LuckoftheDraw by Jayne Kingston

punching your lights out like he almost did last night?” When he
shook his head she added, “That’s amazing.”
    Jude chuckled, clearly in spite of himself. “He told me you
would have my balls. I expected him to be right.”
    “No. Not this time.” She wiped her streaming eyes with the
sleeve of her shirt. “You get one free pass.”
    When she looked up she was surprised to find him coming
toward her. She watched as he knelt in front of her with tears in his eyes.
When he laid his head on her lap and wrapped his arms around her waist she let
him.
    “If I get one free pass I want to use it to get you back,”
he said quietly. “I never messed up once the entire time we were together. I
never cheated or raised my voice in anger, and I never would have dreamed of
striking you outside the context of some of the kinky things we did. I loved
you. I still love you.” He tightened his arms around her waist. “Can I please
have this one fuck-up?”
    She ran her fingers through his hair, fresh tears in her
eyes and her heart in her throat. “Jude, I can’t.”
    He groaned miserably and relaxed the hold he had on her
waist.
    “Yes you can.” He sat up. “It’ll be easy. I’ll make it easy.
Try it.”
    After all the time she’d spent desperately wishing he would
come back, how was it that she wasn’t the least bit tempted to ruin what she’d
started with Alex for him? And his idea for them to live as a threesome—while
she might have jumped at the chance when she was younger—was even less
appealing.
    “You know what Busha always says, don’t you?”
    He groaned and sat back. “Here we go,” he muttered.
    She ignored him. “‘If you spit on the ground, do you pick it
up and put it back in your mouth?’” she asked, using Busha’s thick Russian
accent.
    He gave her a bland look. “That’s disgusting.”
    “But wise in its way.” She took his face in her hands.
“Jude, you were right to pursue your dream. It was cruel of me to ask you to
stay and selfish to not talk to you about it because I knew I wasn’t going to
get my way.”
    He closed his eyes and turned his cheek into her palm.
    “And you were right to insist that I not wait. I would have
been miserable without you for months at a time. The end would have dragged out
for who knows how long before I got tired of our situation and broke it off.”
She lowered her hands. “Neither one of us handled the end the way we could
have, but from this perspective, at this moment in time, I can see it was
inevitable.”
    He shook his head. “Don’t say that,” he whispered.
    “Nothing has changed, Jude. I still don’t want a
relationship where I have to leave home for any certain amount of time just to
be with you.”
    “Would it be different if it were Alex?” he asked.
    She knew him well enough to know he wasn’t asking to draw
her into a fight.
    “It doesn’t matter because he doesn’t want to leave Chicago,”
she answered.
    He groaned and hung his head. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
    Petra didn’t have it in her to try to convince him
differently. She could imagine living without Alex even less than she’d once
been able to imagine living without Jude.
    Jude got to his feet and she rose with him.
    “Do you like the work you’re doing now?” she asked.
    A small smile touched his lips, but the effect on his eyes
was profoundly more enlightening. She could see before he answered that the
answer was a resounding yes.
    “It’s far harder and unbelievably more rewarding than I
could have imagined.”
    “Then you didn’t make the wrong choice.” In spite of her
newfound happiness with Alex, it hurt a little to say the words.
    He nodded and looked at some unknown point over her shoulder.
    Tears sprang to her eyes. “I will always love you, you
know.”
    He stood and drew her into his arms, holding her as tightly
as she held him. She breathed in his familiar scent and let the memory of all
the times he’d held her in the past settle