The Sin Between Us

Chapter 14: The Weight Of His Hand.

My car gave out on a Monday morning.

Nothing dramatic about it ... .no smoke, no ominous noise, just the engine turning over and over in the cold without ever catching, until eventually it stopped even trying.

I sat there in the driver's seat for a full minute, staring at the dashboard like it had done this to me on purpose, personally, out of spite. Then I climbed out, went back upstairs, and called a tow truck.

After that I called June to see if she could swing by and get me to work.

June didn't answer.

I stood in my kitchen scrolling through my options, weighing each one against the cost of it. I could call my father, except he'd turn it into a full production, forty minutes of questions about oil changes and maintenance schedules I hadn't kept up with. I could try my cousin Danielle, except she lived clear across the city and it wasn't worth the ask. I could take the subway, which meant standing in the cold and showing up twenty minutes late with numb fingers.

I opened Jude's name instead.

It sat six contacts deep in my recents list, which told me something uncomfortable about exactly how often I reached for other people first.

I called him anyway.

He picked up on the second ring. "Hyacinth."

"My car died."

A short pause on his end. "Where are you?"

"Outside my building. I already called a tow truck, but I need a ride to work and June isn't…"

"Fifteen minutes."

He hung up before I could even get the rest of the sentence out. No follow-up questions about maintenance history, no lecture about tire pressure. Just the number fifteen and then silence.

He showed up in twelve.

I got in and the car was already warm, smelling faintly of his coffee, and he handed me a cup from the console without a word, like it had been sitting there waiting for me specifically. I took it. We pulled out into traffic.

"You didn't have to…" I started.

"I know," he said.

"How's the coffee?"

"Good. Thank you."

"Tow truck coming when."

"About an hour, they said."

He nodded once and we drove the rest of the way in easy quiet, the morning traffic thick and slow around us, both of us content to just sit in it together. I watched the city slide by out the window and felt that particular, specific warmth that comes from being looked after by someone who does it without ever making you feel like an inconvenience.

He pulled up outside my office building. I reached for the door handle.

"Let me know what the mechanic says," he said.

"You don't need to worry about"

"Hyacinth."

I looked over at him.

"Let me know what the mechanic says," he repeated, quieter this time, no less final.

Simple. Not up for negotiation.

"Okay," I said.

The mechanic's verdict came in around noon .. a dead alternator, two days to fix it properly. I texted Jude the update.

His reply landed almost instantly: “I'll pick you up after work.”

Not

“Do you need a ride?”

Not

“Let me know if you need anything.”

Just the plan, stated as fact, the same way he did everything.

I'd stopped arguing with that particular habit of his weeks ago.

He picked me up at five-thirty sharp. We hit traffic almost immediately on the bridge..some accident three lanes over that had everyone slowing to gawk… the kind of jam that stretched a twenty-minute drive into the better part of an hour.

He turned the music down low and we talked our way through most of it. His week. My week. A book he was halfway through and described so badly, so incoherently, that it somehow made me want to read it immediately just to see what he'd gotten wrong.

The traffic refused to move and neither of us seemed particularly bothered by that fact. The city sat dark outside the windows, the heater humming low, and at some point I turned sideways in my seat toward him, tucked my feet up under me, and simply…settled.

Like I'd landed somewhere I was actually meant to be.

He glanced over.

"Comfortable?"

"Very."

He looked back at the road, and something in his jaw had gone softer than its usual set.

We were stopped dead now, not inching forward at all. He reached across to adjust the heat, his arm crossing close in front of me, and on the way back he simply left it there.. resting along the top of the console between us. Casual. Unbothered. Like it meant nothing at all.

It did not mean nothing.

I was intensely, uncomfortably aware of that arm. Of the three or so inches separating his forearm from my knee. Of the fact that he'd placed it there deliberately and left it there deliberately and was now staring dead ahead at brake lights like he hadn't just done something entirely on purpose.

"Jude," I said.

"Mm."

"You're doing the thing."

He didn't look over.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you do something and then act like you had absolutely nothing to do with it."

A beat of silence.

Then

"I genuinely don't know what you're referring to."

"You absolutely do."

He said nothing back to that. But the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, betraying him completely.

The traffic finally began to crawl forward. We inched, stopped, inched again. His arm stayed exactly where it was. I didn't move my knee away from it either, and I noticed myself not moving it, and I let that be its own small, quiet admission.

By the time he pulled up outside my building it was well past seven. I reached for my bag on the floor between us. He reached for it at the exact same moment his hand closing over mine on the strap before either of us had fully registered what was happening.

We both went completely still.

His hand over mine. Neither of us pulling back. The engine idling low beneath us, the heater still running, the whole car gone suddenly, dangerously quiet.

His thumb pressed lightly against my knuckles …not quite holding on, not quite letting go either, caught in that narrow space between the two.

I looked down at our hands.

He looked down at our hands too.