My phone buzzes, getting my attention, and I check it only to silently groan seeing it’s Tyler.
I could let it go to voicemail, but then he’ll likely try to find me using Dirty’s tech skills. I really don’t want him to know I’m here or about my degree, especially since he no longer has that right.
Maybe, just maybe, he’s calling to accept the divorce?
One could hope, even if it tears my heart into shreds, it’s what's best for us and Cole, because there is no coming back from what he did.
“Hello,” I answer on a sigh, deciding to get this over with.
“What took you so long to answer?” Tyler asks in return.
I roll my eyes at his alpha-hole tone and snide, “Debating on whether or not to answer.” He growls, and I shake my head and ask, “What can I do for you, Trigger?”
“Don’t fucking call me that!” he snaps, but I don’t remark back, knowing there is no point.
I may think of him as Tyler in my mind, never once calling him his road name that he earned when he got a little too trigger-happy one evening in the yard, but I’ll never call him his legal name to his face again.
He broke us.
Could I have communicated with him? Yeah, sure why not, but I had just been raped. Even now, I still feel filthy over that concept, I’d lost our baby that my heart still hasn’t gotten over. He chose to screw someone else, not me, he chose to allow his mind to conjure up crap heknewwas bullshit because heknewhe was my life.
This mess, this break up, this pain and heartache is all him.
“Caleb's birthday is coming up. Dirty wanted to make sure you were going to attend,” he grumbles, and I chew my bottom lip.
“Is Cheryl going to be there?” I ask, knowing I can’t be in the same room as that woman, not after what I walked in on a few years ago.
The bitch works at the club's strip club, Rebel’s Honeys, and had tried to trap Dirty, poking holes in the condoms she used with only him when she was his main girl for a while. When she claimed to be pregnant, she had the biggest grin on her face which soon fell when Dirty denied the pregnancy until he got proof.
It pissed her off because Stone didn’t deny when his now dead ex-wife had claimed to be pregnant even though she wasn’t and married her and Ty never denied Cole, putting a ring on my finger even though I never asked for it. As soon as the DNA test came back proving Caleb was his, she got her grin back until he did one even better and took full custody, breaking the trance Cheryl had of living an easy life off her child.
She barely came around, but when she did, she was nasty, and it took a lot for me to hold my tongue until I walked in on her smacking Caleb across the back with a wooden spatula.
His screams still echo in my head.
She denied it, of course, after I punched her and broke her nose. Caleb refused to speak, too traumatized, so it was my word against hers, and the club believed her because, in their eyes, I was a patch chaser as well.
She got off with no punishment while Caleb remains traumatized.
“You can put your claws away, she won’t be there, Caleb didn’t want her, he wanted you,” Ty confirms softly, and I retort, “Ever wonder why?”
“I know why, pixie, I always knew she hurt Caleb, and so did Dirty which is why he keeps her clear of him and why he threatened her life. Pixie the only reason we couldn’t sack the bitch is because without the club vote, we can’t do jack shit,” he murmurs, and I snort.
“No one believed me because of you,” I remind him, and he sighs.
I didn’t know why at the time, didn’t understand until I heard a few of the older generation old ladies. Tank’s step-mama, Sara, bitched about how I trapped Ty, how I was trying to get rid of anyone who I saw as competition.
It was then that I began to believe I wasn’t family.
“I’ll be there,” I say, knowing he won’t say anything that will make it better, that will prove to me that I have a family because I don’t.
“Good, I’ll let Dirty know,” he says, then decides to piss me off as he states, “Drop off and pick up from now on will be me unless I’m on a run. I should be back in time to pick Cole up Thursday.”
“No,” I instantly deny, but he talks over me and states, “It’s time we stop pussy footing around each other, we’re seeing atherapist. Pixie, Friday night I held our son as he cried his heart out.”
My mouth drops as my stomach sinks, hearing the truth in his words.
“What, why?” I choke, pressing down on my stomach.
