TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel (5 page)

Cass

The thing about reality is
that it’s relative. In the muggy days of my illness – when life was all shadows
and laughter in the distance – I was, somehow, as happy as I’d ever been in my
life.

Perhaps because of the way
I’d wake up and find Jennie holding my hand. Not entirely surprising; more
surprising was when I’d wake up and find my father stroking my hair, sober –
somehow, I could tell he was sober. I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d seen
my father sober.

Of course, I call this time
“the time I was sick” or “my illness”, but it wasn’t. A sickness or an illness
happens on accident. And what was happening to me wasn’t accidental. Not at
all.

Which makes the memory of my
father stroking my hair somewhat, though not entirely, less pleasant.
Somewhere, even when I know that
he
was
the one making me sick (I don’t know what he was using, or how he got it), I
still hold onto that memory of his sad, sad eyes looking down on me, his big
clumsy hand in my hair, his mouth moving in words I was too fevered and dazed
to even begin to understand. I imagine, though, that he was saying
sorry.

Sorry, Cass, sorry, sorry, sorry.

But I was happy because for
once, I didn’t feel like myself. The bad thoughts that plagued me all the time,
every day, were gone, replaced with a delirium that was soothing in its
detachment. I wasn’t Cass the screw up, the fat girl, the forever alone loser…I
was just a body, a sick body, and a mind that lagged and swelled with feverous
dreams.

What does that tell you
about my life, that I was happiest when I was so sick I couldn’t even walk to
the bathroom on my own?

When the fog lifted – for
the most part, at least – we were in the backseat of my Uncle Kevin’s beat-up
old Corolla. We were down by the water, in an old industrial neighborhood that
always smelled like vanilla pastries, too sweet, cloying. I knew the area only
very vaguely.

“Jennie,” I said, the words
happening even before my consciousness caught up to me. “Jennie.”

My mouth was the Dead Sea,
her name sandpaper as it croaked its way out of me.

“Jennie’s fine, Cass,” Uncle
Kevin said from the front seat. “Jennie’s with the girls upstairs.”

‘The
girls
upstairs’ were what we called the kindly older women who were always ready,
willing, and eager to watch Jennie when needed. Sometimes, I thought, they were
a bit too eager. When I had to go to my part-time job as a cocktail waitress on
weekends, or had to tutor someone after school, or other miscellaneous tasks,
they happily opened their home to Jennie.

They loved her; who didn’t,
though? My father didn’t like them, called them “carpet-munching old dykes”,
but he certainly couldn’t watch Jennie when he was passed out in his underwear
in front of the TV, and the little bit of money my after-school tutoring and
weekend job brought in were good for the bills.

I think they felt sorry for
me. I wished they’d been around when I was growing up.
 
Once, when I’d lingered upstairs when
picking Jennie up, loathe to return to the hell that was our apartment, one of
the “girls”, Jackie, had talked to me about how much they’d wanted a child. She
had been idly stroking Jennie’s hair as she stared at the large tropical
aquarium in the living room. Jackie’s eyes had drifted down to Jennie, a sad
smile on her face.

I almost wanted to tell them
to take Jennie, thought she might be better off living with these two
mild-mannered, well-educated, sweet-as-pie, women. But that wasn’t right.
Jennie belonged at home, with her family…as fucked up as that family might have
been.

At any rate, my brain
processed that information and settled itself slightly; then, I wondered where
we were going. To a doctor, I presumed. Maybe Uncle Kevin was going to pay for
it. Maybe I was that sick.

“Doctor?” I moaned. My
father’s face appeared, drunken and red, as he peered over his shoulder at me.

“Yes, Cass, we’re
goin
’ to a doctor,” he said, voice thick with the lie.
Uncle Kevin shot him a disgusted look. I passed out again, my brain too tired
to do anything but believe what I knew was never going to be true.

I can’t tell you of all the
things that happened in between my father gently shaking me awake. I saw where
we were. I tried to run. My Uncle Kevin had disappeared, leaving my father and
I alone. He slipped a rope around me, like a dog…

And then the boy, his eyes
kind and gentle, and his promise…

And then the hands, rough
and ugly and cracked and the breath in my mouth like a plague and my body given
up entirely like it was someone else’s, not mine anymore, not mine at all, my
mind
 
raising
,
lifting upwards, away from it all as my hands beat against his chest, happy now
to escape it…

And then the gunshot. And
the streaming blood. And the bright rose of death erupting against his shirt.
And then falling sideways into his arms…

When I woke up again, we
were moving. We were moving
fast
. In
a car, not my Uncle’s car. The city was zooming past us like we were flying on
a jet plane. It was impossible, how fast we were moving…I looked over, blinking
wildly, my head throbbing. It wasn’t my father in the driver’s seat. It was
him, that boy, the one I knew…

“Thomas?” I croaked out, the
word falling like a spineless fish from my mouth, seeming to flop around on the
floor, dead and useless. What did it matter that I could remember his name?
What did anything matter anymore? I looked down at myself, clad all in white.
Whose dress was this, anyway?

“It’s Trigger, now,” he
said, only half his mouth moving as he spoke.
 
He barely glanced at me over his
shoulder, one hand set on the steering wheel, the other on the clutch. We were
moving so damn
fast.

“Where…what just happened?”
I asked, feeling my cheeks damp and puffy from tears, my nose stuffed up, my
throat heavy and clogged. My head pounded. My heart ached. My hands shook. I
was a mess. I wished he didn’t see me like this. The absurdity of that thought
was almost enough to make me smile. What did I care that he saw me like this? I
had bigger problems than a handsome boy I once tutored seeing me in a sorry
state. Way, way bigger problems.

Like the fact that that boy
was speeding off to nowhere, with me in tow, and no sign of letting me go or
telling me where we were going or…

“Upstate, for now, then
Vermont, I guess,” he said. The straight answer nearly knocked my socks off. So
did the fact that he expected me to just go along with it. I mean, I was right
out of it, that was for sure, but…

“Um,” I said, though
admittedly it came out more as a moan. “Why? Go? Me? Why I go? I- ugh!”

Why weren’t my brain and
mouth cooperating? I tried to shake the persistent mist. I tried to shake it
all off. I tried, and tried, but all I could see was the wound blaring up red,
Jennie’s face, my father’s hands on the rope, my body, white flesh exposed…and
none of that made talking any easier.

“Maybe you should go back to
sleep,” he said. Thomas. Trigger. Whatever. He made a pretty good point; more
sleep wasn’t the
worst
idea. But…but
I couldn’t…because…even as the thoughts went through my head, I felt my eyes
closing by the inch.
Because Pop…no…not
Pop…Jennie…because Jennie…because Jennie…

But it didn’t keep me awake.
Instead, it just made me dream of her. Her hand slipping into mine, her face,
cherubic and small, looking up at me. Smiling, smiling, smiling.

And then letting go.

When I woke up again, we
weren’t in the city anymore. I had no idea where we were. But we sure as hell
weren’t in the city. Panic clutched my heart before anything else, and even
before my eyes were open I was kicking at the air, screaming, flailing my arms
around.

“Shit, Cass, shit! Stop! You
gotta
stop, Cass!” Thomas yelled, throwing one hand
out to try and still me while the other hand desperately tried to stop the car
from swerving all around the country road.

“Let me out! Take me back! I
need to get to Jennie! I need to…”

“Stop, shit, oh my God, you
need to
stop.
Who the hell is Jennie?
You
gotta
know – I couldn’t leave you there. Not with
your asshole father. You passed out, Cass. And besides…” his voice trailed off.
I stared at him, mouth open, looking dumb as could be, I’m sure. Not that I
could really care about looking dumb in front of him now. As the day’s events
slowly began to filter back into my mind, I could remember, all too clearly,
how much of me he’d seen not too long ago. The memory dragged up the memory of
that old man’s dirty hands on me and…

He’d asked me to call him
Trigger, and after what I’d just seen him do, I didn’t have any problem
remembering to call him that.

“Jennie is my sister,” I
spat out, closing my eyes tight, the words chasing the memory away. “She’s only
a little kid, I need to get back to her.”

“Oh, fuck,” Trigger groaned.
“If I’d known that…shit. Where…shit! Shit, shit, shit!”

“What about my father?” I
asked, suddenly realizing that he could be dead – or worse, still alive.

“Your father,” Trigger said,
looking at me sideways. “Is probably in the back of a police car right now.”

I felt sick.

“Why…”

“I tried to make it look
like he did it,” he said, sighing. “I thought
….I
don’t
know what I thought. Dammit, dammit, dammit!” he slammed his hands against the
steering wheel. The car swerved slightly, sickeningly. I was nauseous enough as
it was…

“Tomas – what…what just
happened? I haven’t even…oh, my God,” I found myself saying, my voice softer
than I meant it to be, my throat closing up painfully, tears flooding the backs
of my eyes. Reality was crashing down around me. Life itself was crashing down
around me. My father…had tried…to sell me? To pay off a debt? What debt? What…

“Your father’s a dick, and
the guy I work for is an even bigger dick,” Trigger said hurriedly, as if eager
to get off the topic. “Was.
Was
an
even bigger dick.”

This boy killed someone,
I thought. And that made me think
of him, as I knew him, a year prior. I’d been assigned by the school to tutor
him. And when I first saw him, I’d been terrified. He was so damn
handsome,
and me with my lifetime of bad
self-esteem, I just about shit my pants thinking about what he must have
thought of me. Those green eyes, that long hair pulled back into a tiny bun…the
way he moved his body, even, was like some sort of wild cat prowling through a
jungle.

But he’d been…sweet. More
than sweet. He’d been charming. Hell, he’d been
flirty.
And I, too shy and awkward to do anything about it, had
just taken it all in with a goofy smile on my face.

In all my 18 years, he’d
been the only guy to ever make me smile like that.

He’d make these jokes at his
own expense, sometimes, and I’d feel so bad for him.
Me
feeling bad for
him.
Can
you imagine? But it hurt me that he saw himself as too dumb to do anything –
because he wasn’t. When I asked him a question that wasn’t just some random
date of some stupid battle, his answers were
smart.
It was just the little nitty-gritty that eluded him. And it
sucks, but all that little nitty-gritty is what we end up judging people on.

Just like people judged me
because of my old, thrift store clothes and my big thighs and my makeup-less
face.

“Cass,” Trigger said,
pulling me from my thoughts, his eyes on my cheek, one hand on the steering
wheel while the other latched onto my knee. At first, my flesh crawled, the
memory of that other man’s hands on me so fresh.

But this touch wasn’t like
that; it was different, somehow. He was touching me because he needed me, right
then. He needed just to touch me and know I was real and that so was he and
that we were both there in that car together, that we were both running away
from the same thing.
He killed a man,
I
told myself again, but when I looked at him, I remembered, quite suddenly, his
promise.