Chapter 6
TRIPP
The feeling of sandpaper scratching against my temple pulls me from my sleep and the actually-pleasant dream that came with it.
Opening my eyes with a quiet groan, I turn to find Drumstick perched on the back of the couch, not-so-patiently waiting for his breakfast. He greets me with a meow and I reach over to scratch him between the ears.
I’m sitting up on the couch, with Julia asleep with her head in my lap and her arms wrapped tightly around my hips. I’m not sure how long the screensaver on the TV has been filtering through its selection of nature photos, or what time we fell asleep after I brought Jules downstairs last night.
This is the first time that we’ve slept in the same place since Connor last crashed on our couch, and I’m not sure that she’ll even remember it when she wakes up.
As Drumstick’s teeth angrily take hold of my ear, I carefully move my wife’s arms and slide out from underneath her, pulling the blanket at her feet to cover the rest of her body before I move to the kitchen to feed the cat.
While he devours a can of his special high protein wet food that smells like a pile of dead fish and crushed dreams, I get to work throwing a few English muffins and strips of bacon into the oven before dropping a pan onto the stove to fry some eggs.
My eyes flick between the pan in front of me and the couch while I flip the eggs, and the corner of my mouth quirks into a smile at the small sounds that Julia makes while she sleeps.
She’s not normally a noisy sleeper, only when she’s been drinking.
The first few times she’d done it, I’d almost expected her to start snoring, but it never happened.
Just those little squeaks and hums.
I quickly plate up our food, topping the English muffins with the eggs – Julia’s nearly burnt, the way that she likes them, and mine perfectly runny – and I set the plates onto our small dining table before filling two glasses with orange juice.
I don’t really like the stuff, but Jules told me once that orange juice and a few aspirin were the perfect hangover cure, and damn it if she wasn’t right.
Crouching between the couch and the coffee table, I gently brush her hair away from her face, my own pulling into a wistful smile as I look at her. She’s so peaceful like this, even with her eyes puffy from all the crying that she did last night.
“Breakfast’s on the table,” I whisper to her.
She stirs, pulling the blanket closer to her chin with a quiet groan, her face pinching.
“Aspirin, too,” I add with a kiss to her forehead.
It takes five more minutes of groaning and stretching before she eventually makes her way to the table and plops down into a chair, with me joining her on the opposite side.
When did that start?
We’d always sat next to each other before.
I guess there are a lot of things that we used to do differently.
“You made Monty muffins,” Julia comments with a satisfied hum as she bites into her sandwich.
“Patent pending.”
“That patent has been pending since high school,” she laughs quietly.
She’s barely halfway done with her English muffin sandwich by the time that I finish my first and stand at the stove to put together another.
I can’t stop watching her. Studying. Waiting for a shoe to drop, an axe to fall.
As I settle into my seat again and poise to take the first bite of my food, I hesitate.
“You were really upset last night.”
Her eyes snap to mine before she looks back toward the table, pulling a drink from her glass of juice.
“I don’t even remember most of the night, Lovey,” she tells me with an unconvincing shrug.
I haven’t seen her upset like that in a long time. It almost looked like what used to happen to Edie; a flashback, a panic attack, the world seeming to fucking fall to pieces around her, and no one could get any of it cleaned up.
It scared the hell out of me.
Picking up the pair of aspirin tablets in front of her, Julia throws them into her mouth and swallows them down with a gulp of her drink, wincing as she sets the glass back onto the table.
The rest of our breakfast is eaten in an uncomfortable silence, only broken by the loud ringing of my alarm, telling me that it’s time to leave for the shop. Jules’s eyes move toward my phone in unison with mine, and we break to meet each others’ gaze.
“I only have two appointments today,” I tell her. “I can move them.”
“You don’t need to,” she says with a shake of her head. “I told you, I don’t remember most of the night. It was probably just one too many drinks.”
“Okay,” I sigh. After shoving my plate into the too-full dishwasher that I make a mental note to run when I get home, I reach for her chin to press a kiss to her lips. “I love you, Jules.”
“Me too,” she smiles before offering me another quick peck.
I pull my phone from my pocket as I reach the garage, scrolling through my contacts to find her best friend’s number, and I hesitate. With one hand on my bike and the thumb of the other hovering over the small phone icon next to Aislin’s name, I look back toward the door that leads into the house.
I could stay.
Maybe I should stay.
My chest caves with the release of an unsure breath as I slip the phone into my thigh bag and the side of my curled fist whacks into the button that draws open the garage.
She’s fine, I tell myself.
We’re fine.
It’ll be a fight.
If I walk in the door and tell Jules that I had two four-hour appointments booked out today and both of them no-showed, we’ll get into a screaming match.
It won’t start as one – it will be slow.
My frustration, her annoyance, our shared disappointment; we’re both so on edge right now that those small, insignificant things will meld together into one big, ugly, unrecognizable mess of anger that we’ll aim at each other for no good reason and once again, we’ll hear the death rattle of our marriage.
Lying to my wife is not something that I do often, and it isn’t something I’m good at, but if she asks me tonight how the day went, I will lie to her to avoid that fight.
I’ll lie to her to keep her just a little closer for one more day.
Stuffing my small sketchbook into my thigh bag, I secure the strap around my leg and reach for my helmet before heading out to lock the back door.
My phone vibrates wildly from its place in my pocket, and I reach for it to see the name of Brody’s girlfriend lighting up on my phone’s screen.
“What do you want, you little monster?” I playfully grumble into the phone, hoping that this isn’t about to be the one time that it actually is Nia on the other line.
The lilted giggle that meets my ear tells me that it’s Nia’s daughter, Katie, like I thought it would be.
She’s called me every week from her mom’s phone since their visit – usually to ask me ‘what does the beach look like today?’ or to complain about her parents telling her that she’s not old enough for a tattoo, yet.
“Mommy told me to call you and tell you I like my present,” she tells me, and the corner of my mouth pulls up into a smile. “I got to have four pieces of candy already!”
“You’re gonna be obnoxious tonight,” I laugh.
“Well, I ate all my dinner,” she counters.
“Oh,” I say with a raise of my brow as I lean against my bike, “that changes everything, then, doesn’t it?”
I listen as she talks to me about her week and all of the goings-on in her life – her newest loose tooth and how much money she hopes the tooth fairy will bring her, her current favorite thing to do in her school’s playground, and what she ate for dinner tonight – laughing as I watch the evening sun disappear from the sky.
At least fifteen minutes pass before my brother can be heard for the third time, telling her that it’s time to brush her teeth and get ready for bed, to which she responds with an exasperated sigh that I’d expect to come out of a teenager.
“Be nice to your parents, they’re old,” I tell her as I pull my key from its place in my pocket. “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”
“Okay,” she pouts. “Miss you.”
“Yeah, you too, monster,” I chuckle. “G’night.”
“How’s Katie?” Connor calls to me from his perch on the seat of his bike as I clip my phone into the mount above my gas tank.
I cross the few parking spaces between us, running a hand along the bike’s lime green tank with a low whistle as I reach it.
“She’s seven going on seventeen,” I answer. Using my chin, I gesture toward his bike. “She looks clean. You off to a meet?”
He nods as he pulls up the zipper on his jacket. “You should come with me.”
My eyes scan from his bike to mine while I consider for too many moments too long taking his offer. He revs his engine with a suggestive quirk of his brow to tease me until I finally shake my head.
“I gotta get home,” I tell him with a pat to his shoulder as I move toward my own bike. Stopping as I’m just about to throw my leg over the bike, I say, “Hey, you said you saw Jules throwing up last night?”
“No, I just ran into her in the bathroom,” he says with a shake of his head.
I hum as I slide my helmet over my head, offering Connor a quick two-finger wave as he pulls out of his parking space and leaves the lot.
I don’t take my usual scenic route home tonight – and by scenic, I mean the route with which I can occasionally manage to get myself a two-second glimpse of the beach as I zoom past it.
Instead, I keep to the back roads and a series of questionably-legal detours to get myself home as quickly as possible.
Without pulling off my helmet, I dial Julia’s number as I pull into the garage and step off of my bike, making my way toward our shelving unit as the line rings.
I reach for a high shelf, shoving aside a smaller helmet to bring down hers; white, adorned with a pink bow printed at the top of it.
The suit that I pull down for her matches both in color and style.
She’d promised that, if I got her ‘cute’ gear, she’d try to get over her fears and ride with me more often.
That was almost five years ago now, and she’s only been out for a small handful of rides since.
“You’re calling me from the garage?” Jules giggles through my Cardo as the door to the house pulls open and her head pokes out of it. Her eyes move to the gear in my hands and she shakes her head. “No.”
“It’ll be good for you,” I insist.
“I’ll fall off,” she argues.
“When have I ever let you fall off?”
A playful smile crosses her face, and for just a split second, she looks the same way that she did when I brought home my first bike.
I think she slapped me across the arm fourteen times that day, squealed fifty times, and when I finally got her on the road with me, I couldn’t count the number of times that she screamed.
“You have to go slow,” she tells me as she finally breaches the doorway and steps closer to me. “And don’t do any tricks, okay?”
“I promise,” I laugh. “Both wheels on the ground and both feet on the pegs.”
I help her into her suit, pulling the zipper to secure it into place while she ties a pair of low-hanging braids into her hair. As I gently slide her helmet into place and secure the strap beneath her chin, she reaches up to slap my visor shut with a giggle.
Hooking my fingers underneath her helmet, I pull her closer to me and raise my visor to offer her a warning look, met with only another giggle in response.
“Please don’t let me fall off,” she pleads.
Moving my hand to the top of her helmet, I playfully give her head a shake before pushing down her visor and moving toward my bike. Jules stops to blow a kiss to the guardian bell secured onto the pegs for good luck before hopping on behind me.
She’s bought one for every bike that I’ve owned, but like this bike, I think this bell might be my favorite.
It’s a simple silver bell, embossed with a web and a spider on the front of it.
Jules hates it; she’s not a bug girl, outside of butterflies and the occasional ladybug, but she was happy to put it on the bike for me.
Even though I keep to my promise as we start down the road, keeping my speed at the limit, her arms are wrapped so tightly around my waist while we ride that I feel like one of those squeeze toys whose eyes pop out when you apply too much pressure to their bodies.
Her body presses firmly against mine, and even in her fear, her fingers flex against the fabric of my shirt every now and again. There’s excitement somewhere underneath all of the rest of it; like I knew there would be.
It’s one of the things I like so much about riding. There’s something about it that rewires my nervous system, even just for an hour or two, and it reminds me just how alive I am. The risk, the reward, the fucking thrill of it all.
“Lovey, I have a question,” Julia’s voice crackles through my Cardo, and I offer a pat to her hands to let her know that I’m listening. “Why do you always make me wear this ridiculous suit?”
My hand moves from hers to rest at the outside of her thigh, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” I tell her.
The line between us is quiet for a moment, eventually broken by the sound of her blowing out a breath, seemingly directly into the mic, as she leans against me.
“You’ve always been my protector,” she says.