“I got tired of being pissed for almost twenty years. Finally thought of what my mom would’ve wanted for me and it wasn’t that. Wasn’t what I wanted for myself as a kid either and being fed up with everything and everybody seemed to be some kinda sign… so I left. That’s when I came back.”
Rip’s knuckles brushed over the fine bones on the back of my hand, and I stared up at the ceiling before I asked the one last question I would let myself wonder over. “Are you glad you came back?”
His chuckle was a puff, and those knuckles moved over me one more time before he said, “Some days, no… but, yeah. Yeah. Coming back was the best thing I ever did.”
Chapter 23
If I had thoughtthat maybe I would have gotten a break from my Streak of Shit, I would have been mistaken.
Big-time.
Thankfully, as much as I might have hoped things would be different and my luck might have turned around, I hadn’t expected for even a second that that would be the case. I knew how my luck worked, and in my life, when it rained… there was a hurricane coming. In this case, the thing with my sister had been the warning it was headed my way—I just hadn’t seen it for what it was soon enough. The break-in had gotten me to the eye of the storm, and now I had the other half to live through. So I was expecting not to have the best day, or days, of my life, the morning I woke up holding Rip’s hand.
The morning following the evening in which he’d basically admitted that he had been in a gang, or something close to that, based on his words.
But we weren’t going to talk about that, not until he was ready. If he ever was.
If anyone knew how hard it was to admit intensely personal things, it would be me. After all, I had a handful of people in my life that I trusted very, very much, and I had never told them about my dad and the gun. I had never told them about calling the police on him. They just assumed I’d gotten fed up and ran away.
So, I wasn’t going to think about it. I wasn’t going to bring it up again, and I didn’t when he woke up after I rolled out of bed, or when we rode to work together again, and when our lunches overlapped by thirty minutes and he sat next to me, quietly reading through his magazine, his elbow brushing mine often.
The following morning, after he’d spent another night in my bed with me, neither one of us brought up any piece of our admissions… or commented about sharing the mattress again, except this time I had used my pillow instead of his shoulder like I had that first night.
Unfortunately, in the days since the break-in, Jason forgot he was on strike two, or he’d decided he didn’t give a crap about his job and had taken being an obnoxious jerk to a totally different level. He’d been even more moody and snarky than before, and I could barely handle him when he simmered with it. He’d started disappearing for long periods of time during the day, and when I asked him about it, he’d claimed having diarrhea as to why he would disappear for twenty minutes at a time every hour.
I had timed it: twenty freaking minutes. That’s how on edge he had me that I would time his poops to have as evidence if it ever came down to it. A part of me couldn’t help but genuinely hope that, sometime soon, karma would come back and bite him in the ass in the form of him actually getting really terrible diarrhea for being a big, fat liar.
Jerk.
So on that Friday, the last day before he was supposed to go on vacation for a week, a day I’d been counting down from what felt like the day I’d been born, I wasn’t surprised when he showed up in a rotten mood. I could tell just by looking at his face that he was about to unleash a jackpot of bitch faces, sighs, and under-his-breath comments.
That alone had put me on edge.
I wasn’t completely surprised when we hadn’t even made it to noon before we got into it over him not agitating some paint I’d asked him to prep for me while I’d peeled the tape off a hood that I’d done matching, thick white stripes on—Shelby stripes.
“I was ordering paint for you,” he’d tried to claim when I came out of the booth and found the paint sitting in the same spot it’d been in before.
I knew he was full of it instantly. “So you ordered it for me?”
His blank stare confirmed my answer. “They put me on hold and I hung up.”
Patience. Patience.
I touched the charm bracelet on my left wrist and asked, “Who put you on hold?”
“Somebody.”
“Man or a woman?”
The expression he shot me made me think he thought it was a trick question, but it wasn’t. “Man.”
“What was his name?”
Jason rolled his eyes and shook his head. “How the hell should I remember what his name was?”
“If he put you on hold, I want to know who did it. We do a lot of business with them, they shouldn’t be putting you on hold,” I lied. Of course sometimes even Hector put me on hold when I called in an order, but that was beside the point. My gut said he was lying. “What was his name?”
“I don’t know,” the asshole replied.
