Chapter 20
JULIA
Silence.
For seven days, my house has been silent.
No engines revving on the driveway, no humming over a skillet filled with bacon, no purring at the foot of the bed or chirping at the birds just outside of the bedroom window.
Just raw, unending, agonizing silence.
My heart and my mind have been loud; screaming, pleading.
The only things that I want to silence, but I can’t seem to shut off.
Buried under a thick comforter, I reach to the tray next to me for a cookie and I take a small bite, letting a clump of sugary blue frosting fall onto the pillow with a sigh.
I thought he would have come home by now. I thought that we would talk, maybe scream at each other for a while – not loud enough to have the police show up at our door, but loud enough to get it out of our systems. Maybe we would throw things at each other.
Something.
My phone has been on its charger since the moment that I got home from that church, just waiting for my husband’s name to light up on the screen, but it hasn’t. He hasn’t called me, he hasn’t texted. Nia won’t give me any information, other than to tell me that he’s at their house and he’s safe.
I feel like I’m drowning.
My heart has sunk into the depths of my chest and no matter how hard it tries, it can’t seem to claw its way back to shore.
A series of loud and excitable meows filter up into the bedroom and I tear away the blankets covering my legs, unbothered by the tray holding my chocolates and cookies being dumped onto the floor in my excitement.
Tripp is locking the front door behind him as I barrel down the stairs toward him, and he turns to stop me by putting a hand up in front of himself with a shake of his head and a quiet ‘don’t.’
He looks terrible.
I don’t know why, but I thought that after a week, he would have healed up and he would look like Tripp again; but he doesn’t. His lip is still split at the side, now scabbed over. The bruising around the cut on his cheekbone is still dark and angry, now with yellowed skin around the edges.
His eyes…
His beautiful eyes are shadowed by faint green and purple bruising, and they’re tired.
So tired.
“Tripp,” I whisper.
Everything in my body aches. Not being able to touch him or wrap my arms around him and make sure that he’s really here is so physically painful that I can hardly stand it.
“I thought about leaving you,” he tells me.
My hand reaches for the space above my heart on instinct, clawing at my sleep shirt.
“I walked out of here ready to come back with papers and tell you to sign them, but…” Heaving a sigh, he drags his hand down his face.
“Tell me the house was empty while I was gone.”
“Aislin came over on the second day,” I tell him truthfully. “She came to get my appointment schedule; I needed someone to take my clients. No one else was here.”
Some of the tension in his face releases, letting his sadness show through, and I take a tentative step closer to him. I inch toward him as if he’s a bomb that I’ve been tasked with defusing, carefully moving closer until I’m near enough to take his bruised face in my hands.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” I whisper with a trembling voice.
My thumbs gently stroke his skin and the rough stubble lining his jaw. I don’t think I’ve seen him with anything more than overnight growth since he decided to try out wearing a mustache after his high school graduation.
He hasn’t been taking care of himself.
Closing the distance between us, I press my lips to his. His fingers work their way up the base of my neck and into my hair, oily and pulled into a messy bun so I wouldn’t have to wash it. I could nearly cry when he hums as his tongue slides against mine.
It feels like us again.
It feels like we’ll climb up the stairs and fall into our bed and the world around us and all of its problems will melt away.
But I won’t get that lucky, will I?
“Jules,” he says, putting his hands on my shoulders to push me away from him. “I need you to tell me everything.”
“I can’t,” I tell him with a shake of my head. My fingers slide into his belt loops, holding onto him as if he’ll disappear the second I let go of him. “It’ll hurt you.”
“I’m already hurt,” he says with one side of his mouth pulling into a tight line. His hands cup my face, and he leans toward me to press his forehead to mine while he speaks. “I need to know when, and who started it.”
His voice breaks as it drops to nothing more than a whisper, and his grip on me tightens.
“I want to forgive you, and I want to understand why, so I need to know.”
“I can’t,” I tell him with a shake of my head.
“Julia,” he pleads.
My hands wrap tightly around his wrists, my eyes squeezing shut as I brace against the pain that claws at the inside of my chest. The last time I heard my husband sound like this was just over a month before we started down the road to Miami.
It wasn’t my name that clawed its way past his lips in an agonized plea that day, it was his mother’s. He’d sworn up and down for years that he hated his parents; and maybe that was true, but when they told him that he wasn’t a part of their family anymore, it broke him.
Now I’ve broken him, too.
“I begged him,” I finally admit, my voice breaking as my throat goes raw with the threat of tears. I can’t bring myself to open my eyes, but I feel Tripp’s body deflate against mine. “I was drunk and we’d been fighting and I begged him to do it. Lovey, I’m so sorry. I never meant—”
Feeling him pull away from me, I open my eyes and watch as he pivots, bracing his hands against his knees. Lifting a hand, he scrubs it down his jaw, looking at me as if I’ve just shot him point-blank in the chest.
It might have been less painful if I had.
“The night you got sick?” I nod. Tripp’s features contort into agony and he looks as if he may be sick. “I took you home because you fucked him? I was washing my best friend off of you?”
“Lovey, please,” I plead. Tripp sits on the floor, lowering himself onto his back with his knees raised, and I drop onto the floor before climbing on top of him, leaning forward to rest my head against his shoulder. “I won’t try to excuse it; I can’t. I’m just sorry.”
My lips meet the side of his neck, peppering kisses up to his jaw until I reach his lips.
“You have to know that I didn’t plan it,” I beg, pressing my lips to his.
As I pull open his belt and unzip his jeans, my hand slides into his boxer briefs, seeking out his cock to offer it a gentle stroke. Tripp’s hand takes hold of mine as he leaves our kiss, breathing hard against my skin.
“I’m so pissed at you right now,” he chokes. “Don’t get me hard.”
In spite of his protest, his fingers flex against mine, holding them securely in place while I tease and stroke his cock. His eyes drift shut as it swells in my hand, and I quickly work off my sleep shorts to toss them aside.
As I trail my finger along the underside of his cock, I remind myself of the presence of my name tattooed there, a gesture he’d surprised me with early into our marriage.
Only his arms and his chest were covered in artwork at that time, and now my name is surrounded by so many other pieces; but it’s still there.
He’s still mine.
We moan in unison as I pull my panties to the side and slide him inside of me, leaning forward to brace my palms on the floor next to his head.
“I love you,” I tell him as my hips grind against his.
Tripp’s hands move to rest on either side of my face and, though the half circle on his palm has been covered up for years, I can feel it burning against my cheek with the memory of our first kiss. A sting rises to the heel of my palm as his tongue moves against mine. Right now, we’re us again.
Tripp and Jules.
Lovey and baby.
The runaway Montgomerys.
I’m not sure if he’s making love or making hate to me right now, but I know how thankful I am to finally feel his body meld with mine again. To finally feel him fill me up and to have his body bring pleasure to mine.
The night that he took me out on our very first date, he promised that he wasn’t going to try to have sex with me, that he wasn’t that kind of guy, and he kept his word.
Three hours and what felt like endless conversation later, I was inviting him to my house and sneaking him into my bedroom so we could give each other our virginities.
I think we fell in love with each other that night.
To have lost him for as long as I have…
My hands slide beneath his t-shirt to rest against his chest, feeling his heartbeat pounding beneath them.
“Look at me,” I plead as he moves to take handfuls of my ass, guiding the movement of my hips in the rhythm that he needs to make him feel good. “Tripp, please.”
His eyes meet mine, pain and pleasure fighting for dominance behind them. I crash into his mouth with my own, melting into him until the metallic taste of blood hits my tongue as the wound on his lip reopens.
“I want to hate you,” he groans against my lips.
“Love me anyway,” I beg him. My palms massage against the flesh of his sides, his head falling backward against the floor with a pained sound, and I shift them away from his wounded ribs. “Just please don’t stop loving me.”
The first time that I had sex with Tripp, it was quick and messy and we fumbled a lot, but we finished together and it felt like something in the world shifted for us in that moment.
The last time that we had sex, neither of us finished. It was over before it even had a chance to start, and we were fighting within minutes. After that fight, he pulled a spare blanket and pillow from our closet, carted them downstairs, and never slept in our bed with me again.
Now, as my body presses against his and our lips meet, all I can hope for is what we had that first time. His hand moves to grip me by the back of the head as he deepens our kiss with a strangled moan, and his hips drive hard against mine.
“Jules,” he whines with a heaving chest, “I’m gonna come.”
I know my husband’s body. I’ve shared mine with him thousands of times over the past sixteen years. He doesn’t need to tell me, but I know why he is: a warning, the risk of a heartache that neither one of us would survive again.
He’s giving me the chance to leave, but I don’t want it.
Instead, I grind my hips against his, forcing him deep inside of me as my body tightens around his cock with a loud moan.
He stills, pulsing inside of me as we come together, and as we come down, the only sound in the room is that of our unified breathing.
We’re connected again.
Our breathing, the beating of our hearts, and maybe even the wounds in them.
It’s all perfectly in sync.
I can’t remember the last time that Tripp and I sat down and talked to each other.
We used to be so good at it. We could bare our souls to one another and there was no question if the other person understood what we were saying. I’d never felt as connected to another person as I did to Tripp Montgomery.
His soul saw mine, mine saw his, and it didn’t need to make sense to anyone else in the world, because it made perfect sense for us.
Tripp sits across from me at our kitchen table, his chair pulled off to the side. His belt is left open, his jeans only pulled back into place, but neither zipped nor buttoned.
My shorts are still on the living room floor, the only thing between my skin and my chair being the thin fabric of an old pair of granny panties that I usually only reserve for laundry day.
Tripp is slouched in his seat with his forearms resting on his knees as the weight of our conversation bears down on us like an immovable object.
We’ve spent the last hour dissecting our every wound, tearing into pieces of our past that neither of us have ever wanted to revisit, but that we’ve only hurt ourselves by avoiding.
“I lost you,” he finally says after too many beats of silence. His head dips slightly, and when I open my mouth to speak, he quiets me with a subtle raising of his hand. “I think it happened when Paxton died. He died, and so did parts of us.”
He clears his throat, chewing at the corner of his lip. Scooting my chair closer to his, I reach for his hand, holding his tattooed knuckles to my lips as my elbows rest on the table.
“I think we were both so focused on just trying to get through it that we let go of each other,” he tells me. “I should have done more to hold onto you. I could have done more.”
I quickly and gently swipe a tear away from the corner of my eye, sniffling.
“What are you talking about?” I ask him with a furrowed brow. “You’re the only reason I survived it.”
Tripp stayed by my side constantly after we lost Paxton. He flew in his older brother, who may as well be my own flesh and blood, to help us because we couldn’t turn to our parents, and I was hardly able to function.
My husband bathed me when I couldn’t bring myself to do it on my own. He sat on the floor in front of the couch and spoon fed me applesauce, just like he’d done for his sister when she was living through her own grief in their childhood.
He held my hand while I delivered our son, and he cried with me as he told me how sorry and how proud he was.
He put me on a life raft and stayed in the water.
He let himself drown so I wouldn’t.
Releasing his hand, I move to sit on his lap, wrapping my arms tightly around him as I bury my face into the crook of his neck. I don’t expect them to, but his arms snake around my waist and he squeezes me just as tightly in return.
Minutes pass in near silence while we hold each other, the only sound in the house being that of the bell inside Drumstick’s toy jingling as he chases it around the living room.
As I finally pull my head up and away from the safe and comforting warmth of his skin, he reaches to brush away my fallen tears with his thumb.
“I have to think about some things,” he tells me quietly, “but I’m home, okay? Just…I swear to God, Jules, don’t lie to me again.”
“I won’t,” I promise him with a shake of my head.
What he has to think about, I’m not sure of, and right now, I don’t know that I care. He’s home.
Taking his hand in mine, I move to pull him with me up the stairs and toward our bedroom. It’s a mess in here; blankets disheveled on top of our mattress, my snacks now littering the bedding, most of the furniture still in disarray.
In spite of that, we climb into our bed together. As I drop onto my side, I’m pulled close to my husband’s body and for the first time in too long, he holds me tightly.
Kissing me.
Fucking me.
Making the world melt away.