Chapter 26 #2
I offer a nod, chuckling quietly while she runs me through her week and the macaroni and cheese that she had for dinner – which my brother doesn’t make nearly as well as her Aunt Edie does, according to her incredibly-refined palate. I’m kind of surprised that he learned the recipe for her.
I listen more than I talk while she tells me about a fight she’s having with another girl in her second-grade class; a temporary trade gone wrong and a toy not returned to her when it was supposed to be.
My eyes move to Connor while she talks, watching as he stuffs all of his things into his backpack and slips into his riding jacket, pulling the zipper closed to let the smooth leather hug his body.
“Did your friend tell you she was sorry?” I ask my niece, though my focus is glued ahead of me.
Connor turns over his shoulder to glance in my direction, quirking a brow at my question.
“Yeah, but it still hurts my feelings,” she grumbles.
“That’s how it goes sometimes, monster,” I tell her. “You’re gonna piss your friends off, too, and if you want to stay friends with them, you’ll have to tell them you’re sorry and do what you can to try to make it better, right?”
My eyes meet Connor’s again as he leans against his piercing table, crossing his arms over his chest. He smirks at me, not making an ounce of effort to hide the amusement in his features; and I don’t have to wonder what it is that he’s saying to me.
I have the emotional maturity of a pissed off seven-year-old girl.
“Listen,” I say to Katie, “if you want me to fly out there and take the training wheels off this girl’s bike so she falls off and winds up looking like a squished bug, I’ll do it.” Not letting my eyes leave Connor’s, I add, “But I think you should see if you can forgive her, first.”
She groans into the receiver, which tells me that I’m probably the third adult out of three to tell her the same thing today, and that cool Uncle T-Mo has officially dropped the ball on being the cool uncle.
At the sound of her mom’s voice in the background, telling her that it’s time to hang up and get ready for bed, we quickly say our goodbyes so she can get off of the phone.
“That seems like some pretty solid advice,” Connor teases as I hang up the call. “A squished bug?”
“Second day I’m at their house, Katie comes into the room, stares at my beat-to-hell face, and says ‘I think your face is what a bug’s face looks like after you squish ‘em,’” I laugh.
“You’re really good with her,” he tells me, slipping a hand into one of his gloves. After slipping on the second, he’s quiet for a while, the wheels visibly turning in his head while he watches me too closely. “Is it okay to ask you if you think you’d ever do it again?”
Strapping my thigh bag into place, I blow out a heavy breath.
It’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times and a conversation Jules and I have never had; whether because we were too afraid to or because we didn’t want to scratch at an already-festering wound.
“You can ask, I just don’t know the answer,” I tell him. “There’s this look Jules gets on her face sometimes when she sees a baby - like she wants to, and yeah, I’d like to get to do all the dad stuff; but I think after Paxton, we’ve both just been too scared to risk it again.”
Moving his fingers to the back of his neck, gesturing to the space in which I tattooed a set of initials into my wife’s skin, he says, “So PJM is…”
“Paxton James Montgomery.”
“That’s a good name,” he says, the corner of his mouth ticking up. “That’s a guy we’d take riding with us.”
My head dips as I hide my smile while I pull on my helmet; I’m not sure why.
As he reaches for his own helmet, Connor pauses.
“I’d do it, too, if I got the chance to,” he says. “I thought I screwed up with Irina, but she’s doing great. Healthy relationship, headed into a real career…the girl’s got it.”
I flip open my visor, my brow furrowing as I look at him. “You thought you fucked her up?”
“I was eighteen and trying to raise a seven year old,” he chuckles. “Of course I did.”
“Nah,” I say with a shake of my head. “The only reason she’s as well-rounded as she is because you only fucked up normal brother stuff like you were supposed to.”
“That’s why you like me,” he says with his eyes softening, using his head to gesture toward the back door. As we walk through it together, he adds, “Our screwed-up pieces line up.”
“The jury’s still out on if I like you or not,” I grumble.
With his head turning over his shoulder, and through the space in his helmet, a smile reaches his eyes.
“You like me.”
It’s an unspoken, almost instinctual ritual, the way that we leave the shop together and climb onto our bikes.
While we ride, with no real destination in mind, I find myself stuck in my head, trying to sort through thoughts and feelings that I haven’t been able to make sense of.
I love my wife, and I trust her; except for the times that I can’t.
I miss my best friend, but I hate him; except for the times that I don’t.
Two out of six, a voice says in my head.
Connor’s voice.
I shake my head to force him out of it, snapping my gaze to my right to find him looking at me, too. Centering myself again on the road ahead of me, I roll back my accelerator and tuck in to the fuel tank to slide up ahead of him.
My heart hammers, and I slam a fist against my chest in an effort to make it stop.
Connor’s bike glides up next to mine moments afterward, and a gloved hand points off the side of the road, maybe a few hundred feet away from us.
“Pull off here,” he orders through our comms unit.
I follow him off of the shoulder and onto a patch of overgrown grass, a few palm trees of varying ages littered throughout. People don’t tend to stop here; they usually just drive right through. One of those strips of road that tends to be left neglected.
As we climb off of our bikes, Connor reaches for the strap beneath his chin to pull his helmet off of his head.
“Take off your helmet.”
“What?”
“Helmet,” he says, carefully dropping his to the ground with his gloves following shortly after.
I don’t move at first; instead, I study him through the dark tint of my visor as he pushes his fingers back through his messy auburn waves. When his hands move toward my chin to take hold of the strap there, I take hold of his wrists to push them away from me.
“I got it, alright? Jesus.”
My helmet meets the ground next to his as I pull it off of my head, and now there’s no barrier between us. It’s just my eyes on his and his on mine.
The air around us is quiet, with nothing but the sound of screaming cicadas in the trees and the slamming of my heart against my eardrums.
My fist balls at my side, my fingers flexing with every inch of my body on fire, wanting to knock him across the jaw to stop the tightness pushing in on my stomach from every direction.
“The first time that I liked another guy, I hated him,” he finally tells me, after too many moments too long.
“Every time I saw him, I just wanted to tear out his throat. I think there was a part of me that might have been afraid of him; or of what his presence in my head meant, and I didn’t want him there, taking up as much real estate as he did. ”
His hand finds its way to the zipper of his jacket, gently tugging it down as he encroaches on my personal space, filling it with the smell of gasoline and cedarwood.
“Then, that same guy pushed me up against a wall and kissed me, and all the noise stopped.” Reaching for the bottom of his t-shirt, he tugs it free from its tucked-in position behind his waistband.
“All of that anger, the jealousy, the need I felt to hurt him…gone. It was quiet for the first time in months.”
“Nice story,” I tell him, “but as you pointed out, I’ve already kissed you.”
“And you liked it,” he challenges, “and now you don’t know what to do with that.
That’s why you can’t decide if you love me or hate me.
That’s why you can’t decide if you want to knock me out or fuck me.
You invited me into your bed, and I don’t think you expected to like having me there as much as you did. ”
I didn’t.
I wanted him to be miserable. To be there, watching, hearing, and feeling while my wife came for me, and I wanted him to hate it. I wanted it to hurt him.
And then I fucking ordered him into our bed.
I swallow hard as he takes hold of my hands, sliding them underneath the loose fabric of his tee to press against his sides.
My thumb trails mindlessly against the thick scar low on his right side, the lone reminder of his first and only real accident.
It was the one that made him take wearing his gear seriously, and it’s probably part of why he gets on me so much about not wearing any of my own.
His nose presses against mine as he moves a hand to grip onto the back of my neck.
“The question I think you have to ask yourself is: do you hate me, Tripp? Or do you want me?”
My hands slowly trail up the length of his body, my heart hammering like an echo chamber in my head that pulses in my vision.
I’ve only ever felt something like this twice before. The first time that I had sex with Julia, in the dim lamplight that filled her high school bedroom; and again that night in our hotel room.
My nose brushes against his, and my lips beg me to close the distance between us, but I hesitate.
“I won’t kiss you first,” he whispers. “It has to be you.”
A palm presses hard against his chest. His exterior is cool and collected, but the beat of his heart betrays the truth resting just beneath his skin. It feels the same way mine does. Slamming.
Shit.
I don’t offer myself another second to hesitate. Taking him by the back of his head, my lips crash against his. His hands clamp onto either side of my face, and as his tongue slides into my mouth to swirl against mine, it forces a whine from low in my chest.
Every twisted, confusing thought is forced from the cloud of my mind, and the anger I’ve felt for him all day melts into nothingness. The only thing that I can think about is the way that he tastes and how fucking right it feels to have his mouth on mine.
My teeth graze his lower lip, tugging at it. As my tongue meets his once again, I push him backward, earning a satisfied grunt as his back hits the trunk of the tree behind him. I brace a hand against the rough bark, letting it scratch against my palm while the other cups his face.
This moment, untainted by the haze of alcohol, sparks in my veins like a bolt of electricity.
Connor’s hand reaches for mine, bringing my palm against the hardened bulge struggling against the fabric of his riding jeans.
I let my skin glide against the length of it to let my fingertips meet the head of his cock, adding pressure to force a groan from his lips as I fight the need to reach behind his waistband and touch him, skin to skin.
I let it linger there for too long before bringing it to the back of his head, tangling my fingers into the mess of his hair. His hands move underneath my shirt, his palms grazing a path upward toward my chest, and he pushes me with just enough force to make my lips leave his.
“See,” he says as we part, breathing heavily with his forehead pressed against mine. A smirk crawls across his face as his fingers meet his lips to wipe mine off of them. “I told you, you like me.”
In the years since we met, Connor’s shown me on more than just a few occasions that he knows me, sometimes better than I know myself.
Little things, like food that sounded gross on the menu, but he forced me to order anyway, because he knew that I’d like it.
Talking me down from piercings I thought I’d wanted, but he knew that I didn’t have the patience to heal.
He’s right about this, too.
Fuck.
Are we actually going to do this?