Chapter 13
TRIPP
The house is silent when I walk inside, and every light is off, save the small one that sits just above the stove. The same light that Jules and I have fought over at least ten times in the past six months.
With a heavy breath, I drop my helmet onto the chair next to the door and quietly trek up the stairs to our bedroom, where Julia and Drumstick are already curled up together.
It only takes a few steps to close the distance between the doorway and our bed, and I carefully drop onto it to study my sleeping wife.
My lips pull into a tight line as I use my index finger to push a stray section of hair behind her ear.
I need to apologize to her. I shouldn’t have blown up at her the way that I did, but god, it felt like I was a ticking time bomb set to explode.
I still might.
She stirs under my touch as my thumb brushes against her cheekbone, her face pinching before her eyes crack open. As they adjust to the light, her brows stitch together and her hands slides out from underneath her bedding to rest on my thigh.
For just a second, I let myself glance at our open bedroom door and to the hallway behind it before bringing my focus back to my wife.
“Is it Paxton?” I whisper, resting a hand at the soft curve of her waist. My thumb moves of its own volition to massage into her skin. “Because that, I get. I talked to Connor about him tonight, and I thought I was gonna lose it.”
The bedding slides further down her body as she shifts, her face pinching as she looks at me.
“You told Connor about him?”
I nod. “I’ve been thinking about him since we went to dinner,” I explain. “The words just kind of fell out. If you told someone about him and they said something stupid…”
Deafening silence falls between us as she shakes her head, wrapping its claws around my throat hard enough that I think I might choke on it. I let my eyes drift closed, my hand trailing up and down the length of her side before I finally turn back to her.
“Jules, I need you to tell me truth when I ask you this,” I say, pulling in a steadying breath before I continue. “Are you pregnant?”
A crease forms between her brows as they pinch together, dipping at the middle, and her eyes flare.
“We haven’t had sex in months,” she tells me.
My wife thinks that she answered one simple question.
She has no idea that she’s actually just answered two.
“Okay,” I say with a smile, pushing her hair out of her face as it falls. Pulling the bedding up to her shoulders as it was before I came into the room, I drop a kiss on her forehead. “G’night, Jules.”
As I climb off of our bed, I feel like crawling out of my fucking skin.
My mind sings its old mantra on the way down the stairs, but tonight, it’s different.
I’ve lost her.
I’ve lost her.
I’ve lost her.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
My pen digs into the paper in front of me, finally tearing a hole in the page as I scratch at what was supposed to be a tattoo design. It’s the fifth one I’ve ripped today.
I can’t focus. I can’t shake the sick feeling burning in my gut.
I don’t want to go home.
“T-Mo,” someone calls out, but I don’t think that I really hear them.
My eyes flick to the window in front of me, watching the sky transition from the evening dark to blackness as I flip through to another sheet in my sketchbook. This time, I reach for a sharpie. Can’t do much damage with a marker, right?
I’d kill for a smoke, but I’ve already had three in the past hour. My brother is right, I need to cut back on them, and I can at least convince myself to space it out a little bit more if I’m still inside the studio.
Even if my foot is tapping against the floor so quickly that it feels like my body is set to vibrate and the only thing that I’ve been able to hear all day is the sound of my own heart slamming around inside of my head.
“Tripp.”
My marker glides across the paper in front of me, taking the shape of a spider— no, a praying mantis— no…
“Fuck,” I grumble to myself as I scrap yet another piece, tearing it from its metal rings and crumpling it in my hand before tossing it into the garbage with the rest of its friends.
“Tripp.” Connor’s hand comes down on my shoulder with a hard squeeze. “We’ve been closed for three hours. Are you going home?”
A humorless laugh claws its way out of my throat as I finally give myself permission to reach for the pack of smokes next to me.
Tapping the bottom of the pack against the heel of my palm, I tell him, “She’s fucking someone.”
His mouth drops open, his eyes flaring.
I could almost swear that he takes a step away from me.
“She told you that?”
“I’ve been with that girl half my life,” I say, slipping the filtered end of a cigarette between my lips. “I know when she’s keeping secrets that’ll get her in trouble. I was one of them.”
As I move to walk past him, he steps backward again, his eyes moving from my desk to the pony wall that separates my station from the next one over. There’s a vein at the side of his neck that only ever sticks out when he’s stressed, and right now, its pulse is pounding.
A chill hits my skin, bringing with it clammy hands and a cold sweat that breaks out across the back of my neck. His eyes dart between mine in a silent plea.
Pulling the unlit cigarette from my lips, I let my arms fall slack at my sides.
“Tell me right now that you’re not fucking my wife,” I demand.
“T-Mo,” he says with his hands held up in mock surrender.
“Don’t fucking ‘T-Mo’ me,” I tell him. “Tell me you’re not having sex with Julia.”
I’m not sure what I feel first when his features fall and his eyes beg me not to push the issue. Maybe it’s that I feel nothing. Maybe it’s that I feel everything all at once, like I’ve been hit by a fucking freight train.
“I’m not having sex with her,” he tells me, and his eyes pull shut as if he’s bracing for impact. “We called it off last week.”
My fingertips are numb.
My entire body burns, but in the same breath, I can’t feel it.
My vision blurs.
The only sound I hear is the whooshing of my blood in my ears.
Mine? Or his?
Kill him, a voice in the back of my mind tells me. Go back into the office, pick up the baseball bat, and use it to beat in his fucking skull until there’s nothing left but hamburger meat.
An icy calm washes over my body as the distance closes between us and my hand finds its way around his throat. Fear floods his features, maybe shame, too, as my face closes in on his and I drop my voice to nearly a growl.
“How was she?” I ask him, my jaw tight as I speak through my teeth. My grip tightens. “She get nice and wet for you? Huh? She get on her knees for you and suck your dick? Did she swallow?”
“Tri—”
A cough cuts off the rest of my name, his head shaking in a silenced plea.
The image of my best friend splayed out on the concrete flickers behind my eyelids, bleeding from his mouth, his nose, his ear, somewhere at the top of his head.
It forces my hand free, and as I step away from him with my mind being carried out of the shop and onto another plane that I’m not certain actually exists, Connor rubs a hand against his throat, breathing deeply.
“I know you’re pissed,” he says. “You should be. I— Tripp, I swear to God, It wasn’t—”
My eyes move to his, and I pull in a breath, letting it out through my nose as I reach for my helmet to slide it onto my head, offering a hard flick of my jaw to slam the visor closed.
“Fuck yourself, Schepp,” is the only parting that I offer him before the door slams shut behind me.
The number one rule of the road that my friends and I hold both ourselves and each other to is to never ride upset or angry. There’s an assessment that pilots give themselves – the IMSAFE – and we’ve always promised each other that if we don’t pass that assessment, we won’t get on the bike.
Right now, I fail that assessment spectacularly.
The world screams past me anyway, streaks of color whizzing by as I breeze through a blessedly traffic-free road, weaving from lane to lane.
The fabric of my t-shirt slaps against my skin as the wind whips it in all directions, the sound of my engine barely loud enough to try to drown out all of the noise in my head.
My wife’s moans. The way that she whines right before she starts to come. The sound of my name on her lips.
His name in place of mine.
My speed picks up again as I zip through an alleyway between two apartment buildings and hook a left as I exit, hitting a fresh stride.
I’m nearly to an entry point to the highway when red and blues light up behind me. A siren sounds from the patrol car with a few warning blips as it works to catch up to me, and I consider for a second opening the throttle and seeing just how far I can push my bike before the engine quits on me.
With a glance to the long pendant hanging off of my side mirror, I take a breath and pull into an empty gas station, slowing to a stop in the parking lot as the car follows, coming to a stop too close to my bike for comfort.
My eyes flick again to my side mirror to watch as the officer climbs out of his car.
I can already tell by his gait that we’re not going to get along.
I don’t like cops, even the few I’ve had positive interactions with.
For every one of them, I’ve met five more who were assholes.
I’ve met a handful who have preconceived notions about people on sport bikes, and I can smell this guy’s prejudgment from a mile away.
A few careful and quick taps on my phone screen bring to life the camera on my dash, just like every other time that I’ve been pulled over. A gift from my older brother, who doesn’t trust me to not get myself into trouble at every turn.
“Go ahead and take off that helmet for me,” the officer calls out as he approaches.
I comply, hanging the helmet over my side mirror before carefully slipping my drivers’ license and registration from their place in my thigh bag to hand them to him.