Gripping tightly onto my arm, Connor pulls me out of the bathroom and through the party, searching for what feels like forever until we finally find my husband. He has a beer in his hand, leaning against a table while he chats and laughs with his friends, and my insides twist and turn over on each other.
“T-Mo,” Connor says, clearing his throat. “Jules needs to go home. She—” his eyes rake over my body for a moment too long. “She got sick.”
“Baby,” my husband says with a frown and a sympathetic tilt of his head. Setting his beer on the table behind him, he brings his hand to cup my face. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I slur, shaking my head as my tears threaten to spill over.
What the hell did I just do to him?
My stomach churns as Tripp wraps his arm around my shoulders and excuses himself from his friends. When we walk out of the party together and his lips meet the side of my head, I think there’s a chance that I might vomit for real.
As he helps me climb into our waiting ride share, I can’t keep my mind from traveling back to the night of our first real date.
His parents wouldn’t let him get his driver’s license, and I’d offered to drive because I’d already gotten mine. It really wasn’tthat big of a deal to me, but it was to him. He’d taken money from his parents’ account so he could get a cab for us, and he opened the door for me that night, holding my hand as I climbed inside, just like he does tonight.
He slides off my heels for me when we walk in the front door of our townhome, letting me brace myself against his shoulders, and then he’s guiding me up the stairs, pulling the zipper at the back of my dress as we make our way to our bathroom.
“Tripp…”
“It’s okay,” he assures me as he reaches behind the curtain to turn on our shower. Moving closer to me to slip my dress down my body, he says, “People puke, it happens. Remember the rager you threw junior year? I was sure there was no way your parents were gonna let you keep seeing me after the way I violated their pool.”
I nod, biting my lip so hard that it threatens to bleed as I close my eyes to keep my tears from falling.
They didn’t want me to see him again after that night. They told me that he was trouble, and that he would take me down a path that I wouldn’t be able to come back from.
What they said was true, but what they meant by it wasn’t.
Tripp helped me think for myself. He made me realize that not everything was as black and white as I’d been taught to believe; that everything wasn’t simply God or Devil. He helped me to gain confidence in a body that didn’t look like the girls that I saw on TV or in magazines.
He made me feel beautiful.
He gave me the confidence to look in the mirror andknowthat I’m beautiful.
As the hot water melts into my hair and courses down the length of my body, washing away the evidence of my crime, my hands cup my face to cover the sob that rips through my throat.
“I’m so sorry,” I cry.
“Jules,” Tripp says from his post leaned against the counter.
He pushes himself off of the counter, climbing over the ledge of the bathtub and into the shower with me, still wearing all of his clothes. His hands brush my hair away from my face, and I can feel my heart breaking.
“You still love me.”
He pauses, scrunching his face as if to say that I’ve lost my mind entirely.
“Of course I love you.” I wipe my eyes as he reaches behind me for my makeup removing cloth. “Why the hell would you think I didn’t?”
“We used to be so happy, but we fight all the time now,” I tell him. “I thought…I don’t know.”
“If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t stick around to fight with you,” he counters. “I’d just walk away.”
With a quick kiss to the tip of my nose, he runs the cloth under the running water, ringing out the excess before he brings it to my face.
His touch is gentle as he wipes away my eye makeup. I can’t count how many times over the years I’ve explained to him how delicate the eye area is. It wasn’t until I told him that being too rough with the skin there was like going too deep with his tattoo machine and blowing out the ink that he actually understood what I was saying to him.
My body is turned to face the shower head as Tripp reaches for the bottle of purple shampoo that I use religiously, the one that he remembers to use maybe once every two weeks on his own hair, only when I remind him or point out that his silver tone is starting to lean more blond.
His chest presses against my back as he lathers my hair, working the product in with his fingers the way that I taught him to when I was still in cosmo school.
