“You had a couple fans,” he tells me through our shared comms system.
I hesitate, my grip tightening on my handlebars.
“Yeah, well, I’m not really looking for anything right now,” I tell him honestly.
His head whips in my direction for just a heartbeat, and I don’t need to be able to see through his dark visor to know that his brow is furrowed and he’s looking at me as if I’ve just started speaking to him in a foreign language.
“You’re always looking for something,” he teases.
“Things change,” I tell him.
A tilt of his head and a rev of his bike’s engine tell me that he’s gotten my message loud and clear.
As he lowers his chest to his fuel tank, I do the same, gliding smoothly up alongside of him. We pull into the parking lot of the first gas station that we come across, and as we slide off of our bikes in the quiet night air, Tripp’s demeanor shifts.
I’ve done the same thing before, more than once. I might even feel it happening to me right now. The high from the meet is fading, and the demons that were quiet there are louder, now that the environment is different and the excitement has dissipated.
I glance in his direction every few seconds while we fill up and get our visors cleaned off. With our tanks full and Tripp pulling off his helmet to reach for his pack of cigarettes, I jerk my head in the direction of the storefront, telling him without words to roll his bike over there and away from the fuel stations.
Pulling my own helmet over my head, I rest it on the seat of my bike.
“You’re off,” I tell him. “Need to ride backpack?”
He shakes his head. “Just a smoke break.”
I watch while he paces through one cigarette, and then another, smashing their spent ends beneath the toe of his shoe.
My eyes move between the inside of the store and the lone person working behind the counter inside, and the dark, poorly-lit road that we pulled in from. We’re not in a great area, and we shouldn’t stay long, but I don’t think we’ll be moving for a while, at least.
The sound of the single, buzzing street lamp at the end of the lot screams in the back of my head while Tripp paces around his bike, stopping every once in a while to zone out with his focus on the asphalt beneath him.
“Hey,” I say, hushed as I kick a foot against Tripp’s. “You keep disappearing.”
His head shakes as he flicks the ash off of the end of his cigarette, bringing his hand up to scrub the heel of his palm against his forehead.
“We were gonna have a kid,” he finally tells me. Maybe he isn’t talking to me. I can’t be sure, one way or the other. “We’re at dinner last night, and Jules says something about ‘we should try.’ My first thought was, ‘wejustlost him, is she crazy?’ But we didn’t. It’s been two years; and I keep thinking that maybe everything’s just been fucked since.”
His faraway stare in the direction of the bollard next to me suggests that he might not even be aware that he’s saying all of this out loud.
“What the hell?” I gape. “How did I not know about that?”
A hollow chuckle slips out of him as he pulls in a drag from his cigarette, tilting his head toward the sky to blow out a stream of smoke as the hint of a wistful smile ghosts across his lips.
“It was getting hard, but she hid the belly really well,” he tells me. “We were gonna keep it to ourselves as long as we could and pull out one of those ‘surprise, we had a baby’ deals. Jules saw it on the internet and thought it was great.”
Flicking the butt of the cigarette onto the ground and stomping out the ash with his toe, he says, “I lied to you about us going up to Orlando; we were dealing with procedures and funeral homes and…we just didn’t wanna see anyone after we lost him.”
“I didn’t know you guys even wanted kids.”
I cringe the second the words leave my mouth.
Stupid comment,I tell myself.That was so incredibly stupid.
“We wanted that one,” he shrugs, “and a whole bunch more of them after him.”
No matter how deep I dig into my memory, I can’t think of a single moment that would have led me to believe anything was going on with the two of them, good, bad, or otherwise. I remember Tripp being in his usual good mood, tattooing clients and coming out with me for late night rides.
I remember how out-of-the-blue it seemed when he texted to let me know that they were going out of town – toOrlando, of all places – but when he came back, he seemed fine. He didn’t have much to say about their trip, but I just wrote it off as some married couple stuff that wasn’t any of my business, anyway.
