The Worst Taste

Well, everything was good and awful. The party had been mostly okay, outside of that one thing, but then the pool had to go and make everything so complicated. His had been fine. Everyone else had been fine.

Zoras? Zoras had not been fine.

Which was why he was currently getting lunch with Kaiju over their break, his head sunk down to the table to rest his forehead on it as he waited for food to come out.

"Travis, this is the worst. Did you go to the party last night?" He had no idea if Travis had visited after he left, but if he hadn't, he was going to have to explain things, wasn't he?

"This is between us. No telling Rory or anyone else," Jude insisted, and it was only once he'd extracted the promise from Travis that he actually explained.

"It was nice. And the gods brought out a bunch of cool tricks to show off. And one of those tricks was this scrying pool, and if you looked in it, you saw the face of the person you loved."

Jude lifted up his head, making a face at the idea. "Or the person you were crushing on, or whatever. Some people were fine with it, and some people got upset, and my boss got really shaken by it, so I assumed she had an ex or something, and we went and talked."

The look got only more intense.

"Broen. She likes Broen."

"No," Jude said, without an ounce of irony. "She's just... I don't know. Thinking with her ovaries. Like, he's attractive, so I get that? But just..."

Jude let out a groan, thumping his head down onto the table.

"This is going to be awful. Now I have to... I don't know, make sure he doesn't find out, because... I don't know. I don't know if he'd abandon the whole thing to get away from her or not. But I don't want to find out. I don't want things to get weird."

Things were already pretty weird.

"I feel like my dad would be disgusted by the whole thing," Jude admitted. "He's big on professional boundaries. Something like that is just... uh, no. Like, if someone tried to hit on him or something..."

Jude made a face, wondering for a moment if Broen had tried with his dad the way he tried with everyone else.

"The office is nice and all, and the work is great, and..."

Jude trailed off for a moment.

"Maybe I need to get better at not judging, I guess. Because it's hard not to, uh, judge stuff like that."

"I'm not going to tell him," Jude said. "Absolutely not." The thought had crossed his mind, but he'd also put it firmly beside him. "Literally nothing could possibly come from telling Broen about this."

Jude cringed at being called judgey. Because he was. He knew he was. And he was trying to stop that, only it wasn't quite working out.

"It's not my fault everyone here's weird," Jude muttered. "Like, people just do things here and I'm sitting there going 'wait, is everyone else seeing this? Am I insane? Am I the only person who doesn't think it's really weird that everyone's trying to have sex with a fourteen year old?'. Maybe that makes me judgey, but this island is crazy."