Chapter 10
CONNOR
Stepping out of my riding suit, I toss it over the seat of my bike, following with my helmet, and I let out a sigh. I pull my arm across my chest and twist my body, swapping to do the same with the other side before I shift my weight from leg to leg, stretching out all of my aching muscles.
Only when the feeling returns to my ass, do I finally stalk up the small path that leads to the cream-colored mobile home in front of me. Navy blue shutters line the windows and a fresh coat of paint to match highlights the railing for the steps that lead to the front door.
Pulling open the screen door, I rap my knuckles against the solid one behind it. As it opens, my younger sister stands behind it, wearing confusion on her face.
“Uh— hi?” She laughs.
Irina stands nearly a foot shorter than me, with her hair dyed a soft ginger color and held in a bun tied at the top of her head. A towel is hung over her shoulder and flour is sprinkled all down the front of her.
Using my chin to gesture toward her clothing, I say, “Sorry to interrupt.”
Her hand drops onto her hip, her head cocking to the side as her fingers tap along the door frame.
“What are you running from?”
“I just rode for six hours,” I say with a sigh as I push my way past her and into the house. “Let me go pee before you start in on me.”
I haven’t been here in a long time – too long, probably. I should have made more of an effort to come see her in the past couple of years, but I’ve always made an excuse. It was too far, she didn’t need her big brother barging into her life, whatever she was doing was none of my business.
I’m lucky that she didn’t cut me off completely for never showing up.
Despite how long it’s been since my last visit, the inside of the house is nearly unchanged.
A soft microfiber couch still sits at the center of the living room, sandwiched on either end by two small end tables. The TV is in its same place on the small shelving unit that faces the couch. She still has those ridiculous cartoonish paintings that she loves so much hung on the walls.
Almost everything is exactly as I remember it, even my sister.
“Is Grady home?” I shout to her from the bathroom as I scrub soap against my palms.
“Nope,” she hollers. “You have no buffer between you and whatever it is you’re avoiding.”
With a humorless laugh, I make my way out to the kitchen, where Irina sits perched on a bar stool with her chin resting on her folded hands. An expectant eyebrow raises in my direction as I reach the opposite end of the counter, dropping my forearms onto its surface.
“What did you do?” She probes.
I heave a sigh, pushing my fingers through my hair.
“I slept with someone I shouldn’t have.”
Pulling in an exasperated breath, she leans back in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest. “That’s your MO, Connie,” she tells me. “That’s literally just what you do.”
“Not like this,” I argue. “I just need to crash on your couch for a couple of days while I figure this out.”
“Mi casa es su casa,” she tells me. “But you get to wash the dishes.”
My eyes move to the other end of the kitchen, where a freshly-baked cake is sitting on a cooling rack, and ingredients that look like they’ll later become frosting sit tightly packed together next to a large mixing bowl.
“Whose birthday?” I ask, gesturing toward the stash with my head.
“Our neighbor,” she tells me. “She’s ancient and doesn’t have anyone to come see her. We were gonna take her a cake and some flowers.”
A smile spreads across my face and I reach forward to offer a few proud pats to the top of her head.
I worried a lot that I would screw her up when we were younger.
That I was in over my head and destined to send her down a path that would ruin her chance at a future.
I had no business trying to take care of a kid her age, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that I would have let her become property of the state and stay in foster care.
I should have done more than just pick up the phone. She told me she was moving in with some guy I’d never heard of before, and I should have come out here to meet him before I did. A phone call shouldn’t have felt like enough.
Grown woman or not, I should have taken the time to come out here more than I have.
“She’s married,” I finally say as I reach for a cake-crusted pan to bring it toward the sink.
A rolled-up towel whips across the back of my head. “You’re an idiot,” she hisses.
“I didn’t ask for an opinion,” I grumble.
“You asked for a couch,” she counters. “The opinion comes free.”
Carting a massive bag of powdered sugar from her pantry to the counter, she nods toward my phone, flipped onto its face on the counter beside me.
“You did that before you came out – the guilty, hiding-my-screen thing,” she comments. “You’re texting her, aren’t you?”
“Finish your cake,” I tell her, quickly reaching for my phone to slide it into my back pocket.
“I always figured I’d be the more messed-up one,” she teases as she fills a measuring cup with milk.
Yeah, that makes two of us.
I’ve been racking my brain all day, trying to pull forward a single moment in time in which I’d felt so torn before. Just one moment; even just a few seconds. A moment like that doesn’t exist.
I know that what I’m doing is wrong. I haven’t deluded myself into thinking into existence some sort of grey area with any of this.
With every text that I send Julia and every time I get hard thinking about her, the blood in my veins replaces itself with a sharp, burning guilt. Guilt over lying to my best friend, over not telling him that he’s being cheated on, over being the one that she’s cheating with.
Every single part of it reeks of betrayal, and I can’t turn off the sting of it.
But I can’t turn off the part of me that wants her, either.
The house is quiet when I wake up, and it takes me a second to gather my bearings. While quiet during the evening hours, my place is almost always filled with some kind of noise early in the mornings, when we’re all scrambling to get fed, get dressed, and get to work on time.
I nearly roll off of the couch as I stretch my arms and legs as far as I’m able to, before I head into the kitchen to get a plate and a slice of cake left over from the old lady across the way from Irina and Grady’s place.
The two of them will be gone for most of the day, each of them off to school and work earlier than I managed to peel myself off of the couch this morning.
I don’t mind having the place to myself; it’ll be good for me.
The last thing that I need is for my sister to be in my ear, psychoanalyzing everything that I do and all of my relationships – or lack thereof.
Taking my plate back to the couch, I drop onto the cushion and scoop a spoonful of the dessert into my mouth before reaching for the TV remote to turn on some crappy reality television that I don’t actually care about.
Mindless. Mindless is good.
Mindless will keep me distracted and keep me out of trouble.
Or so I think, at least.
I last all of two hours before I pull my phone from its secure place in my pocket to read the messages Tripp sent me.
I quickly type out my response, hesitating for just a minute too long before I finally send it to him.
Is that a lie?
It feels a lot like I’m lying to him.
I don’t know if I’ll go back in a couple of days. I don’t know if I can go back at all.
Once is one thing; a mistake, fueled by alcohol and emotion.
There is no explaining away the messages and pictures I’ve been sending back and forth with his wife.
There’s no excusing the lunchtime visits to have sex in her car or the conversations on the phone when I know Tripp isn’t there.
There is no making this okay, making it right.
It will never make any sense to him, and he’ll hate me for it.
A message from Julia waits unopened only a few threads beneath Tripp’s, the preview reading ‘When are you coming…’
Instead of opening the message, I mute the notifications for the thread and slip my phone back into my pocket, taking my plate with me to the kitchen to deposit it into the sink.
After a quick change of clothes, I make my way out of the house and toward the park’s community center, which is blissfully empty at this time of day. Normally, I like noise. I like chaos. Today, though, I just want to put some music on my phone and tune out the rest of the world.
I need some peace of mind.
The gym equipment in the center offers me that peace, even if just for an hour. I don’t check my phone. I’m able to pretend that Julia Montgomery doesn’t exist. It’s just me and my aching muscles and a city that I haven’t yet made a mistake in.
As soon as that hour ends and I answer my ringing my phone, the mask of my delusion is gone with it.
“You didn’t answer my text,” Julia says.
Her voice is like sugar pouring through the speaker; sweet and addictive.
There isn’t anything inherently sexual about what she’s saying or the way that she’s saying it, and still, the tip of my tongue finds its way to my lip, and all I can taste is her pussy, and all I can think about is how badly I want to bury my face in it.
“It feels weird to take a lunch by myself,” she chuckles. “It feels weird to take a lunch and actually eat lunch.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Listen, I’ll be back in a few days. We can…talk.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
I drag my hand along the length of my face, groaning. “He’s your husband, and we’re lying to him, Julia. We’ve taken this too far. I can’t keep lying to my best friend.”
The line is quiet while she absorbs what I’ve said. The only sound that comes through the receiver is that of a long sigh that she lets out.
“I know,” she finally breathes, her voice thick with shame. “It’s complicated now, though. I— Connor, I really—”
“Please don’t finish that sentence,” I plead. “I have to go. We’ll talk when I’m back.”
I hang up the phone before she has the opportunity to say anything more. I’m not sure if I don’t want to hear what she has to say, or if I just can’t hear it.
As soon as I’m back inside my sister’s house, I turn off my phone and tuck it away in the hopes of forgetting that it exists; and by extension, everything else that I left back in Miami.
I find myself snooping through Irina’s house, and I try to convince myself that it’s because it’s my job to be her nosy, annoying, big brother, but I know that it’s really just because I feel guilty.
I feel guilty for not visiting her more often.
I feel guilty for the mistakes I made while I was trying to raise her.
I feel guilty for showing up now, of all times, because I need her.
When I reach the bedroom, I survey the messy, cluttered top of the dresser.
There are at least ten different types of body sprays and lotions, a handful of clothes – likely rejected options from her dressing this morning, and a collection of photos in mismatched frames that sit next to a stack of psychology textbooks.
I pick up each of the photos to inspect them – some from outings she’s had with her boyfriend, a collage of photos with a group of her girlfriends, one of the two of us at her high school graduation.
The only one not covered in a layer of dust is an old family photo.
Irina is sitting happily on our mom’s lap, the two of them sharing one of those old fold-out beach loungers that no one actually finds comfortable.
My hair is dyed black and hanging in my face, hiding my eyes, but I’m wearing a smile.
My dad’s hand is resting on my shoulder.
This was our last vacation together as a family. I didn’t know it when this photo was taken, but two weeks later, I would come home after staying out for hours past my curfew, and I’d find them dead; and the last thing I would have ever said to them was that they were shitty parents.
The last thing that I said to them was a lie.
Pressing a kiss to the frame, I carefully set the photo back in its place among the clutter, and I make my way back out to the living room to drown out the noise in my mind with more crappy TV.
Mindlessness, once again.