38. If You

“Jo, let me go.”

I shake my head and squeeze my arms tighter around Jude’s middle, fighting against his attempt to remove them. “No.”

“Do you want me to miss my flight?” he asks.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I want,” I reply. “You are not going anywhere.”

“I’m fine, I swear.”

I shake my head. “You are not.”

The last thing I expected when I woke up this morning was to find Jude getting ready to leave for work.

He was in a daze when we got back to the condo last night. In bed, he tossed and turned all night.

I was too worried to sleep, but the fatigue caught up with me around four in the morning. Thank heavens I woke up when I did because I would have lost my shit if he’d been gone.

“I know what happened last night must have been scary,” he starts.

I huff. “You think?”

“But it’s perfectly normal,” he continues.

Yeah, and he must be out of his mind.

“I mean it was a perfectly normal reaction to that kind of thing rushing into my brain out of nowhere,” he adds. “It blindsided me. T-boned m