Chapter 11
Juliette
Bridger had done it. I knew he had done it. There wasn’t any proof and the police hadn’t updated us with any new information, but I knew it had to be him who took a goddamn crowbar and slammed it into my husband’s knee. Ankle too. He couldn’t just hit one spot; he had to hit two.
“Watch it, Juliette!” Gordon yelled from his spot on the couch.
“I’m sorry!” I cried out. I was pretty sure I hadn’t even gone near his knee or ankle, but the apology left my lips as an almost automatic response. My hands gripped the ice pack tight, taking a step back from him. “How do you wanna do this?”
“Just give me the goddamn ice pack.” Holding out a hand, Gordon curled his fingers repeatedly. “Sometimes it feels like you can’t do anything right.”
I held in a sigh, stretching out my hand so he could snatch the icepack from my palm.
He was quick to guide it to his knee, sitting up as straight as he could against the white cushions of the couch.
It’d be his new home for the next few weeks, because getting up all those stairs was next to impossible.
He had everything he needed on the first floor, anyway—access to the kitchen and two of the six bathrooms in the house. The living room was more than spacious and warm enough for him to feel comfortable. As comfortable as one could feel after having their knee and ankle smashed with a crowbar.
“There’s too many criminals running around this town,” Gordon said, shaking his head.
“First our house gets broken into and then I get robbed? Not just robbed, but attacked? Viciously and violently? What is happening? You can’t even go one week without bumping into some delinquent out on the street! ”
“Are you sure you told the cops everything you know?” I asked.
“Yes, Juliette. I told them everything. The maniac had a mask on, just like the men who robbed us. It has to be one of the men from the night before,” Gordon said as he shook his head. “It must be. Maybe the one that was in the bedroom with you. What did he say to you? What did you say to him?”
My arms wrapped around myself. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, you must have said something, because he showed up at my office.”
“I swear I didn’t say anything,” I said. “Honestly. Maybe it was a different guy.”
“There’s no way. It was one of the men who broke in. I want them locked up.” He pointed an angry finger at his knee as if that would make his point clearer, but then he hissed from the contact. “All three of them, but that one who attacked me needs to get the electric chair.”
“I don’t think they do that anymore.”
“They should.”
“I hope they find him,” was all I could say.
“Do you want something to eat? Or drink? What do you need me to do?” I was forcing my ‘good wife’ tone, the one that Gordon expected and loved to hear.
It was the tone of a woman who never talked back, who went along with everything her husband said, who never questioned him or his motives. The wife I had been trained to be.
He nodded behind me. “Bring me my laptop.”
“The doctor said that you should be resting.”
“I need to reschedule our stay at the clinic. The one in Switzerland. Since that delinquent stole my phone, I’ll have to email them instead, but we’re still going.
Once I’m better, we’re going there so you can talk to those doctors,” Gordon said, voice all final and firm.
“Sex is out of the question right now. I’m in too much pain and I don’t trust you to not hurt my knee and make everything worse. ”
Saved by the bell. It was everything in me to keep my smile to myself. “You just focus on getting better,” I said, words soft as I fetched his brand new laptop from the other side of the room. Bridger had stolen all of his old ones. “Just take it easy.”
“I’m going to be downstairs for a while now.
I suppose you’ll have the top floor to yourself,” he said, yanking the laptop from my hands.
“Don’t think of this as a break. You need to stay on top of your schedule.
Keep tracking your period. Keep eating your vitamins and stick to the healthy recipes I taught you, okay? ”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Go make me dinner.”
“Right. I’ll be in the kitchen then. Just call me if you need anything. Do you want anything to dri—”
“Leave me alone, Juliette.”
I nodded at him, hating that the demanding tone in his voice had me feeling a rush of shame. Gordon was good at that. He knew it too. When he talked to me like I was a child, like I had done something wrong, like I was the one who messed up.
Entering the kitchen, I let my hands rest on the counter, pulling in a deep breath.
It felt like the mess was only just beginning.
Bridger was suddenly back in my life and I had been thrusted back into his.
I should have been the good, obedient wife and picked up the phone and called the cops and told them I knew exactly who had hurt Gordon.
I had his name, his birthday, the name of the place he worked.
I could draw the goddamn composite sketch myself even with my eyes closed.
But instead of reaching for my phone on the counter, I remained quiet and still. I was being a bad wife, and Bridger was being a bad person, but it was that stupid bad side of him that I had always been drawn to.
That pull was unbeatable. The danger, the darkness, the rebellion. All the things a good girl like me wasn’t supposed to want but, once upon a time, had wanted with her whole entire heart.
* * *
The pain killers Gordon’s doctor prescribed him knocked him right out, and then I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to do, and that was sneak out.
I wasn’t usually allowed to go out on my own.
Gordon had given me a car for show, but I didn’t ever really drive it, and that was because I needed his permission to do almost anything.
As I drove out of Montclair and into the city, I realized how utterly miserable that sounded.
I wasn’t even sure if I’d find Bridger at his work. I had put Hidden Ink into Google the second he told me about it the other day and had been considering going down there ever since. My mind told me not to, though. My heart too.
Now I couldn’t resist. Nothing quite prompted you to go see your criminal ex-boyfriend after getting a phone call from a doctor in the ER telling you someone just smashed your husband’s knee in with a crowbar. That was the kind of thing a girl couldn’t ignore.
I wasn’t even mad at Bridger for doing what he had done. I was mad at the fact that I wasn’t mad at him. I was mad at the fact that he just stormed back into my life after everything he had done, after all the pain he had put me through, and still had a hold on me.
It was a half an hour drive to the tattoo parlor, and thanks to the late hour, the parking lot out the front was almost empty besides a single car.
It could have been Bridger’s. I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t even know what car he drove anymore.
He knew a lot about me, things about my past he wasn’t meant to know, but what did I know about him? Next to nothing.
Pulling into a spot, I squinted through my windshield.
The parlor looked empty but the neon sign out the front told me it was still open, and according to the times printed on the window, it didn’t shut until seven.
I had five minutes left to scream at him if he was in there.
What I wanted to scream at him exactly, I didn’t know.
I got out of the car, heels clacking against the cement before I shoved the parlor’s glass door open, forcing a little bell above me to go off.
“Hey, sorry, but we’re just about to close!” I heard a deep voice say from down the hallway. Bridger’s voice.
Scowl on my face, I stormed right down that hallway, my heels making sure that my presence was known.
“Hey, I said we’re gonna close real soon!” he called out.
I didn’t even know what I wanted to say to him as I moved further down the black tiled hallway, determination pulsing through me until I collided with something hard and heavy.
Bridger’s chest.
His hands found my waist, squeezing at me tight and keeping me from falling to the floor. Maybe this was a mistake, because his ocean blue eyes found mine at the same time as his woodsy cologne hit me. I could have sworn both things made my knees buckle.
For a moment, we stayed like that. Him towering over me, his eyes scanning me up and down, him pulling me in that little bit closer so that we weren’t just touching, but so that I was pressed to him.
He was in a T-shirt and jeans—a simple look.
But it was one that made me want to tug at the collar and pull him in closer for some stupid reason.
I should have slapped myself for the thought.
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” he asked, voice all low and his hands still there on my waist. “We’re about to close.”
His eyes were shadowy, his jaw tight, his dark hair a perfectly tussled mess. Why did he still have to look so good? Why did he have to look even better than he used to? All tall and muscular and broad.
The men in my world didn’t look like him. They wore suits and hissed when a single strand of their hair got messy and had smooth, uncalloused, unworked hands. They were pampered. Bridger was unruly.
“The sign out the front says you’ll stay open until seven.
That gives me a few minutes with you,” I said, eyes falling to his forearms. They were so big, so thick.
Bigger than when we were stupid kids. Stronger too.
Every part of him looked stronger. “And I’m sure you already know what I’m about to say to you. ”
A grin slowly spread across his face, all lazy and confident. “No, princess, what?”
“I know it was you,” I said quietly, even though I was pretty sure it was just the two of us in the building.
“I don’t understand.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“You’ll have to clarify.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Bridger.”
“Yeah?”