“Gabby!” Jude shouts from outside the bedroom. I don’t answer and hear him at the door pounding. “Gabby!”
I want to go home. But I’m over six hundred miles away from home. My only way home is in a plane flown by Jude. I’m trapped. And what felt like a sliver of heaven just thirty minutes ago now seems like my personal hell that I can’t escape.
“Gabby!” Then I hear the crashing of the bedroom door. Holy shit, he broke the door open. Before I could process Jude busting through the bedroom he’s standing with the shower door open looking at me.
His voice is low. “Get out, Gabby.”
“Leave me alone,” I plead, not caring a bit that I’m standing here naked in front of him. “Please, just leave.”
“Gabby, let me explain. Let me talk to you.”
I remotely realize he has a cut lip and his t-shirt is ripped at the neck. I can’t concentrate on the result of his scuffle because the tears start flowing again and I bring my hands up to my hair. “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to be by myself. Just go … I don’t know, go somewhere.”
“Sugar, I’m not going anywhere. Get out of the shower. Now.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, Jude. Not anymore. Leave me alone!” I shout.
With that he reaches in and flips the shower off. Grabbing a towel off the rack, he steps into the shower with me and wraps me up and starts drying me off. I struggle against him, push him away but he’s just too big and he wraps me up with my arms pinned inside the towel. And damn it all to hell, my tears won’t stop. Resigned, I realize that there’s nothing I can do to stop him. Mostly dried, he wraps the towel around me and leaves the shower for a nanosecond, coming back with a big flannel plaid shirt. Ripping the towel off me he slips it up my arms and buttons a couple buttons. Putting an arm behind my back and before I realize what’s happening, I am up and he is walking out of the shower carrying me to the bedroom.
“Jude. Put me down!”
Using his soft raspy voice through my wet hair, he says, “Stop it, Gabby, you’re gonna get cold.” He puts a knee to the bed, deposits me with my back to the pillows, covering me up tight even though my hair’s dripping. Not foreseeing his next move, I pull my knees to my chest and scoot back as far as I can away from him with the covers tucked tight, but he proceeds to sit close in front of me, straddling me with his legs bent, essentially boxing me in.
Shit and damn.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone? You can’t just carry me around putting me where you want me.”
“I’m not leaving you alone. If I have to tie you down, you’re gonna listen to what I have to say.”
Starting to feel my ire once again at the thought of him tying me down to listen to him, I say, “Fine. Let me have it, Jude. This can’t get any worse, can it? I mean, I’ve learned a lot tonight. I must be really good, huh? Not only am I one of many in a long line of pussy, but I must be good enough for you to keep around for a while. Well, good for me,” I bite out, breathing hard. I’m so pissed, my tears have even dried up.
“Gabrielle,” Jude growls with a warning. “You know that’s not that way it is between us. You know.”
“I thought I knew, Jude. I thought I knew a lot of things. But maybe you should tell me. Tell me all about your past now that someone else has let it out of the bag. But when you’re done, I’d like to know why you’ve kept things from me, important things. Like the most important things, Jude. You know everything there is to know about me. Everything. Why do I not know that you had a wife?”
“And two children.”
I again hear my breath being pulled in and I push back into the pillows as far as I can. “What?”
There’s something working in Jude’s eyes, something between pain and anguish. “I was married, Gabby. It seems like a lifetime ago. We met in high school, Julia was Conner’s younger sister. Conner, Mike and I were tight and Julia and I started dating when I was a senior and she was a sophomore.” He takes a breath. This is obviously hard for him to talk about.
“Jude, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m sorry,” I whisper, now feeling bad for being a demanding bitch. I, of all people, know how it feels to have to dredge up the past, reliving a nightmare.
“No, Gabby. You need to know, I shouldn’t have waited so long,” he says, pulling in another breath. “We were young, but we knew what we wanted and had a plan. I went to the Academy, she got in a couple years of college and I married her as soon as I could, the week after I graduated. I was twenty-two and she was just twenty. Her parents weren’t happy about her marrying so young, but back then we felt like we’d waited a lifetime and they knew they couldn’t stop us. I was assigned to the base in San Antonio, continued my flight training, we lived on base and she took classes while working part time. We had nothing but felt like we had everything.”
The sadness in his eyes seeped into his face. Sitting so close, Jude boxing me in with his hands at my waist, I’ve never seen that look on his face before and it tore through me. I can tell this is hard for him, but he continues. “We were happy, so it didn’t matter what we had. Julia wanted to start having babies right away, but I held her off. I wasn’t blind to the fact that we were young and I wanted her to be able to finish college so she wouldn’t regret it later. I held her off for two years, enough for her to get a degree then we started trying. It took a couple months, her period was always irregular, but she was over the moon and I never saw her as happy as the day she told me she was carrying my baby.”
The tears are streaming down my face again, knowing that however Jude’s story turns out it is going to be tragic. He brought his hands up to my face, his thumbs swiping my tears, but they just kept coming.
His fingers tensed in my hair and continued in his quiet raspy voice. “We had about five weeks of happy. I was away on a two-day training mission and by the beginning of the second day, I couldn’t get ahold of her which was unusual. She was teaching at the time, but she never went more than an hour or two without calling me back. I finally had a friend on base go to check on her.” Jude pulled in another gulp of air. Letting it out he finished on a whisper, “They found her in our bathroom, so much blood and she’d been dead for hours. I wasn’t there, Gabby. She was by herself and she couldn’t get help.”
My chest rises violently with my breathing my heart beats wildly while Jude is still holding my head in his big hands. It is all so overwhelming but I had to ask, “Miscarriage?”
He shakes his head. “Not a normal miscarriage. The autopsy showed she had an ectopic pregnancy. She was farther along than we thought because her periods were irregular, the embryo had split giving us twins and they were planted in one of her fallopian tubes. It was rare, but with her being farther along than we thought and two babies growing inside of her, they didn’t catch it early like they normally do. It caused her tube to burst. She was by herself and probably in so much pain she couldn’t even get to a phone to call for help. She bled out and died in our fucking bathroom, alone, with my babies inside of her. I lost all three of them in one day. And I don’t care that they were only weeks old—they were mine and always will be. I had a wife, two babies and then I had nothing.”