As he moves to open the driver’s side door, I stop him, taking hold of his hand, and his gaze flicks toward me.
“I’m excited to go with you, Lovey,” I tell him.
Lifting the back of my hand to his lips, he presses a firm to kiss to my skin. My fingers push through his hair as we offer each other our best attempt at a smile. The air is heavy around us as we have a conversation that neither of us can seem to put into words, or maybe we’re both just afraid to try.
When my husband’s hand cups the back of my head and he pulls me close to drop a kiss to the top of it, though, the cloud hanging over us clears, even just a little bit.
Settling in for the long drive ahead of us, Tripp’s hand rests at my knee, and I drop my hand on top of it while I use the other to connect my phone to the bluetooth.
He’s trying so hard for me. I can do the same for him.
The sun is nearly ready to set when we finally pull into the parking garage of our hotel.
While I gather our food wrappers and other garbage, stuffing it all into an emptied fast food bag, my husband hurries to my side of the car, pulling open the door with a shake of his head.
“That was fucking horrible, by the way,” he tells me.
The corner of his mouth pulls up playfully as he moves to unbuckle my seat belt for me, before heading for the back of the car. I climb out after him, throwing my purse over my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I’ll play a different one on the way home,” I giggle as Tripp reaches into the trunk for our bags.
“No, those things are banned from the car,” he says with a laugh. “What in the fuck are‘slick folds?’You ask me to listen to a book with you, and I get some grown man in my ear talking about ‘slick folds?’”
“Okay, in my defense, I didn’t know that one was gonna be spicy,” I tell him.
“Spicy?” He says, his voice going up an octave in pitch, and I can’t contain the laughter that floods out of me. “‘Let’s listen to my new book,’you told me.‘It’s a murder mystery,’you told me. Yeah,somethinggot murdered, alright.”
“Stop it!” I cackle, wrapping my hand around his forearm.
We’ve been in Jacksonville for all of ten minutes, and it already feels like both of us can breathe more easily. This feelslike the closest we’ve been in a long time to the days when we didn’t care about money or broken glasses or any of the little things, and we just let ourselves enjoy life.
We make a plan to have dinner together as we enter the lobby to check in. A nice meal out together; a do-over, from my perspective. I’d pinch myself to be sure that I wasn’t dreaming, but if I am, I don’t think that I want to wake up from it.
I find myself clinging onto Tripp for security as we navigate through the too-busy hotel lobby and into the elevator to go up to our room. I know that I shouldn’t pass judgment on the people around us for their tattoos and piercings; the skin of the man whose arm I’ve clung to is covered in images of demons, snakes, insects and corpses, and he’s one of the kindest and most gentle people I’ve ever met.
It’s different when it’s strangers milling around, some with their faces – and even their eyes - covered in colorful ink and others with so many piercings, it’s hard to tell where they start and end. I might feel better if I could spot the guys from Tripp’s shop in the crowd, but everyone around us is a blur of ink, vivid dyes, and metal.
As we step out of the elevator, my husband’s arm finds its way around my waist.
“What do you think,” he says, “order in, or go sit down somewhere?”
“I kind of want to put on some makeup and sit down with you,” I tell him shyly, but his mouth quirks into a soft smile.
“Okay,” he nods, giving a squeeze to the skin just above my hip.
My hand reaches up to fidget with the delicate chain around my neck, my fingertip running over the grooves and edges of the ash-filled gem inlaid in the soft gold setting, and I let out a breath. My hand balls in the hem of Tripp’s shirt and I stop him from moving forward.
“Lovey,” I say quietly. “I know you’re really trying to forgive me. I don’t think I necessarily deserve it, but— thank you.”
For just a second, he chews on the corner of his lip. I expect us to wind up in a long talk that keeps us from making it to our dinner date or that devolves into some kind of argument, but we don’t.
Instead, his hand cups the back of my head and he pulls me close to press his lips to my forehead, and my heart skips a beat.
He kisses me again as we reach the door to our hotel room and he presses the key card to the lock, pushing open the door - next to which, someone else’s luggage is already sitting. To our left, the door to the bathroom is cracked open and the shower can be heard running inside.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Tripp groans. Rapping his knuckles against the bathroom’s door frame, he shouts, “You’re in the wrong room!”
The person inside says something in return, but their voice is almost impossible to make out over the heavy flow of the water. As the shower clunks to a stop and silence fills the room, the door opens. Behind it, Connor stands with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, and his face twists into confusion.
