My breath is in my throat, my heart is beating quickly, and Jude’s face is tipped to one side. I watch his lips and, oh my God, Jude de Silva is going to kiss me.
I gasp.
The sound makes him rear back, a startled look in his eyes. His features twist into extreme discomfort, and his cheeks flush bright red.
“I’m sorry!” we both say at the same time, which makes me laugh, and I look at his eyes, in the hopes he’s ready to laugh, too.
Our eyes lock, and there’s a moment when it feels like maybe we can save things. But then Walter Matthau lurches to his feet.
We teeter.
Every muscle in my body tenses, trying futilely to find some purchase, but there’s no stopping what’s begun. Inertia takes over, and the three of us tip into the freezing, brackish water, landing this disastrous take with a humiliating splash.
And…scene.
Chapter Twenty-One
As I head downstairs inmy dry pajamas, I find Jude and a towel-dried Walter Matthau at my front door. His back is to me, and he’s wearing the sweats I lent him after the three of us staggered like swamp things out of the Venice canal. I clock Jude’s wrung-out, balled-up suit in one hand, then the note scrawled on myZombie Hospitalnotepad in the center of my kitchen counter. It doesn’t take Veronica Mars to make sense of these clues. We scurriers recognize our own kind.
Still, it feels like someone is folding my heart into origami.
“You’re leaving?”
Jude spins around, his eyes moving up the stairs to me. He looks destroyed, and the sight of his expression sends me down the last few stairs to reach him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, nodding toward the note. “I tried to explain. I should go—”
“Please don’t go. Not yet.”
I notice he’s lit the gas fire in my living room, something I’ve not been able to figure out in a year and a half of living here. It makes my small, open-floor-plan first-story kitchen and living room feel wonderfully cozy, romantic. It makes it feel as if something pleasant is about to happen here—if it weren’t forthe two massively uncomfortable people and the shivering dog populating the scene.
There’s something exciting about the way these casual clothes look on him. Not just because they show off his sculpted shoulders, but because comfort wear puts me in the mind of curling up on the couch, in front of the fire, which I would love to do with him right now.
I gesture at my butter-yellow sofa. “Can you stay? Can we talk?”
“You don’t owe me any explanation,” Jude says. “You did us both a favor, stopping what I was about to do. I’m just…” He rubs his face. “Not entirely myself right now.”
Discomfort rises off Jude like steam. I know that the kindest thing would be to let him slip away from the source of his discomfort—me. But I don’t want him to go.
“I’ll make pancakes,” I offer, moving into the kitchen and opening my fridge. I take out eggs and buttermilk. “I’m not even raging mad, and I’m offering to cook. I think you’ve helped me reach enlightenment.”
Jude cracks the smallest smile, and I feel like someone’s spread a weighted blanket over all my worries. When he pulls up a barstool and sits down, I celebrate with a low-key fist pump under the counter.
“What’d your note say?” I ask, as Jude quickly crumples the paper.
“Bad first draft. Nowhere near ready for a table read.”
“Question for you: Does the thought of quinoa in your pancakes make you want to run screaming?”
“It makes me want to run screaming toward the pancakes.”
I grin and dump some quinoa into the bowl of dry ingredients.
“Question for you,” he says. “Where’d you get this sweatshirt?” He points at the clothes I’ve given him to wear. The gray sweatpants must be my brother-in-law’s, left behind when they needed someplace to stay while they fumigated for termites.
But the sweatshirt—the only top I could find that would fit Jude’s six-foot-four frame—is the one Sam loaned me in Two Harbors when I was the one who needed dry clothes.
“You like Taj Mahal?” Jude asks, looking down at the graphic of the singer’s face on the front.
