?” I lifted a shoulder.

Once again, silence fell over us like a sheet. I waited and as the beats of my heart thumped, I suspected that this would be a question he wouldn’t answer.

“When I was little—let’s say preschool to middle school—I spent a lot of time in bed.” His lips flattened out, and I could tell he was trying to figure out how to say this. “Books were my refuge. And so was the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel.” He kept talking, and I took that to mean that he didn’t want to talk about why he needed refuge. “On Mondays, the thrift store near our house had a sale on books. Mila went every Monday, gathered up an armful of books, and carried them home for me.”

“What kind of books?”

“All kinds. Nonfiction, mythology, crime fiction, cozy mysteries and even a bunch of romances.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Romance?”

He laughed, and it filled my chest. Instantly, an image of him in full smile lit up my brain. He had the kind of smile that called to you to return it with one of your own. He exuded warmth, and had this thing about him, like he was a home for someone who needed a place to rest.

And, damn. Damn, if I didn’t for even a second think maybe I saw him that way because that was what I needed.

“Bigfoot romance,” he said, interrupting me from my thoughts.

“Bigfoot romance?”

I watched his shadow shrug. “She thought she was funny.”

“Well, you do like the mountains.”

“And the seas.”

“And tents.”

“Ah,” he said warmly. “Yes. I love tents.” And the laughter in his voice was like a burst of heat in my chest.

Talking with Jude was easy, like there wasn’t expectation. I felt so guarded around most people. All it would take was a twist of my tongue for the truth to spill out.

“So what are you doing in Colorado?” And just like that, my guard came back up.

I shifted, felt the abrasive shingles scrape the back of my jeans. “I’m here for Colin,” I said, feeling like I’d already said this before.

“Why?”

My jaw ached with the stretch of opening my mouth to say the words I always said, like I was reciting a carefully constructed script.
Because he’s my boyfriend.

“I’m trying to make it work between us,” I said. “How many times are you going to ask me?”

“As long as it takes until you realize the truth, or until you tell me the truth.” My eyes were adjusting to the dark enough that I could begin to make out the edges and curves of his head. “Tell me about your parents.”

“Change of subject...”

“I’ve told you some about my life. I think it’s fair for you to tell me something about you.”

He was right. But he’d concealed some of the deeper parts. I too could skid past the surface and scoop up some truth. “My dad is a sperm donor. My mom is a bottom feeder. My grandfather can be credited for raising me.”

“Tell me about your mom.”

I thought for a minute, thinking of a story to tell Jude that would explain who my mother was better than me simply using adjectives would. “When I was in first grade, my snow pants ripped at the knees.” I moved my hands to my knees as I remembered the story. “They were old, something my grandparents had bought me the year before. My grandfather was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia and my mother had a new boyfriend living with her. I came home from school to a home that was dark because she didn’t have money to replace the light bulbs. She’d spent the money on a trip to the casino—gambling was her vice at the time.” I curled my fingers into my jeans, felt my nails slip between the worn threading. “And I showed her my snow pants.”

The house had been cold, I remembered that. My mother was bundled up in blankets on the couch, staring off into space at some talk show. I looked at Jude, and even though I couldn’t see him clearly, I knew he was looking at me. “I showed her my snow pants and she ignored me, telling me about the boyfriend who had stolen her money and how sorry I should feel for her, for hooking up with another loser. I showed her the snow pants again and she asked me if I thought she was fat.” I looked down, because even though I couldn’t see Jude well, I felt like he could see me all too clearly. “I asked her three times. She finally relented to at least look at them and said she’d fix them and have them ready in the morning.” I scooted, needing to move some of the nervous energy I was feeling talking about my mother.

“The next morning, my snow pants were folded up on the coffee table. I can’t tell you what that felt like.” My breath hitched as I remembered how it felt, to see that she’d followed through. “I picked them up and put them in my backpack. Hours later at recess, I pulled out my pants to put them on and saw the shiny duct tape over the knees. And along one leg was cigarette burns.” My stomach hurt, remembering the shame that had filled me along with the indecision. Should I wear the snow pants and suffer embarrassment or should I skip recess? “The school had a rule about wearing snow pants outside when the weather dipped below 10 degrees. And so I sat out that day, and every day the rest of the winter.”

Jude was quiet. I wanted to scrub at my skin, to remove some of the embarrassment of that moment. I had never told anyone, not even Ellie.

“Cigarette burns?”

“My mom is chain smoker and a drunk. She probably shook so hard while applying duct tape that she dropped her cigarette and forgot about it long enough for it to burn.” It made sense—my mother had a track record for forgetting her own daughter long after school got out.

“That’s stuck with you.”

I nodded, not sure if he could even see the movement. “Defining moments like that always do.”

“How was that defining for you?”

“I realized that my mother didn’t really care about me; whether I’d be embarrassed or not wasn’t her concern.”

“You were in first grade. Six or seven?”

“Six.”

We were silent then. I had dug my nails so hard into the knees of my jeans that I could feel the imprint in my skin underneath the fabric. “Tell me something, Jude.”

“What?”

“Anything.”
Just help me not feel so alone.

“Do you know why I love the mountains so much?”

“No.”

“Life is temporary. The world is not.”

I was silent as I thought about it. I knew just how temporary life could be, but because I wasn’t as well traveled as Jude was, I didn’t know a whole lot about the world. “Life really is temporary.”

I felt him nod beside me. “Yes, it is. And there’s something comforting knowing that each time I climb the mountain, I’m a little bit lighter. Hard to harbor any stress when you’re on top of the world, seeing that view.”

I thought of Colin’s quote on his Facebook photo, about climbing mountains so the world could see him. And I was sure I asked to only confuse me even more, but the words tumbled from my mouth anyway.

“Why do you climb mountains, Jude? Is it so the world can see what you’ve done?”

He was silent for a minute and I began to realize that in his silences, he was thinking, feeling what I said. Jude wasn’t one to give me an answer if it didn’t mean something to him.

“I climb mountains so that I can see the world. The world doesn’t care what I’ve done.”

I waited a beat, as I always did when Jude said something quietly profound. And then I spoke what had been weighing on me. “So, Yellowstone.”

“Yellowstone,” Jude repeated. “Let’s go.”

I sighed. “Why?”

“Because it’s there. Because you’ve never been. Because maybe you need a break. Because you can. Because it’s Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, a wilderness with canyons that will steal your breath and animals that will eat you if you get too close.”

I’d fallen under a spell when he spoke, but was quickly removed from it. “Well, you were really selling me on it until that last part.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let you get eaten.”

I leaned my head on my shoulder, feeling like I could do this—I could go to Yellowstone with Jude and just enjoy myself. See some of the beauty that Jude was so enthralled by.

“You once told me you wrestled bears.”

“I’ll wrestle all of the bears,” he promised, and I saw the curve of his lips in the moonlight. “And you can finally say you visited a supervolcano.” He held up a finger. “Even more impressive, it’s the only active supervolcano located beneath land.”

“A volcano? Jude, it sounds like you’re talking me out of it.”

“Listen, the caldera has erupted three times in the last two million years. It’s safe—depending on who you ask…” when he saw me shift uncomfortably, he continued on. “There are all kinds of wildlife and canyons and the lake. It’s beautiful. And the hike up Mount Washburn is the best, in my humble opinion—you can see everything. The Yellowstone Grand Canyon, the Sugarloaf mountains...”

“How long is this hike?”

“Six-ish miles. In and out, same day. We’ll go up early so we can take our time and be back well before the sun starts to set.”

The idea of a hike with Jude didn’t worry me, knowing how capable he was. And what little views I’d been afforded to on the hike with Colin and his friends, I knew a hike in Yellowstone would be far more majestic. I found myself agreeing easily. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I saw a flash a white with Jude’s smile and found myself returning his smile.

Quiet settled over us, until all I heard were the flutters of birds and the chirp of crickets and the beat of my heart, hammering against my chest like it was finally calm for the first time that day.

T
he next week
passed slowly at first, with me doing the tasks Jude had assigned me and sort-of-kind-of avoiding Colin when possible. There was a movement within me, but I couldn’t tell where it was going.

Until the day Colin walked around the couch and closed the laptop in my face. “Let’s go on a date,” he said, completely disregarding the sour look I must have worn, knowing he’d closed my computer with lots of work unsaved.

“I’m trying to get some work done before I go to Yellowstone.” I flipped the lid of my laptop back up and avoided his hands when I did it.

“You have two days.”

“I leave the day after tomorrow,” I replied, typing on the keys to wake it back up.

“Yeah, two days.” He plopped beside me, causing my papers to scramble in a mess that already began a headache at the back of my skull.

I wavered between giving him acid words and continuing to work over acquiescing to his idea. The latter won out, mostly because I’d resolved to try. Even if that meant I was trying my patience in the process.

“Okay, Colin.” I clicked save and hoped that the interruption hadn’t caused me to lose my work. “Where are we going?”

“The movies?” Instantly, I felt relief. It was getting easier to feel that, when Colin made a suggestion that meant we’d have to talk very little. I may have become accustomed to telling him lies, but that didn’t mean I felt good about it.

“Okay. Which movie?”

“I was thinking about our first date. How about you pick?”

Hope was a tangible thing, blooming in my chest. Hope was a small opening, waiting to be filled with promise, in my chest. “Really?”

He frowned a little, giving him that model-esque pout that used to slay me. “You wound me, Trista. Don’t act so surprised that I want you to pick.”

I cleared my features of the soft surprise. “Alright.” I pulled up a website for show times and rattled off the names of a few movies. Not a single one was the romantic comedy I’d hope to spring upon him, just to get a reaction. Colin settled on one, a sci-fi set in the late 1970s and after I changed into jeans, we left the apartment.

Colin pulled the top off the Jeep, the sun was so warm that it had heated the seats to an almost-painful warmth. I lifted my legs a few times, separating my skin from the upholstery to give them relief.

“The last time we went to the movies was with Ellie,” I said, interrupting the silence that was pressing into me.

He didn’t reply to that—just stayed quiet, flipping on the turn signal and moving down the next street as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Do you remember what the movie was? Something youngish…” my voice trailed off as I squinted into space, trying to remember what I’d seen with Colin and Ellie so long ago. “Oh,” I said, remembering. “Harry Potter. The fifth one.” I leaned back against the seat. “We went to the dollar theater. It was so packed that we couldn’t get seats together, remember? Ellie was going to sit in the aisle just so she wasn’t forced to sit next to a stranger.” I laughed, remembering the usher telling her it was against fire code.

Colin remained silent and I wasn’t sure if he remembered. His memory seemed to be lacking in a big way. “Remember? You finally agreed to sit next to the stranger so Ellie and I could sit together.”

“Does everything have to be about Ellie? Haven’t you moved on yet?”

The words struck me harder than his fist would have. I felt it in my gut, the clench of my throat as I reacted. “How can you say that?”

“It’s been three fucking years, Trista. Three.” He glanced over, three fingers up in the air. “And you’re still talking about her like it was yesterday. Why can’t you let it go? Let her go?”

I felt the unfurling of grief in my belly. It’d held still for the last couple weeks, because I was never without it—but now it was uncoiling, taking up space like it always did—reminding me that I was full of everything. “Why is it so easy for you to let her go?”
To let me go?
I added silently.

“Grief is a deadweight and it’ll drown you faster than anything else.”

His words struck me again. Because if anything was pulling me under, it was my apathy for Colin.

“Ellie isn’t deadweight. She was my best friend.”

“And she’s dead.”

Colin had never spoken so bluntly to me, so harsh. And even though what he said wasn’t news to me, it still hurt to hear him brush her aside so effortlessly.

“You’re right she is. She’s been dead for three years. And you’ve been absent for even longer.” I turned and faced out the window, hoping he’d say nothing else to me. I wanted that silence again, because the alternative had only rendered me tender to Colin. He’d have hurt me less if he’d said he didn’t love me.

Colin drove us to a small town style theater, only two screens. I followed him quietly, grateful he wasn’t making small talk, up to the window. We paid for our own tickets and he paid for our snacks and then he led me to the theater to our right. And the entire time, we didn’t say a single word to one another.

When the lights dimmed and his hand brushed mine reaching into the popcorn container, I waited for him to say something or do something. But he pulled back, politely allowing me to grab a handful of popcorn and waited until my hand was clear for him to go back in.

Something so small shouldn’t feel so significant, but it did. He hadn’t smiled at me in response or even kept his hand comfortably beside mine. He’d retracted. As much as I had, at least emotionally, from him.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that his bathroom break stretched longer than the five minutes I expected. But when it stretched to ten, and then fifteen, I wondered where he’d gone.

And when I’d endured the entire movie, to the credits, completely alone, I was no longer surprised; I was angry.

I left the theater and paced the concession and looked out the front of the building for any sign of him. When I came up empty, I called him.

His phone went straight to voicemail.

My anger was palpable. I could taste it, the acid bubbling in my throat as I ground my teeth together and searched for him. After several minutes searching, I nearly gave up and plopped to a bench before an employee approached, ushering me out. There was no reason for me to stick around, since it was long after all the other patrons had left and close to closing time for the theater.

Once I was politely escorted out to the sidewalk, I spotted Colin’s Jeep in the same spot he’d parked it. But still, the man himself was nowhere to be found.

Giving up, I pulled up my phone and fired off a text to Mila.

Her reply came only seconds later.

“No,” I groaned aloud. The last thing I needed was to be around Jude when I was feeling like my boyfriend was really as oblivious as I’d expected he was.

But minutes later, Jude rode up in a small white car.

“I thought you didn’t have a car?” I asked, desperate for him not to see how embarrassed I was at being left alone.

“This,” he said, tapping the hood, “is Betsy, Mila’s car.” He shut the driver’s door and came around. “You okay?”

I didn’t want to tell him just yet what had happened, so I merely nodded and accepted the seat he offered when he opened the passenger side door.

As Jude rounded the car, I tried to rack my brain over the places Colin could have gone. Whenever I’d gone to the movies with him and Ellie, it had been common for him to disappear from time to time, but I’d been with Ellie. Not alone, holding his drinks and jacket and popcorn.

“What an asshole,” I said, the anger finally too much for me to hold in.

“What happened?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. He left halfway through the movie for what I assumed was a bathroom break but then never came back.” Jude zipped out of the parking lot and I afforded one glance back toward Colin’s Jeep.

“Hm,” was all Jude said.

Thankfully, we were back at the apartment minutes later, but Colin was not. I paced the kitchen, my flip flops making an unending clacking sound.

I opened my laptop, pulled up his Facebook and tapped my finger impatiently as the page loaded. Colin documented so much of his life online that it was how I knew what he was doing. That was true for when I lived in Wyoming and when I’d moved in with him.

Jude grabbed a root beer from the fridge and waited behind me.

When Colin’s page loaded, there was a photo of him and two other girls, his arms around them and a beer in each hand. The image was so shocking that I thought it had to have been from earlier—another party or something. But he was wearing the shirt he’d been wearing on our date and he’d been tagged in it with a location of a bar I’d seen near the theater.

My blood boiled close to the surface. He’d ditched me, on a date he’d wanted, to go to a bar and hang with other people. It wasn’t even a jealousy thing—because I wasn’t the least bit jealous of the flirty intentions seen in the photo. It was the fact that I’d been forgotten. Again. By the one person who wasn’t supposed to forget about me.

I slammed the lid of my laptop closed and picked it up, my arms tense. I pushed from the table, enough to the shake the glass bottles of salt and pepper that clinked next to one another.

I’d known for a while that Colin and I were in the twilight of our relationship; chasing the dusk of us with a slow gait. But until that moment, I hadn’t been fully ready to quit it all.

“What are you thinking?” Jude asked from behind me.

“I’m thinking that it was stupid to come to Colorado. That it was stupid to drag this out years past its expiration date.” I stood and pushed my chair in harder than I’d intended, and then gripped the top of the chair’s back. My nails pushed into the fabric, the tips bent from pressure.

“What can I do?”

I closed my eyes, not ready to turn around and look at him.

“Tell me what to do.”

“I can’t do that.”

I knew he couldn’t, wouldn’t. And it both burned and cooled me.

“But I can talk with you. Or listen to you.”

I let the air pour from my nose. “I don’t want to talk.”

“I will then.” His hands touched my shoulders and it was as if he’d pressed a warm compress to my skin with how instantly I reacted. “Let’s sit on the couch.”

I looked at the couch, out the corner of my eye. “Let’s go to the roof.”

* * *

D
espite his weakened arm
, Jude had less trouble climbing up onto the roof than I did.

Once I’d plopped beside him on the warm shingles, I felt like I could finally breathe, exhale the anger and disgust with myself and suck in the air that blew off the mountains. It was a baptism of sorts, the air cleansing me of my grief.

“When I was twelve,” Jude began, his voice that constant warmth that I seemed to crave more and more lately, “I was trying to impress this girl. She was in the same gym class as me, a year ahead, but we’d been lumped in one large class thanks to district-wide budget cuts.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. “What was her name?”

“Melody. She had these eyes.” His gaze was on me but I faced forward, sucking in the air and feeling the anger slowly slip away from me. “Her face was strikingly narrow. Cheekbones and chin angled sharply, supporting the saddest blue eyes I’d ever seen.”

Pulling my knees tighter to my chest, I remembered Jude had described me the same way.

“She had a volume of poetry in her eyes. A hundred stories to tell, but she was so quiet—silent, really. She kept to herself and kept her struggles close. When I saw her, I felt this compelling tug. Like I was called to her for some reason.” I felt him shrug beside me, because I watched him from my periphery. But I didn’t turn my head or allow him to see my face as he told me about Melody.

“Anyway, I tried to impress her—like I said. We were all paired up to play softball and she and I were on opposing teams. When it was my chance to pitch to her, I fucked it up. I nearly hit her. Because I was so distracted by her, she told me to get off the field.”

My lips curved, but I didn’t give way to the smile. “She sounds like a smart girl.”

“And she was.” Jude shifted so that he was laying on his back and when he didn’t continue, I joined him, but still didn’t look at him. I just lay beside him on the roof, in silence.

“What happened?”

“Well,” he said with a sigh. “When it was my turn to hit, I knocked the ball completely out of the field and she said, ‘So you can’t pitch, but you can hit?’ before she gave me a smile that sealed our fate. I was only twelve, still a boy of course, but I fell in love with her stormy eyes and her pointy chin.”

I felt a pang of jealousy in listening to this story about Melody who’d stolen Jude’s heart with a single smile. But I remained silent, waiting for him to continue.

“When I was thirteen, I told her I loved her. We were sitting on her front porch swing, listening to it creak back and forth with each kick of our feet in the air. She was going to the high school and I still had one year left in middle school. But for some inexplicable reason, I felt like I needed her. And on our first day of school the following year, she kissed me on the corner between our two schools and said goodbye and the goodbye became the beginning of something permanent. The next day she forgot to kiss me and the following week, I found her on her front porch swing, smiling at another boy—an older boy—a boy whose hands didn’t tremble as mine had when I’d held her. A boy with an easy smile and a confidence I didn’t have.”