Over Lunch

Jude was not entirely clear why he was nervous. He shouldn't have been. He had absolutely no reason to be nervous. But he felt nervous anyway. Maybe because telling Rory felt sort of final. Maybe because he expected a lot of squinting and judgement. Either way, he was pretty awkward by the time he settled down for lunch the following day, waiting for Rory to arrive.

Oh great. Now he was making her nervous with his nerves. Jude did his best to give her a smile, only it probably still came off as nervous. Rory's intensity could be a great thing, but it also could be a bit, uh, overwhelming.

"No," Jude said, swallowing as he ordered his drink from the waitress. "It's not like that. It's not, uh, a bad thing. Did you hear about the end of the party? With the pool?"

"Checked out the pool?" Jude asked, raising an eyebrow before deciding it didn't actually matter. She'd been at the party. Whether she'd looked or not... well, he'd learned not to ask who people saw in the pool.

"Basically, a god--probably love, maybe water and love--put a scrying pool in at the party. If you looked in it, you didn't see your own reflection, you saw the person you were... into. Crushing on. In love with. People saw boyfriends and girlfriends and stuff. I'm sure you can guess who I saw."

Jude wasn't going to beat around the bush. Not with Rory. He'd spent a long time underestimating her, and by that point, sitting down for lunch with her, he'd recognized she was almost definitely better at emotional and relationship stuff than he was.

"No," Jude said with a grimace. Of course she knew. He'd kind of expected, so of course she knew. "Around the time I figured out what the pool did... well, it was obvious. I guess a bit of a well, I guess that's a thing, but I knew who it was going to be before I looked. It really just confirmed."

He didn't like it though.

"I... well, I talked with someone else about their similarly awful crush, and the advice I gave them was that you just had to move on. Find someone else, and the old crush would wither and die. And... it isn't ever going to work with Broen. Like, even if I wanted it to..." Which he most definitely did not, no sir. "It wouldn't work. So I kind of, uh, looked at my options and figured I should just ask someone out."

Jude cringed. Boy was that a cringe.

"Honestly I was reading this whole how to increase your confidence book and it basically said 'if you're nervous about asking people out, just ask a bunch of people out who are out of your league. After you get rejected a bunch, you stop feeling so worried about it."

He was definitely just being weird because he had been too nervous to ask people out.

Well, that, but also...

"Well, I figured I'd ask someone out who was like... way out of my league. So that I could get rejected, and get over it. Only I asked Alma Malivani, and they said yes, and this was probably the worst person to ask because she has like..." Jude grimaced. "Infinitely more experience than I do."