Maybe she already knows that he’s gone home, anyway. She might have gone with him, for all I know. If you pack up and leave behind the guy who weaseled his way into the middle of your marriage, your marriage is fixed, right?
Something uncomfortable pulls in my chest.
Pulling in a deep breath, I shake my head to send it away.
It was just sex, I tell myself.I can get sex anywhere.
Great, now it’s not just Tripp I’m lying to.
My fingers tap against my fuel tank, the still-running engine giving off a quiet purr while I sit idle on the driveway.
I’ve visited this place thousands of times. It’s a second home to me.
Right now, though, the Spanish-style architecture of the townhouse in front of me looks more like something out of my nightmares.
No sane person would be able to conjure up any reason that I should be here right now. My sister would spout off with words more colorful than I’d ever heard if I told her that I was here; and she would probably be right.
Turning off my engine, I slip off my gloves and open the visor on my helmet before banging a fist against the door in front of me.
“Jules,” I call into the house, “open the door!”
I wait, checking my phone every few seconds between knocks, but she never comes to the door. I can hear the TV in their living room. I know she’s home; and now I know that means that Tripp left her.
“I won’t do anything,” I promise. “I just want to make sure that you’re okay.”
A message alert pings on my phone.
That’s something that I don’t think I can do.
She’s a bubbly person by nature, but between this and the pieces that Tripp has shared with me of their past, I know that she’s probably in there crying by herself; and as wrong as it is, I want to go in there and try to make her feel better. Comfort her somehow, if I can. I need to help pick up the pieces of the heart that I had a hand in breaking.
Maybe there’s a small part of me that wants to be able to say‘look, I made the right decision, I did the right thing – the hard thing, but I’m not running.’
Tapping the corner of my phone against the door, I flip closed the visor on my helmet and head back toward my bike.
She’s alive, she’s conscious, she’s still in the state.
I can live with that.
As I head back toward my bike to slip my gloves back onto my hands, I shake my head with a hollow chuckle as a sick irony hits me.
There are three people I’d like to talk to right now; the same three people that I could always talk to about anything. My dad, Tripp, or one of our first riding buddies – Ray.
My dad’s ashes are somewhere in the Atlantic, because how was an eighteen-year-old kid supposed to pay for two caskets when he could barely afford to feed his sister? Tripp would likely rather kill me than talk to me, and we buried Ray five years ago, a few hours up the coast near his parents’ house.
The carabiner holding my keys is the same one that held his until we lost him.
As I settle onto the seat of my bike, I pull in a steadying breath and run through a check list in my head. It’s a half-pass on two out of six. If I stay on this driveway and I keep waiting for Julia to open the door or make a sound, though, I’ll fail three.
Offering one more glance toward the front door and throwing out one last ounce of hope that she’ll open it, I start my bike and pull away from the building, through their neighborhood and back onto the main roads.
I find myself at a dingy-looking hole-in-the-wall bar, whose interior reeks of stale cigarettes and a mother’s disappointment. Settling onto the seat of a peeling faux leather stool, I offer a smile to the bartender, raising two fingers in a wave.
With a kind glance in my direction, he adjusts the worn ball cap that covers his oil-black hair and leans against the bar.
“You seem like a no-frills guy,” he tells me, and the corner of my mouth quirks. “We’ve got a shitty IPA and a shittier lager on tap.”
“I’ll take my chances with the lager,” I laugh.
