14
Riggs strips off the overshirt he has on and hands it to me. I hesitate to take it. I’m freezing and won’t admit it, but he can see the way my body shivers.“Take it,” he snaps, his anger palpable and his eyes never leaving mine as I take it from his fingers.
I slide it over my arms and hug it around myself, cursing him for smelling so good all the time.
It wafts up into my nose and makes it incredibly hard to hold my glare.
The long-sleeve black shirt beneath sticks to every muscle on his chest and arms, leaving nothing about the man he’s grown into to my imagination.
“Don’t do that,” he says as the garage goes quiet and only the rain outside can be heard between shallow breaths and unsaid secrets.
“Do what?” I ask.
“That.” He shakes his head. “Lie for her, start shit, go along with their nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” I argue, stepping forward. He throws his head back and huffs, his gaze turning violent as it fixes on the ceiling. “She did amazingly tonight.” I say it, I hear the words and nausea builds, that’s not me. Those aren’t mine and he knows it.
A chuff of mean, bitter laughter spills from his chest. “You sound like him,” he sounds defeated when he brings his eyes down to look at me again.
There is so much pain behind them that I can’t understand.
He’s not wrong though, what came out of my mouth is something that Koa would have said.
Birdie shouldn’t be good at these things, but she is. She’s trained to be.
“I’m his wife, Riggs… that’s usually how that works.
” I swallow hard. Was his wife. Riggs gauges my expression, cold and cautious.
He hates that word more than anyone. A symbol of possession, that’s what he called it.
“Koa doesn’t love you. He loves the attention you award him.
You’re just another trophy to get dusty. ”
“You need to stop,” he warns, his voice low and stern.
“Nothing happened tonight that shouldn’t have,” I say in response. He expects me to stay quiet but he should know better, because maybe that was the girl I was with Koa, but never with Riggs.
“None of you should have been in that club tonight in the first place,” he finally snaps, but he doesn’t raise his voice he just steps forward until he’s towering over me with the intention to intimidate me.
The problem is Riggs never had it in him to be mean to me and he knows it because his jaw unclenches as he breathes me in and his hands flex at his sides like he wants to touch me.
I can hear his thoughts, every single one as loud as ever.
But I didn’t want to hear them then, and I don’t want to hear them now.
“You can’t throw your weight around here. I’m not yours to protect, and Birdie is a big girl.” I hiss the lie. The reality is I’m fucking trembling with the need to vomit as my adrenaline rush subsides and I realize what happened. She killed a man. For me. “You weren’t here. We did what we had to.”
His chest heaves and the anger boils but the violence towards me never comes.
“You don’t understand how dangerous this is!” he barks as he turns. “I’m trying to keep you all alive, Cress. This isn’t a fucking game!”
He’s livid and it’s reasonable, everything in me wants to protect Birdie and the boys but this isn’t just about me or them. It’s about protecting the legacy that Koa left, safeguarding the garage, and their futures.
“You think I don’t know that?” I snap at him, my own rage simmering. I’m so sick of him pretending like we aren’t capable.
“You don’t know anything,” he growls.
“Then tell me!” I bite back.
“No.” He stares me down and I can see the inner battle he’s fighting to keep the secrets. I just need to push a little more.
“I’m not naive, Riggs! I know you guys weren’t upstanding members of society,” I say and he starts to laugh. “Oh please. I know you were stealing cars. You don’t need the plate numbers to collect change.”
The quarters.
“We stole cars every day for a month.” Riggs explains, his voice laced with venom. “Until that wasn’t enough. Koa proved himself to Westfall and we were upgraded to bigger things.”
“Stealing electronics.” I shrug, who cares. I care. A lot. It’s a terrifying darkness that I didn’t know about them and it feels like a looming cloud charged with electricity. I’m just waiting for either the storm to cause destruction or for the clouds to part and more secrets to spill out.
“Drugs, Cress.” He rides a vicious line, “murder, extortion.”
“You’re trying to scare me,” I fight back.
“No, Koa was the ring leader for it all! He didn’t know when to stop and it got him fucking killed!” Riggs spits and rakes his hands through his hair before walking away from me before I even respond.
“He wouldn’t do that.” I argue. “Koa was the most gentle person I knew.”
“Because he spent an hour washing the blood off his hands before he crawled into bed with you, Cress.” Riggs lowers his voice. “He kept his vicious side from you on purpose, for this exact reason.”
“You’re such a liar—and for what? Because you’re pissed off that things were handled without your go ahead?” I question.
“Who the fuck do you think made Birdie the way she is?” He asks.
“You. It’s clear she resents you for a reason.” I accuse him and an icy laughter leaves him.
“He’s got you so tangled up that you don’t even want to know the truth, none of this fucking matters.” He shakes his head in disbelief.
“Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot,” I demand. “I knew Koa better than any of you.”
He huffs, clearly frustrated with me as he paces away further into the garage, crashing his hand across a bench and knocking its contents to the floor.
“That’s it. Throw a fit like you always do.” I shake my head. “Riggs doesn’t get his way so he loses his mind!”
“You think this is about control?” He whirls on me, stalking me in four easy strides. Chest to chest he raises his arms out to the side. “About being in charge of all this?”
“Isn’t that what it’s always been about? You hated that Koa was the boss. That he took care of everything, that he was who people thought of first. He was who you wanted to be! You can admit it, Riggs, he’s gone. You have everything that belonged to him, what more could—”
“You.” Riggs cuts me off abruptly—without hesitation. “Cress, God damnit. You.”
I open my mouth and close it again, biting down on my tongue. I shake my head and am the first to step back because I can’t handle the heat rolling off his chest. You. It’s the same story, the age old tired argument that sends us into a dance neither of us want to be a part of.
2008
“Hey,” Riggs appears in the doorway in a band t-shirt that hangs over him a size too big, his hair so long it can tuck behind his ears but he leaves it messy around his face, and a ring on almost every finger. He taps them against the frame and waits for me to set my homework down in my lap.
“What do you want?” I smile at him and he can’t stop the mirrored grin that appears on his face as he comes to kneel beside my bed.
“Do you want to go for a drive?” he asks, tilting his chin up to look at me as his hand creeps across the pink bed spread toward my thigh. Instead of touching me he snatches the pile of foil from my gum and starts to fold the little hearts as I make my decision.
If Koa found out…
“It’s almost midnight,” I whisper, looking at the clock on my side table.
“Yeah, everyone is asleep.” The moon from the window catches in his irises and reflects back at me. As if mother nature is calling my bluff: you never say no to him.
“Alright,” I whisper and he excitedly takes my book, dropping it to the chair near my closet before grabbing me a jacket and helping me into it. “Be quiet though. If you wake my Aunt she’ll flip.”
“I got in here, didn’t I?” Riggs smirks and tucks his hand into mine.
It’s warm, like most of his intentions, and he leads us through the dark house toward the back door.
He holds it open for me as I slide between him and the door frame but before I can slip out into the night he brings his finger beneath my chin.
“What?”
“Just wanted to look at you for a second.” He sounds weird, and I don’t know how to ask him what's wrong but before I can he changes pace again and pulls away. “Okay, now we can go.”
I pause, watching him for heartbeat longer before I skip down off the step toward the old honda civic and Riggs closes the distance with his long legs, reaching the door to open it for me.
All hope that my Aunt staying asleep goes out the window when the engine rumbles to life and he pulls out onto the street with as much noise as he can make.
“You did that on purpose,” I say leaning over the center to look at the side of his face.
That boyish jaw, turning sharp with age and his soft smile appearing less and less the more he experiences.
I can see him sliding away from me right before my eyes and I don’t really know how to stop it from happening.
“Where are we going?” I ask him, knowing that he doesn’t have a destination, he just needs out.
“Anywhere we want,” he says, shifting gears and forcing the Civic faster as he rips out onto the highway. His gaze grows distant. The highway is quiet but his thoughts are loud.
“Riggs.” I call out to him and he turns to look at me. “What’s wrong?”
I’ve known him since I was seven years old. We moved into the house across the street from his family’s home and garage. And I know when he’s upset about something.
“It’s nothing,” he says too quickly for it to be the truth.
“It’s him isn’t it. What did he do?” I ask, I can hear Koa in the back of my mind defending himself from words that Riggs hasn’t even spoken.
“Don’t worry about it, Cress,” he says, finally turning to look me in the eye. “You want to drive?” he asks and I take a second but I nod.
This is the most exhilarating part of knowing Riggs Monroe.
He shifts back in his seat, moving it back just enough for me to crawl into his lap and take over the wheel.