Chapter 24 #3
Tripp’s hand tangles firmly in my hair to hold me in place, my tongue sliding into his wife’s mouth. A strangled groan forces itself from his throat as his cock pulses against mine, and the sound of my best friend coming is enough to send me flying right over the edge with him.
I part from my kiss with Julia, pressing my forehead against hers as I pant through my orgasm and my cum spills onto Tripp’s stomach to join his own.
Stunned silence fills the room as the three of us breathe together, none of us sure what exactly it is that just happened between us.
I quickly reach for the box of tissues on the bedside table to my left, pulling too many tissues from it before balling them in my hand and bringing them to Tripp’s stomach.
“Let me—”
“I got it,” he insists, his hand enveloping mine before he snatches the wad of tissue from me.
His hold on me lingers for a few moments too long, his eyes holding mine before snapping down toward his stomach as he wipes himself clean.
Jules is perched next to him, her expression unreadable. Her ankles cross over one another, her thighs pinching together as if hiding some sudden shame at the realization of what just happened between us.
Unwittingly, I scan each of our naked bodies, sweat-covered and worn, and my chest heaves with a hard exhale before I push myself off of the mattress and reach for my underwear to slide my legs back into them.
“Where are you going?” Jules asks me.
Tripp still won’t look at me. Maybe he can’t.
“To bed,” I answer too curtly to be making a casual statement. With a quick glance over my shoulder as I cross the room, I pull my lips into a tight smile. “Night.”
My hand moves to shield my eyes from the harsh rays of the morning sun as I step through the sliding glass door which leads to the balcony of our hotel room.
Shaking the bottle of ready-to-drink coffee in my hand, I crack open the lid and pull a sip from it, grimacing at its artificial hazelnut flavor. Tripp scoffs with a shake of his head as he slips a cigarette between his lips, bracing his forearms against the balcony railing as he lights it.
“Are we gonna talk about last night,” I wonder out loud as I rest against the wall to his right, “or…?”
“We were drunk, and I still hate you,” he grumbles. “No conversation necessary.”
“We weren’t that drunk,” I argue, “and I’m not so sure that you do hate me.”
His brow quirks, his head angling just slightly in my direction, though his eyes stay glued to the building ahead of him as he pulls in a drag from his cigarette.
“You could have killed me for what I did to you. You could have made me sleep outside when you saw me in the room,” I tell him. “I know what it looks like when you hate someone, Tripp, and you don’t hate me. You might want to, but you don’t. I don’t think you can.”
His gaze shifts to me in his peripheral with a shake of his head so subtle that I could almost miss it. Blowing out another stream of smoke, he flicks his spent cigarette over the balcony’s railing, bringing his forearms back down to rest against the warm metal.
Uncomfortable silence hangs between us once again, seemingly our new normal, as he pulls another cigarette from the pack and rests the filter between his lips.
He doesn’t reach for his lighter right away; instead, his face angles toward the warm sun overhead and back into the glass windows of our hotel room.
“It’s not that you had sex with her,” he finally says. “People fuck the wrong people all the time. Shit happens. It’s that you kept fucking her, and then you fucking lied to me about it. You let me stress out about it for weeks.”
“I screwed up. I’m not gonna try to make excuses for it.” My hand fidgets with the lid of my drink; screwing and unscrewing the lid, my fingertips tapping against the flimsy metal. “I have feelings for her.”
“I know you do.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck, I know that, too, Schepp,” he barks. “I know you know that you fucked up. I know you know that you should have told me. Doesn’t mean I can just act like it didn’t happen.”
Finally bringing his lighter to the end of his cigarette, he lights it with a shake of his head. He doesn’t pull in a drag. He just holds the lit cigarette between his fingers, occasionally flicking the ash over the railing behind him.
“So what was that, last night, then?” I brave asking.
“We’d just spent three hours talking about you,” he scoffs. “We had too many drinks, got too emotional, shit got weird, and it’s never happening again.”
My brow quirks at that, my weight shifting onto one foot.
“Right,” I nod slowly and disbelievingly, “the way you kissed me definitely screamed ‘this is a one-off.’”
Without giving him time to do much more than shoot an annoyed glare in my direction, I step back into the hotel room and slide the door closed behind me.
Julia’s things are all laid out on her and Tripp’s bed, organized into piles and ready to be packed. She offers a smile as she steps out of the bathroom with an arm full of hair tools and products. Her eyes meet mine before snapping down toward her luggage with a blush crawling across her cheeks.
I reach for my own suitcase to pull out a change of clothes, which I slip into next to my bed.
Julia’s eyes flick to me one more time as she settles a curling iron between two pairs of shoes that she didn’t even wear.
“Are you driving back with us?”
I look through the door behind me to Tripp, still standing at the balcony with the cigarette tucked between his fingers, then back to his smiling wife.
“Yeah,” I nod definitively. “I am.”