Chapter 23
JULIA
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” I pout with a gesture toward Tripp’s backpack and his clothing choices, laid out in a messy pile on top of our bed.
Turning his head over his shoulder, his eyes meet mine as a regretful smile pulls across his face.
“If I could have canceled…”
“I know.”
I move to stand behind him, pressing my body against his as I bring my hands to his elbows.
“I’m really gonna miss you while you’re gone,” I tell him.
My hands trail from his elbows to his wrists and back again, massaging at his skin as my cheek presses against his back.
“I need you to come with me,” he says as he pulls open the zipper on his backpack.
He’s gone to this convention with his team every year since his shop opened.
Every year, I’ve held down the fort at home.
Every year, I’ve missed him for the entire weekend, and every year, he’s come into the house, dropped his bags at the door and wrapped his arms around me so tightly, I could be convinced that he hadn’t seen me in six months.
He doesn’t trust me enough to go without me this year.
I guess I’ve earned that.
“I have clients tomorrow,” I tell him. “Weekends are busy for us. Aislin would have to rearrange everyone’s schedules for me.”
Pulling the case for his tattoo machine out of our closet, his eyes meet mine, firm and serious. “I’m not trying to be a dick, but I’m not asking, Jules.”
He’s been making an effort for me; sleeping with me in our bed, sitting next to me at mealtimes…he told me that he wanted to forgive me, and he’s been putting in so much effort to make sure that I believe him.
With a decisive nod, I let out a breath.
Tripp looks confused, maybe even wounded, as I step past him and out of our bedroom.
When I return with a suitcase from the garage and I drop it next to his belongings on our bed, that confusion is quickly replaced with gratitude.
“What do I need to bring with me?” I ask him, and weight visibly drops from his shoulders.
“The plug for your book thing,” he says with the corner of his mouth ticking up into a grateful smile.
We work together, mostly in quiet, to pack our bags. It’s a loaded quiet; the kind of quiet that holds everything and nothing all at once. If we were still members of the faith, we might be led to believe that it was telling us that we were in the middle of a test.
That these six hours on the road together will serve a purpose greater than proving to my husband that I hear him and that I am committed to earning back his trust.
Six hours in which we’ll have nowhere to go and nothing to do but to face what we’ve gone through and to figure out where we’ll go from here.
If Tripp’s younger brother were here, he might tell us that this is the greatest test that our marriage will face yet.
If his older brother were here, he might tell us that going to this convention together is a mistake.
While it only takes Tripp maybe twenty minutes to throw some clothes into his backpack and get his work supplies into a suitcase, it takes me closer to an hour.
Aside from the occasional day trip to the beach with my friends, I don’t travel much.
I went to one conference years ago when I opened my salon, and it was the most nerve-racking event I’d ever been to.
It was admittedly a great way to get my name out and to bring in customers – some of whom are still my regular clients – but I didn’t think that I’d ever go to one again.
When I’ve finally finished putting my things together and Drumstick’s needs are take care of for the weekend, Tripp carts all of our things out to the garage to load them into the back of our waiting Forester.
It could be worse; we could have gotten the compact that I’d tried to talk him into instead; but we wanted a big family, and an SUV works better for car seats and big kids than a compact does.
“Ready?” He asks as he pops his head in through the garage door. “Drive through somewhere and get on the road?”
I nod with a smile, following behind him to the car.
As he moves to open the driver’s side door, I stop him, taking hold of his hand, and his gaze flicks toward me.
“I’m excited to go with you, Lovey,” I tell him.
Lifting the back of my hand to his lips, he presses a firm to kiss to my skin.
My fingers push through his hair as we offer each other our best attempt at a smile.
The air is heavy around us as we have a conversation that neither of us can seem to put into words, or maybe we’re both just afraid to try.
When my husband’s hand cups the back of my head and he pulls me close to drop a kiss to the top of it, though, the cloud hanging over us clears, even just a little bit.
Settling in for the long drive ahead of us, Tripp’s hand rests at my knee, and I drop my hand on top of it while I use the other to connect my phone to the bluetooth.
He’s trying so hard for me. I can do the same for him.
The sun is nearly ready to set when we finally pull into the parking garage of our hotel.
While I gather our food wrappers and other garbage, stuffing it all into an emptied fast food bag, my husband hurries to my side of the car, pulling open the door with a shake of his head.
“That was fucking horrible, by the way,” he tells me.
The corner of his mouth pulls up playfully as he moves to unbuckle my seat belt for me, before heading for the back of the car. I climb out after him, throwing my purse over my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I’ll play a different one on the way home,” I giggle as Tripp reaches into the trunk for our bags.
“No, those things are banned from the car,” he says with a laugh. “What in the fuck are ‘slick folds?’ You ask me to listen to a book with you, and I get some grown man in my ear talking about ‘slick folds?’”
“Okay, in my defense, I didn’t know that one was gonna be spicy,” I tell him.
“Spicy?” He says, his voice going up an octave in pitch, and I can’t contain the laughter that floods out of me. “‘Let’s listen to my new book,’ you told me. ‘It’s a murder mystery,’ you told me. Yeah, something got murdered, alright.”
“Stop it!” I cackle, wrapping my hand around his forearm.
We’ve been in Jacksonville for all of ten minutes, and it already feels like both of us can breathe more easily. This feels like the closest we’ve been in a long time to the days when we didn’t care about money or broken glasses or any of the little things, and we just let ourselves enjoy life.
We make a plan to have dinner together as we enter the lobby to check in. A nice meal out together; a do-over, from my perspective. I’d pinch myself to be sure that I wasn’t dreaming, but if I am, I don’t think that I want to wake up from it.
I find myself clinging onto Tripp for security as we navigate through the too-busy hotel lobby and into the elevator to go up to our room.
I know that I shouldn’t pass judgment on the people around us for their tattoos and piercings; the skin of the man whose arm I’ve clung to is covered in images of demons, snakes, insects and corpses, and he’s one of the kindest and most gentle people I’ve ever met.
It’s different when it’s strangers milling around, some with their faces – and even their eyes - covered in colorful ink and others with so many piercings, it’s hard to tell where they start and end.
I might feel better if I could spot the guys from Tripp’s shop in the crowd, but everyone around us is a blur of ink, vivid dyes, and metal.
As we step out of the elevator, my husband’s arm finds its way around my waist.
“What do you think,” he says, “order in, or go sit down somewhere?”
“I kind of want to put on some makeup and sit down with you,” I tell him shyly, but his mouth quirks into a soft smile.
“Okay,” he nods, giving a squeeze to the skin just above my hip.
My hand reaches up to fidget with the delicate chain around my neck, my fingertip running over the grooves and edges of the ash-filled gem inlaid in the soft gold setting, and I let out a breath. My hand balls in the hem of Tripp’s shirt and I stop him from moving forward.
“Lovey,” I say quietly. “I know you’re really trying to forgive me. I don’t think I necessarily deserve it, but— thank you.”
For just a second, he chews on the corner of his lip. I expect us to wind up in a long talk that keeps us from making it to our dinner date or that devolves into some kind of argument, but we don’t.
Instead, his hand cups the back of my head and he pulls me close to press his lips to my forehead, and my heart skips a beat.
He kisses me again as we reach the door to our hotel room and he presses the key card to the lock, pushing open the door - next to which, someone else’s luggage is already sitting. To our left, the door to the bathroom is cracked open and the shower can be heard running inside.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Tripp groans. Rapping his knuckles against the bathroom’s door frame, he shouts, “You’re in the wrong room!”
The person inside says something in return, but their voice is almost impossible to make out over the heavy flow of the water.
As the shower clunks to a stop and silence fills the room, the door opens.
Behind it, Connor stands with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, and his face twists into confusion.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Tripp says again, this time, scrubbing a hand down his face in frustration.
“What are you guys doing in my room?”
“This is our room,” Tripp argues. “You’re gonna have to get your shit and get out.”
My eyes move between them, my hand flexing against the strap of my purse, and Connor grips the towel to hold it in place as the two of them posture at each other like a pair of animals.
They’re both hurt, they’re both angry…and in this moment, I hate myself for being the reason why.
A sting settles behind my eyes as tears prick at them, and I chew at the inside of my lower lip. I’m not sure if saying anything to either of them will help or hurt right now, so I keep my mouth closed and my racing thoughts to myself.
Tripp’s hand lands possessively on my ass with a squeeze and he gestures with his head, keeping his fiery gaze locked onto Connor’s.
“Go unpack your stuff, baby,” he tells me. “He’ll be gone in two minutes.”
Sliding past Connor’s carved body to take my things further into the room, I try to tune them out as they continue to argue.
I try to ignore it when Connor walks past me to reach his suitcase.
I try to ignore the sunkissed glow on his skin and his toned back as he dips to pull clothing from the case.
I think I’d like to disappear entirely, right now, if I’m being honest with myself.
My breathing halts when the two of them leave the room, and all I can do is hope – maybe even pray – that they aren’t going somewhere to fight each other. It’s flattering, even romantic, in the books that I read; it wouldn’t be so nice in real life.
I’m not sure that I take a breath for the entire fifteen minutes that they’re out of the room. I’m not sure that I do when they finally step back inside, either.
Both of them are agitated and their voices are still raised as Tripp throws his backpack onto one of the beds.
“They fucking double booked us,” he tells me.
“There aren’t any other rooms?” I ask.
“No.” Pointing to the sliding glass door at the opposite end of the room, he tells Connor, “You can sleep on the balcony.”
Connor hoists his own bag onto the second bed, dropping it harshly onto the mattress without breaking eye contact with my husband as he pulls open the zipper.
The silence in the room is so thick and so deafening that I can hardly pull together any amount of focus while I finish putting on my makeup and I tie a ribbon into my hair. When I step into the bathroom to change my clothes, I almost expect to walk back out to a bloodbath.
As Tripp and I walk hand in hand through the hotel and on our way down to dinner, his thumb stroking back and forth against my skin, I can’t decide if it’s his pride or the expense of being here that is keeping us from leaving.
I just hope we make it out of this in one piece.
I hope that our marriage does.