A/N: Shara: I'm not totally consistent with a posting schedule, but generally speaking I update Wednesdays and Saturdays. Sometimes more often, but pretty much never less than twice a week (unless something unexpected happens to prevent me from updating).


"Jude," Tommy's voice came from next to her. He sounded insistent, like it wasn't the first time he'd tried to get her attention. She pulled out her earphones and looked up from her computer, surprised.

"Hey." She hadn't heard him enter the living room where she was sitting on the couch, had been playing her music too loudly for the hum of the power wheelchair to register. She shut her laptop and set it on the coffee table, turning to look at him. "Sorry, I didn't hear you. Is everything okay? Do you need something?"

She intentionally didn't say "do you need help." They'd had a fight that morning, a bad one, when he'd nearly fallen trying to move from the bed to the new wheelchair. She had moved to help as soon as she had seen what he was trying to do, but he'd shot her a look and she'd backed off. It had been obvious that he wanted to do it on his own, but there had been a moment when he was supporting his weight on his bad arm, and it had given out suddenly. He'd almost fallen to the floor, and she'd let out a yelp of "Tommy, careful!" as a sudden vision had come into her mind of him hitting his head and hurting himself again.

She'd rushed to help him, and he had snarled, "Don't touch me!" When she stammered that she was just trying to help, he had pushed himself up into the wheelchair and shouted at her that he didn't want her help. She started to protest and he had cut her off, shouting, "Get out! I don't want your help, I don't want you touching me, I don't want you here! Get out!" She had flinched and recoiled. She had whispered an apology and tried not to let him see her start to cry as she'd turned and left the bedroom. She knew he'd felt guilty immediately, had heard him mutter a curse to himself as she'd turned away.

He had apologized later, taking her hand and looking into her eyes with an expression of deep guilt and sorrow as he explained that he hadn't meant it, that the whole situation was just incredibly frustrating, that he had been in pain, but that it had been wrong to take it out on her. She'd assured him it was okay, she could handle it. He'd repeated that he was sorry, and she had looked down at their entwined hands and said in a choked whisper, "Anyway, I guess I deserve it." He'd sighed and said her name in a pained voice, but he hadn't actually argued with her statement. Even though she'd been the one to say it, it stung knowing he agreed.

Now he said, "Yeah, everything's… fine, I just…" He looked a little nervous, she thought, and sad. "I, uh… I need to ask you something. We need to talk about…" he sighed, shutting his eyes for a moment. "I need to try and understand something."

She raised her eyebrows, then frowned a little, confused. "Um… okay?"

He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly before looking back at her and saying, "I need you to tell me why you did it."

It took her a moment to figure out what he meant, but when she did, her eyes widened. "Tommy–" she started, but he cut her off, putting his hand up.

"And I don't want to hear another apology, I don't want to hear about how it was a mistake and you wish you could take it back, and I really don't want to hear you say again that you love me." He grimaced a little as he said the words.

"But I–" Jude started to protest, but Tommy cut her off again.

"That's not the point!" he snapped. Then, calmer, he said, "I know, okay? I know you're sorry, I know you regret it, I know you…" he sighed and shook his head. "I get that part. Everything you've been saying for the past few weeks, all the apologies, I get it. I'm trying to forgive you, I am. But the part that I still can't get my head around is why. So I need you to explain to me what it was that made you do it."

"Tommy…" Jude sighed, shaking her head. "This isn't going to help any–"

"Why?" He cut her off, raising his voice. "Why did you do it, Jude? Why did you cheat on me? What could have made you decide to throw us away like that?" His voice shook on the last few words, and Jude felt tears pricking her eyes.

"No, Tommy, it wasn't like that," she insisted.

"Then what the fuck was it like, Jude?"

"It's not like I planned it!" she protested. "I didn't decide, I didn't… It just happened, okay? It was a mistake, I–"

"No," he cut her off, firmly. "No. Cheating doesn't just happen, Jude. People say that, I have said that, but it's a goddamn lie."

"He kissed me, he just… he kissed me, Tommy. That's what happened, it was out of nowhere–"

"Bullshit," he hissed. "For one thing, there's a long fucking way from that to–"

"I know I should've stopped it sooner, Tommy, you don't think I know that? It all happened so fast, I didn't think, I didn't–"

"No! That is not good enough!"

"What do you want me to say, Tom? That it wasn't a mistake? That I planned it? I didn't! It was! It's not like my dad, it wasn't an affair, I wasn't sleeping with someone for months and keeping it from you, it was one time! I regretted it immediately, I stopped it, and I was honest about–"

"Stop!" Tommy shouted, cutting her off. "Shut up for a second!" He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath, clearly fighting to control his anger. When he opened his eyes and spoke again, his voice was calmer. "Okay, of course I believe that you didn't plan it. But that doesn't mean it wasn't still a decision."

"It wasn't like that!" Jude protested again. "I– I got carried away, it happened so fast and I… I don't know what you want me to say. I don't know what you think this is going to help."

His jaw clenched, but he kept his voice relatively calm when he spoke. "Maybe in the moment it wasn't a conscious choice, and if it had really come out of nowhere, or if all you had done was kiss him, then maybe I'd believe that you just got carried away, but that is not what happened. Even if you didn't plan or decide to cheat, you still fucking decided to put yourself in a situation where you knew it could happen."

"I didn't know," she whispered, eyes wide. "I didn't know what was going to happen until it was already happening."

"Bullshit!" Tommy said again, agitated again. "That is complete bullshit! You knew he was into you, you knew he flirted with you, you fucking let him! And then you pulled an all nighter with him, let him stick around after the recording was finished, you drank with him! And he may have kissed you, but then you let him do a hell of a lot more than that! You let him– you–" he cut off with a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl. "You let him inside you," he hissed, his expression contorting with pain and disgust. She felt sick, her stomach lurching, and she covered her mouth with her hand, tears spilling out and over her cheeks. His face was red, his hand clenched, white-knuckled, on the arm of the chair. "Am I wrong?" he asked, tightly. She couldn't speak, just shook her head, her hand still over her mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut again, murmuring, "God fucking dammit," under his breath. After a moment, he opened his eyes and spoke again in a tight voice, "Every step of that was a decision, Jude."

Jude felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. She looked at Tommy for a long moment, at a loss for words, before dropping her hands back to her lap and whispering, "You're right."

Pain flashed in Tommy's expression, and she saw him swallow hard before breathing, "Why?"

"I… I never wanted to hurt you, or to betray you, or to ruin us, or… I never would've risked… If I had been thinking, if I had…" she let out a little sob, "I don't know what to tell you."

"Tell me why." There was more desperation in his voice now than before. "I need to understand why. What could have made you do this? What was going through your head that made you… I need to understand what happened. I want to forgive you, Jude, I do, but I can't if I don't understand why."

"What if there is no why?" she protested desperately. "What if I don't know why either?"

"There has to be a reason, Jude! Unless the reason is that you just didn't give a fuck about me, us, our relationship, then–"

"That's not fair!" she cut him off, more tears streaming down her face. "Don't say that! You know I care, Tommy. I have proven that!"

"Then why?" he cried.

"I don't know!"

He kept pushing, speaking louder and faster. "Was it him, then? Was there something about him you just couldn't resist, something he has that I–"

"No!" Jude cried, appalled. "God, of course not. It wasn't about him, it was more complicated that that." She sighed, putting her head in her hands, briefly, before looking up and saying, "Fine. You want to know the truth? After Caroline di–" but she barely got their daughter's name out before Tommy cut her off again.

"No," he said in a harsh, low voice. "No fucking way do you get to use that as an excuse. She was my daughter too, Jude. I lost my daughter too, and I didn't go and fuck the first girl to flirt with me. You don't get to claim–"

Jude cut him off. "Let me talk!" she shouted. "For fuck's sake! You don't get to ask this question and then shut me down when I try to give you an answer! Of course it's not an excuse, Tom. I'm not making excuses. You asked me why, you asked me what was going through my head, and I am trying to tell you, if you would just shut up and let me talk for two seconds!" Tommy's jaw clenched in anger, but he nodded once, a signal for her to go on. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she wiped the tears from her cheeks. When she spoke, the anger had drained from her voice, replaced by a quiet, exhausted pain. "Caroline is gone." She closed her eyes for a moment. "And when she died, it was like… Nothing made sense anymore. I didn't make sense. I couldn't… It was such a short time that she was here but I don't know who I am anymore without her." Jude opened her eyes again and looked back at Tommy. "And I didn't know who we were without her. We were fighting constantly, we were…" she sighed, looking down at her hands.

"And that's all it took?" Tommy's voice was tight.

"What?" She looked back up at him, confused.

"We had a fight, you were mad at me, so that was it, game over? It was that easy for you to throw us away?" He looked more hurt than angry now.

"What? No, of course not! You're not listening to me. It wasn't about the fight. I mean, that was why I worked late, so I guess in some way, maybe, but, no. It was about… me, it was…" She sighed again, looking back down. "I think you're right, when you say I knew how he felt. I didn't know, I didn't… I guess I didn't think about it. But, I don't know, part of me knew. And I did, I let him flirt with me. You were right about that. It was like… I didn't know how to be with you. I couldn't separate being with you from the grief about Caroline, you know? But when I was with Benjamin, he… saw me differently, I guess? He didn't know me as anything other than a musician and a producer, so I felt like when I was with him, that's who I could be. When I was with you I was the mother of a dead child, and I couldn't figure out how to be anything other than that. Maybe I liked spending time with him because I could escape from that, for a second." She was mumbling now, still looking down at her hands. "So then we had that fight, he and I were behind schedule on the single and I used that as an excuse to–"

"To get away from me," he finished, softly. Jude looked up. Tommy was looking at her, his expression unreadable.

She bit her lip, then said, "I should've talked to you about how I was feeling. Instead of getting so angry about what you said to him, I should've thought through why you said it, about the parts of it that were true, instead of putting myself in a situation where it became true. But I didn't know he was going to kiss me, and even if I had known, I wouldn't have believed that I would've…" she trailed off again.

A muscled tensed in his jaw for just a second. "But then you did." His voice was still quiet.

"It was late, we were drinking, and he kissed me and I just…"

"Didn't feel grief," he finished, quietly. She was surprised, shocked but elated for a moment that maybe he understood, maybe this was him forgiving her, but then he said, "It's what you told Kwest."

"Oh." Jude tried to hide her disappointment. "You heard that?"

Tommy shook his head. "Not all of it, I was in and out a lot at that point." He sighed and looked at her for a long moment, searching her face. Eventually he said, "So you didn't feel grief. He kissed you, and for the first time in months you were finally happy?"

"No!" she protested. "You're twisting my words, Tommy!"

He looked angry again. "If you don't want to be with me, just say that. If losing Caroline was too much, and you can't be the person you want to be when you're with me, then you could've said that to me, you didn't have to fuck some other guy."

"That's not fair," she objected, tears filling her eyes again. "You know that's not what I meant. You know that's not true."

"Just listen for a second to what you're telling me, Jude. You didn't know how to be with me, you weren't happy, so you start hanging out with this other guy because he can somehow fucking see you for who you really are or something, and then he kisses you and you don't feel grief anymore, unlike, apparently, kissing me, which clearly had gotten to the point where it was making you miserable."

"That's not true!" she cried. "Of course I wasn't happy, Tommy, of course I was miserable, because our daughter is dead and I could never think about anything else. So no, I wasn't happy, and you weren't happy, but it wasn't because of you! I didn't do this to hurt you, and I didn't do it because I didn't want to be with you, it happened because I didn't know how to be me anymore. I don't know how to… How to be, how to keep going on. It's never been about you, it just made it really hard to know how to be with you. Are you honestly telling me that you didn't feel that?"

Tommy frowned at her for a moment, then said, "She was my daughter too. So sure, yeah, there were points when I felt like it was too much, and obviously we were fighting and it was rough, but no, Jude, I didn't ever feel the need to get away from you by spending time with some other girl. Sometimes I felt like I needed out, or I needed a drink, and then I fucking stayed. I didn't drink, I didn't leave, I didn't sleep with someone else."

"You're a fucking saint, Tom!" she shouted. "Is that what you want me to say? Fucking congratulations! You're perfect, you're wonderful, and I'm awful, I'm horrible, I'm–"

Tommy spoke over her. "Jude, stop."

She kept shouting, tears pouring down her face. "I'm a piece of shit, I'm a fucking whore, I–"

"Jesus, Jude! Stop!"

"I betrayed you, I let you down, I made the biggest fucking mistake of my life, I–"

"Girl, come on." Tommy pushed himself out of the wheelchair, struggling to stay off of his broken leg as he transferred to the couch.

"I don't deserve–" Jude finally cut off as Tommy moved, saying through tears, "No, Tommy, careful, you don't have to–"

"Shh, Jude," Tommy hushed her with a heavy sigh as he sat on the couch, reaching out to put an arm around her shoulders. "Come here," he said gently. She looked at him in surprise for a second, but moved to sit close to him. He hugged her to him, and she laid her head on his shoulder. The unexpected tenderness of it made her cry harder, sobbing into his shirt. He stroked her hair and said, softly, "I never said any of that." Jude raised her head and looked at him, raising an eyebrow, and he sighed. "Alright, well, I never meant it." He reached out and brushed tears from her cheeks.

She looked into his eyes and whispered, "You should know that I hate myself every bit as much as you hate me."

"Oh, Jude…" Tommy looked devastated. "I don't. Honestly, honestly, I don't hate you, I could never. Please don't think that."

Jude sniffled and sat up, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. "I wouldn't blame you."

He sighed again and shook his head. "I… Obviously I'm angry, I'm fucking furious, sometimes, and obviously it hurt, but that doesn't mean that I hate you, or that I don't want to be with you, because I do. I still… I want us to get past this, it's just really fucking hard, okay? Especially when I'm in a lot of pain, or the meds are messing me up, or I'm frustrated with the physical therapy and all of that, you know? I know I'm taking it out on you, but please don't let that make you think that I don't…" He sighed again, shaking his head. "I'm sorry. I've been treating you like shit. I'm... I know I've been hurting you."

She reached over and grabbed his hand, squeezing his fingers gently. "It's okay. I'm okay, I understand." She let go of his hand and looked down, away from him. "It was… It was one moment of… There's no excuse, but I was lost, I had lost myself, I was… Caroline died and everything shattered, everything was upside down and inside out and so when we went back to work, I tried to latch on to anything that made me feel normal for a second. For that one moment at three in the morning after a fight with you and half a bottle of champagne and two months of feeling broken and numb and…" She was crying again, her voice choked. "For one second I let myself think that he was some kind of escape, and that that's what I wanted. It happened really fast, and I let it go way too far before I stopped it." She looked up again. "But I did stop it, Tommy, I did. I know that doesn't change anything, but I- I came to my senses and I stopped him and I made him leave and I know that's not enough and I still made a horrible mistake, but you have to understand that it didn't mean anything. It was never about him, and it was never because I didn't want to be with you. I love you. I know you told me not to say that, but it's true, Tommy, I love you. I don't ever want to be with anyone except for you. Do you believe me?" She gave him a wide-eyed, pleading look.

Tommy sighed. "I… I want to, Jude. I'm trying to." He looked at her for a moment, then gestured with his head and said, "Come here." She moved close again, leaning into him and wrapping her arms around his waist, trying to be careful of his ribs. She tucked her head into the hollow of his neck and he leaned down to kiss her hair, his arm around her shoulders. He had lost a lot of weight since the accident, and was thin in her arms, his collarbone sharper under her cheek than she was used to. But he was warm and he smelled like soap and laundry detergent and home. She felt herself start to cry harder again, and decided not to fight the tears. After a long moment of holding her, as her crying subsided, Tommy said, "Thank you for being honest."

She looked up at him and nodded, placing a hand on his cheek. "Always. And thank you for trying." He nodded, giving her a little smile. Even though the smile was slight and his eyes stayed sad, Jude felt a rush of relief and smiled back.

"I have PT," he said suddenly, breaking the moment. "I'm gonna be late, we should go."

"Right." She pulled away and sat up, sniffling and wiping the rest of the tears from her face.

As she stood up, he said, "Can you help me?" reaching a hand out to her. It was such a small thing, and a strange token of apology, but Jude felt her heart squeeze anyway.

When they pulled up to the clinic, Tommy stopped Jude before she got out of the car, saying, "Hey." She turned to him, surprised, and he leaned in, reaching out to put a hand on her cheek. "We're gonna be okay," he said gently, stroking her cheek with his thumb. She leaned in, and he kissed her, softly.

When she pulled back, she whispered, "I love you."

He looked at her for a moment, her look on his face, the one that had been turning her heart inside out since she was 15 years old, then nodded. "I know, girl."

It wasn't exactly what she wanted. She had hoped he'd say it back, say he loved her, maybe even that he forgave her. But still, it was something. And for now, it was enough.


A/N: You know how I love writing the long conversations, so here's another for my repertoire.