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“Decided to have two cigarettes instead of just one,” Winter said. “By the time we were finishing the second one, we’d already seen three cops race past, so we mapped out a different route and took the local road that ran parallel to the highway. It took us to within a mile of the rest stop. Gave us a chance to smoke a few while we waited, too.
“Well, Riley rolled some left-handed cigarettes, figured you guys will need a few of those too,” Tavis remarked, lighting one of the two Riley had left on the table and passing it to Winter, who gratefully accepted.
“You figured right,” Winter wheezed, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. “God that’s good.”
There were a dozen things Tripp wanted to ask, but he took his clues from Tavis and waited for Winter to begin talking on his own, which he did only after enjoying several long tokes.
“Can I preface this whole conversation by saying that I was set up?” Winter asked.
“I suppose you were bamboozled and run amok too,” Tavis quipped, prompting Winter to flash a ghost of a smile his way.
“No, just set up,” Winter explained. “Wouldn’t have said fuck-all if the bastard had admitted to being a reporter. Wouldn’t have taken him to bed either.”
There was a sudden tick at the corner of Tavis’s jaw, and his eyes darkened in that way Tripp had come to recognize meant he was pissed about something. He plucked the joint from Winter’s fingers and inhaled deeply, scowling when Winter reached to try and get it back from him.
“I’m sorry,” Winter said. “I was drinking, I needed someone to talk to and…”
“You talk to me!” Tavis snapped, scowling, inhaling, and allowing the smoke to remain deep in his lungs for several seconds before exhaling a stream of smoke. “Wasn’t that what we agreed on? You don’t ghost me just ‘cause….”
“I know!” Winter snapped, while Tripp felt like he was inching closer to learning what had gone wrong between them. “I panicked. It was shitty of me. I know I fucked up and I know you’re pissed.”
“Try again,” Tavis growled.
Blinking, Winter met his gaze, and only then did Tavis pass him the joint back.
“You really hurt me,” Tavis said. “I’d rather be angry with you. I wanted to be. But in the end, I kept on asking myself what the hell I’d done to have you turn your back on me that way.”
“Nothing.”
When Winter didn’t elaborate, Tavis raised a skeptical eyebrow at him.
“It wasn’t…”
“Me? Anything I did? Let me guess, it was you and I shouldn’t feel bad about what happened,” Tavis remarked, sarcasm dripping from his tone.
“Well, it’s true,” Winter groused. “I panicked. It was the most intense night of my life, and I didn’t know how to take that. I’d been looking for something that would make me truly feel something for so long, that when it happened, I didn’t know how to handle it. Especially when it came with someone I’d known as long as I’ve known you. To think that it’s been right there, all this time, and I was too scared to cross the line and go after it.”
“Until you weren’t.”
“More like until we weren’t alone,” Winter admitted. “Would never have had the guts to go for it if it hadn’t been for Tish.”
“It shouldn’t have taken a third person in the bed for you to accept what we both wanted.”
It was like watching a ping pong ball bounce back and forth across the table, and there was no longer any doubt in Tripp’s mind what they were talking about.
“I just want to be clear on one thing before you two keep going,” Tripp interjected during a pause where they passed the joint back and forth, short double puffs spaced between each handoff. “Is the reason Winter doesn’t know if he’s the father of Tish’s kid or not because there is a chance you might be?”
“Pretty much,” Tavis replied.
Glancing from one to the other, the one thing that was impossible for Tripp to miss was that they appeared completely at peace with the situation.
“But that’s not what you’re fighting about,” Tripp said, trying to clear things up before they started going back and forth again.
“We were never fighting,” Tavis explained. “He started ignoring me after we fucked each other stupid.”
Scowling at his brother, Tripp struggled to wrap his mind around what he’d just heard. “O-kay, umm…I didn’t think…I mean…”
Biting his lower lip, Tripp tried to map out what he wanted to say before he said it, so he didn’t come off as invasive or insensitive, while Tavis just chuckled.
