Asymptote or Adjacent?

Jude

Do you love me like that?
If I keep on driving

So brief had been the glimpse into her anger that Jude doesn't even know it goes. Perhaps that makes him all the more selfish, to have not recognized it - but he is eighteen and his world has never been so upturned before, so thoroughly set on its head. Selfishness is to be expected.

Still, he succumbs to that selfishness and leans into her embrace, emerging only enough to bury his face in her shoulder and blindly reach for her hands. "I might never have found him if I hadn't left. He might have been attacked alone or -" but he can't finish that thought. The cruelties of the world were not a burden meant for her shoulders. "None of that's your fault." And after Koa's gentle handling of his interrogation - though interrogation it had still been - Jude can't blame her for having loved him, or been infatuated with him, or whatever it was that had led to her still having feelings for him and admitting them to Jude.

"I'm sorry I left. I needed to clear my head but - I don't know. I want to say I could've done it here but I just don't know. I just...I'm just sorry." Which is not enough and he knows it, but he doesn't want to lie either. He'd needed to see his mother, his father - and distance alone had made time spool out unfairly long, well before murders and lies and interrogations. He can't say he would have been able to come to any of the conclusions he'd needed to if he hadn't left, so he won't say it all.

Would you hold me when we crash?
Or would you let me go?