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He stopped to try to swallow his own emotions then, so it was my turn to squeeze him. But I forced just enough space between us after that so that I could look up at his face.
“Keep going, J. Tell me.”
“Now,” he said and paused. “Now I have to find a way to face that they were all killed just because someone wanted my attention. I hated my wife for this. That she could do this to me. And now I have to spend all my life wondering what her last moments were really like. Did she know they were there because of me? Did she scream for me? Did she fight to stay alive? Did she have to watch Faith —?”
He couldn’t even finish the last thought.
And I was glad that he couldn’t.
I didn’t want to hear it anymore than he wanted to say it.
Utah was gone by the time that Jersey let go of me after that, and Jersey couldn’t help but smirk at the spot where Utah had been.
“Your body-bitch isn’t a very good one,” he said.
“Jersey.”
“I’ll stay somewhere else for a while, Triss,” he said. “You guys can all stay here. Stay together. I’ll come back when I get my head sorted out.”
“What? No. You’re not leaving. We just got you back.”
“I would’ve killed you if he hadn’t been there, Fancy Face. And I wouldn’t have even known I’d done it.”
He brought a hand up to my cheek and my heart broke all the way open to see tears in the man’s eyes.
“I never understood why or how I managed to live through all that back then,” he said quietly. “Some part of me understands it now. I’m still here because you were always going to need me. But that’s kind of a double edged sword now too. I wouldn’t survive it a second time, baby.”
“Survive what?” I asked, a little afraid of the answer.
“You’re what keeps me here, Triss. I’d never live through losing you too. I wouldn’t even want to. I hate myself right now. I hate myself for the way that I felt about Liz for all these years. I hate myself for what I did to you. I hate myself for not knowing what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it now. But what I hate even more than all of that is that I’m so fucking terrified of how I’d have to feel about myself if I did something even worse to you. If I end up being the reason that I lose you too.”
“We’ll figure something out, J,” I said and leaned into him again so he’d hug me another time. “Just please don’t leave.”
He chuckled while he squeezed me. “Before anybody does anything else, I’m going to need you to go burn the fucking shirt that you’re wearing, baby.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
jersey
Trista spent the next few days doing everything in her power to keep me preoccupied. She was convinced that isolation wasn’t the answer for either of us anymore and that we both needed to be leaning into the company of all these other fucking people around my house. And for some inexplicable reason, I hadn’t been able to successfully refute any of her ideas. Everywhere that she went, I followed. Anything she asked me to do, I just did. Anywhere she wanted me to be, there I fucking was. She’d begged me not to leave. Cried. I didn’t stand even the slightest fucking chance at walking away from her after that. She acted like I was somehow the thing that was holding her sanity together and that if I wasn’t around, she’d just topple right into chaos.
For as much as I didn’t like having to acknowledge it, she’d already managed to override every ounce of control that I thought I had left. I’d blacked out and tried to fucking kill her while she slept beside me, and rather than taking that as the most obvious fucking sign that she should’ve sprinted away from me as far as she could get, she was determined to hold me closer. She didn’t spend even a second of her time acting like she believed I was a full-blown monster. She never stopped looking at me like I could walk on water if I just decided one day that I might try it. I spent days trying to prepare myself for her to recoil any time I reached for her, but she never even so much as flinched when my hands searched for her.
She was made of fucking stone.
She was also the bane of my existence, and the reason that I was sitting under the pool shelter next to Utah and his Judge, who simply never stopped fucking talking, while both girls were on floats in the water.
Trista might have been made of stone, she might’ve taken over every spare moment and thought I had, but she was well on her way to the punishment of a lifetime if she continued to wear the world’s smallest bikini in front of this entire crew of males. Especially the male directly beside me, who’d apparently never learned how to not stare at a woman. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been sitting out here drooling this entire time.
“Put your eyeballs back in your head if you plan on keeping them, slick.”
The punk laughed. “What?”
“I don’t share, baby boy. Everything about that girl belongs to me.”
“Yeah,” he said and laughed again. “She’s meaner than you are, dude. I don’t want any part of Trista.”
I couldn’t even prevent myself from smirking at that.
