“I don’t know what that was,” he says quietly, swiping the pad of his thumb across his eye.
“I would tell you my theory, but we’re not at your table, so I’m not allowed to,” I tease, wearing a smirk as I stand to pick my pants off of the floor. “You don’t have to be embarrassed about it.”
His eyes flick to mine, dismissing me with a scoff as he reaches for his discarded shirt to wipe his cock clean.
I catch the ball of fabric as he tosses it to me, swiping my cum from my stomach before taking it with me into the bathroom to get myself cleaned up, and I toss it into the garbage can when I’m finished.
Standing in front of the mirror, I study my own features. The sweat-lined brow, the neck now marked with what will likely be more than one hickey come morning. The broken nose that Tripp set for me after a week of begging me to see a doctor for it, with nothing but a bottle of grain alcohol to manage the pain and a pair of pens used to hold open my nostrils.
With a glance to the doorknob reflected behind me in the mirror, I blow out a breath with a shake of my head.
As I step out of the bathroom, Tripp is shimmying back into his pants, pulling up their zipper before securing the belt through the loops around his hips. I stop in front of the sales counter, watching as he slips the end of the belt into its buckle.
“Tripp,” I finally call out after a few moments too long spent in quiet. “Do you remember coming to get me the night I was hurt?”
His jaw tenses, the muscle rolling as his eyes darken.
“I could hardly make out your face through all the fucking blood,” he growls. “Of course I remember that. Why would you bring that up right now?”
Bracing my elbows on the counter, I lean against it, clicking my tongue as I dip my head.
“What did you do when you left the house that night?”
His fingers push through his hair to bring it away from his face as he drops back onto the couch. A forearm drops to rest on his thigh.
“I found one of them,” he answers plainly. “It wasn’t hard; the guy was wearing your blood the same way Jules wears her fucking accessories; like he wasproudof it.”
I move to speak, but my throat closes around the words and refuses to let them out. A shake of Tripp’s head tells me that I don’t need the words to get my question across. He already knows exactly what it is that I want to ask him.
“One of the most important people in my life was beaten so badly that he couldn’t walk and he was too scared to go to the hospital about it,” he says, his tone gruff and clipped. “The guy got the same treatment that he and his buddies gave you, and I would do it over again without a second thought.”
My head dips again as my tongue wets my lower lip, pulling it between my teeth. The few memories that I have from that night flicker behind my eyes, every blip playing back like its own silent movie.
I remember calling Tripp. I remember the color leaving his face when he climbed out of his SUV. I remember my entire body hurting in more ways than I ever thought a human could possibly feel, and I remember thinking that I might die, alone on the cement.
“I’ll tell you whatIdid when you left that night. I cried,” I offer up with a clearing of my throat. I can feel more than see the tension in his body as he snaps in my direction. “Everything hurt – so much worse than it did after the wreck. I was scared to death. You’d gone back out, Jules had run to the pharmacy…and I completely fell apart, cried like ababy.If I was a Montgomery man, would that have made me less of one?”
Reaching to fix the loosened tie on his old, worn down Chucks, he raises an irritated brow in my direction.
“Four dudes followed you out of a bar and tried to kill you,” he argues, “it’s completely different.”
“Answer the question.” His head shakes as he pushes himself off of the couch.
We both know the answer to my question, and we both know that he can’t – or won’t – say it out loud. I cross the room to take his face in my hand, stroking my thumb against his cheekbone.
“They may not have used their hands to do it,” I muse, “but your parents still spent your entire life beating the crap out of you; and for whatever it’s worth, I think it takes a much bigger man to admit that he’s in pain than it does for him to hide it. I think Julia would feel the same way.”
His head dips, his teeth tugging at the corner of his mouth as he moves past me, aiming for his station. The greyscale images on his skin pull across his back as he digs in a drawer for cleaning supplies, and he keeps his body turned away from mine as he flips a bottle of disinfectant over his finger with a clearing of his throat.
“Don’t worry about that,” I tell him, grabbing onto his shoulders. Reaching forward to pull the bottle from his hands, I drop it back into the drawer and use my foot to push it closed. “We’ll come in early and deep clean. Just race me home.”
Moving to his desk, I pick up his helmet and push it into his chest, bothered more than a little bit at the idea of him riding home in even less coverage than he usually offers himself. His eyes hold mine, narrowing with an unasked question, and I offer him an affirmative dip of my chin in response before we trail out of the shop and out to our bikes.
Tripp’s ridiculous pop music playlist floods my ears while we ride, but instead of offering him my usual feigned complaints, I glide up alongside him. My gloved hand rests between hisshoulder blades for only a moment before I tuck into my fuel tank and weave around him.
His engine roars as he accelerates, and the two of us find ourselves in a dance, weaving around each other between lanes as if our bikes are working together to braid some kind of invisible string.
As his bike leans through a turn, his uninjured hand extends to let his fingertips brush along the asphalt beneath it. The eyes of some corpse-like creature inked into his back draw my attention, his own brand of aposemastism.
