lately, jude’s been feeling like a nineteen-fifties housewife. he gets up, cooks junior some eggs, changes the linens if he’s sweated through them in the night, walks the dog, puts a spin cycle on, does the dishes, figures out which bills they’ll bother to pay this month and which they’ll let fester in the bottom of a drawer, by which point it’s usually time to start making junior lunch ( a greasy fry up, or something loaded with protein and carbs ). sometimes, when the afternoon rolls around, jude will sling his camera over his back, half-heartedly carry out a freelance gig for this start-up brand or that family-owned sandwich shop, or take headshots for some actress determined to get the hell out of dodge and make her fortune shaking her tits on broadway, but more often than not he’ll get stoned and watch reruns of the simpsons with junior. jude doesn’t resent him for it ━ it’s nice to have somewhere for his brain to sit, where it doesn’t rest in the cavern of jenny’s absence ━ but it’s becoming part of a humdrum routine, and he can feel his body getting restless. there’s a hunger beneath his skin that boils and bubbles like molten earth, and if he doesn’t scratch it, he’ll start to lash out and say things that he can’t take back, like how junior’s obvious annihilating guilt over leo’s recent worrying episode is probably a symptom of a larger fuck up. he should go and see leo. in the hospital, jude had barely left his side, or junior’s side, but since then he’s felt more like his roommate’s caregiver than his friend, and it’s a feeling that’s starting to outstay it’s welcome, despite his better intentions. tonight’s a rare night off from his wifely duties. junior’s round at mimi’s, or charlotte’s ( jude can’t really keep up ), so jude’s been down at fanny’s with logan, drunk enough to take the edge off and make everything feel slightly out of focus and hazy, like the camera assistant's switched off mid-take, but lucid enough to follow the episode of top gear he’s stumbled upon, channel-flicking. in his loneliness, it feels like a small slice of home ━ like a hand has reached out of the television screen and pulled him into a brotherly headlock ━ until a knock at the door cuts him from the escapism of watching three middle- aged british men traverse the dirt roads of bolivia and back into the reality of his too-small sitting room. who the fuck would be knocking at this time of night? something instinctive in him knows, even before the door clicks open, it’s lana.
still the sight of her slaps him like a cold salmon to the cheek, bustling her way into the trailer before he’s even had a chance to get a word in, all smudgy and sharp-edged despite the undercurrent of vulnerability that trails behind her like the extravangant train on a wedding dress. “hi?” jude says back, startled and dumbstruck and fucking ecstatic to see her, though it pings at some string inside of him coiled tight around the deep-rooted sense of not being enough. “are you…? sorry, what?” it’s been months since he’s seen her. feels like it could have been years. and suddenly here she is, walking around the place he lives, asking him to play fucking scrabble. “um… do i look like a person who owns scrabble?” jude asks, noting the bottle of whiskey, the slight stumble to her usually self-assured steps. “sorry, i’ll just go and check the fuckin’ activities hamper in the rec room… maybe i’ll bring you some enid blyton novels while i’m at it.” the closest thing junior and jude have to a rec-room is the cabinet of dvd’s, xbox games, and car boot sale antiques behind the tv. somewhere in the chest is the sculpted figures of him and jenny, their clay hands wrapped around each other’s fingers. she’d given it to him months ago, a surprise talent he’d never known she had. despite the break up, he still can’t bring himself to toss it away. at least in that reality the two of them are still together. “surprised you’re not asking for buckaroo…” that at least seems more like lana’s style, a chaotic donkey rampantly bucking everything off its back, leaving a tearaway trail of havoc and mischief wherever it goes. he has to remind himself that lana isn’t just chaos ━ that spending time with her can be calm as a sunday morning sunrise and easy as breathing ━ only most of the time when she drunkenly trots her cowboy boots into his life, he finds himself entirely uprooting himself to fit into whatever pot she’s in, abandoning everything just so that his roots might get to twist around hers. “think we’ve got a magnetic travel-set of chess, but… that’s about it. i’m watching top gear if you wanna’ join. feel like richard hammond’s probably your type. a bit ratty and cheeky and kind of hard to pin down.” and probably a bit of a knob. “siobhan used to have a massive crush on him.” siobhan had also told jude that she’d kill him if he ever went back to lana. not that this is going back to lana. still, her words ring true in his head when he takes a step closer, fingers fastening around the whiskey bottle to examine the label. “do you wanna glass for that? or… i dunno, if you wanna sober up that’s cool. we’ve even got taps and running water in locke row now.”
there’s a desperate need in his stomach to ask her why she’s here. at the party, their eyes had met without a single word exchanged, just a pulsing zeroing in like a dolly zoom, until everything else felt out of focus. before that, radio silence for months, the kind he’d grown accustomed to with lana. jude knows better than to rock the boat so soon. he can’t help but feel like her being here is the result of another classic teddy lawrence misstep, foot falling through the broken panel in the staircase where she thought he would catch her and landing in empty air, stumbling to jude only to claw her way out of the absence. still, he’s glad it’s his door she’s chosen to rap her knuckles against; not leo’s, or dom’s or whoever else exists on the revolving door of her roster. it feels special to be chosen by lana, like he’s useful for something, even if all she wants him for is a half-arsed game of scrabble and a shag. “i can make you a tea, if you want. we’ve got herbal shit.” or maybe it’s the other kind of herbal shit she’s craving. “could get stoned.” shrugging, he pushes past her, knocking her hip with his hip, her shoulder with his shoulder, and flicks the kettle on, reaching for his medical tin. it’s got paddington bear on the front of it, and his name printed out by an embossing label maker. as a kid, he’d keep his milk teeth in it for the tooth fairy. feels like blasphemy that it’s now home to his grinder, and rolling papers, and baggies of shit laced with ground up pencil sharpenings. “i’ve got sex and the city on box set, if you want. junior pretends to hate it, but i know he secretly wants to fuck the shit out of samantha. everyone wants to fuck samantha.”
