TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel Read online

  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.

  He’d kept that promise.

  “Cass, you understand, right?” he said, eyes darting back and forth from me to the road. It was largely empty; we were farther upstate than I’d ever been before in my life. As you may have guessed, my father wasn’t much for family vacations. “Your father is going to jail. If I did it right, and I think I did, he’s going to jail for a while. No one is going to believe an old drunk, Cass. He can tell them the truth, they won’t believe him. He passed out. I put the gun in his hand. Cass, that gun can’t be traced to me. They’re going to throw him in jail.”

  “Pop…Pop is going to jail,” I said, dreamily, my eyes drifting along the landscape now as I tore my gaze away from Trigger’s. Pop was going to jail. After all those years of living in his house, feeling that deep sick fear in my heart every time he came home, after everything…he was never going to come home again.

  “What,” Trigger said, his voice turning to grit now. “Are we going to do about your sister? Do you know where she is? Is she safe?”

  “She’s with the girls upstairs,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t know what I was talking about. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what I was talking about. “She’s safe. Safer than….safer than she ever was.”

  Suddenly, illogically, I was so grateful to Thomas – or Trigger, rather. She was safe. I was safe. My Uncle Kevin wouldn’t come for her. He didn’t care about us. No one would come for her. Except Child Protective Services, if they heard about it. With the girls upstairs, she had a chance to be happy, live a normal life. I couldn’t raise her on my own, not with the money I made waitressing, and even if I could raise her on my own…

  I didn’t want to.

  The realization made me want to burst out in fresh tears. How could I be so awful, so callous, as to say that bringing up an eight-year-old girl who idolized me, who I loved more than anything on this earth, just wasn’t something I thought I could do? I was 18 – I was 18, and I had enough of a problem dragging myself through the day. The girls upstairs didn’t just like taking care of Jennie, they loved it. They asked to do it. They cared for her like my father never could, like my mother had refused to.

  I was just a damn kid.

  I couldn’t raise my baby sister.

  She’d probably end up in foster care, taken away from me once they realized how truly shitty I was at doing anything, how useless I was, how…

  And there was my father’s voice again, in my head, reminding me that I was no good, would never be good, could never do anything good.

  How could I raise my sister to believe in herself when I didn’t even believe in myself?

  I was thankful to Trigger for taking care of our father, for making it so that he couldn’t hurt her anymore. Or me.

  But the more I realized just what that all entailed, the more I felt sick and sad and, most of all, sure that never seeing Jennie again might be the best thing I could possibly do for her.

  And that just ripped my heart right out.

  As though he heard it happening, heard the wet squish of my heart falling onto the floor, Trigger spoke.

  “Penny for your thoughts, Cass,” he said. “Who are the girls upstairs? What do you want me to do? I mean…I can go back. We can go back. I can take you to her, if that’s what you want.”

  “No,” I said, my voice thick and croaking as one, two, three tears finally escaped my slitted eyes. “She’s gonna be be..be…better off…wi-wi-with them.”

  Looking back on this moment years later, I’d sometimes wonder how I’d made the decision so quickly. It was truly as though my mind leapt in the span of a second from the unthinkable pain of losing Jennie to the irrefutable logic that it was the only good option.

  I’ve come to think of it as evidence of the purest type of love there could ever be, where my pain was eclipsed entirely by her needs. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it would hurt her, too; she was about to lose her beloved sister and her not-so-beloved but still very familiar father all at once. But children are resilient, and at seven I knew Jennie could come back fighting. And I’d call, and write, and visit, and…

  But where would I be calling and writing and visiting from?

  “Trigger,” I said, swallowing hard. “What are you going to do with me?”

  Surely he didn’t plan on dragging my useless, chubby ass around behind him for the rest of his life. He was handsome and smart and socially skilled – or, at least, antisocially skilled enough to find a home for himself wherever he went. Me, I had three hundred dollars to my name, no friends, no family.

  I couldn’t afford the rent in our apartment, which was already dirt cheap considering it was rent controlled. I could maybe scratch up enough to pay another month or two, but then what? My tips at the lounge were paltry compared to the cost of living in New York, even if I could get them to hire me full-time. I could get a room, I supposed…

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do with you?” he asked, turning to me with a look of concern. “I’m not going to do anything with you.”

  My heart fell; even thought I already knew I’d just be a burden to him, could never ask him to help me get a new start somewhere, the way he’d said it sounded harsh on my ears.

  “We’re going to do it together,” he said quickly. “If you want.”

  What does that mean, I wondered, closing my eyes, head throbbing even more now. What does any of this mean.

  “I guess…I mean…I need to go back, right? To New York. Right?”

  “Why?” he asked. His eyes were tipped towards mine over the divider. “What’s there? If you’re not going to take care of your sister…”

  “My life is there,” I said, knowing it was irrational even as I said it. What life? Without Jennie, I didn’t have any life at all in New York. Just good grades at a school I could never continue attending, an apartment I couldn’t afford, and family that didn’t care a damn about me.

  “Listen,” he said with a sigh. “This whole damn thing is crazy, alright? I can’t go back to New York. They’ll kill me. Straight up, they’ll kill me, Cass. You can go back if you want or…”

  “Or what?” I asked when the pause lengthened out uncomfortably.

  “Or you can help me,” he said, a fiery blush coming to his cheeks. “We can help each other. Right? I mean, you helped me pass history.”

  At that, he smiled at me bashfully. If I was anything but utterly overwhelmed by everything, it would have been adorable.

  “I just…you can go back if you want. But I’m gonna try to get myself something good on this earth, something new and good. I think I can do that…I think you can, too. I think it’ll be hella easier if we try to do it together, right?”

  I gulped. Of course it would be easier. But outside of our little study sessions, I didn
’t know anything about Trigger. Hell, I only just learned that he went by Trigger now, only just learned he was in some kind of gang. I didn’t know who his parents were, what kind of music he liked, whether he was a psycho…

  You know he’s not a psycho, though, I thought to myself. And it was true; I knew he was good. He had to be good, to have brought me with him in the first place. He’d risked everything – everything – to keep that promise he’d made, a promise made in the heat of the moment, a promise between near strangers.

  “I’m fixing for New Hampshire, maybe,” he said, eyes fixed steadily out the window, tone nervous. “Pretty cheap, easy place to hide. And nice landscape…I like the country. Always have.”

  “Trigger…you can’t honestly expect…why would you even want…” the questions were flying from my mouth quicker than I could even finish them in my mind. He bit his lip, white-knuckling the steering wheel.

  “You wanna call your sister?” he blurted out, interrupting me. I nearly sobbed out my response, but kept it inside, nodding fervently instead. Whether he knew it or not, he’d said the exact right thing to keep my mind from rolling off into a Never Never Land of awful possibilities and terrible options and questions better left unasked.

  “I’m hungry, too,” he said, leaning forward slightly over the wheel as if to see better. “You got a phone? I don’t.”

  I raised my arms, indicating that not only did I not have a phone, I didn’t have anything. I was still in that white dress…the one I couldn’t remember ever having worn before, or buying, or putting on myself. There were no pockets, nowhere I could keep a stick of gum never mind a cell phone.

  “Alright, well, next rest stop, I’ll pull over, how’s that? And in the meantime maybe….maybe we don’t talk, don’t ask questions. Try not even to think. How’s that? Just for now. Then we can talk it all out over a good square meal?”

  I almost wanted to smile at him. He seemed so nervous. This impossibly handsome, cut, poised guy…but then I remembered why he had damn good reason to be nervous. And that just reminded me of…

  I felt sick again, rolled down the car window, gulping in fresh air. I closed my eyes tight. Don’t think, don’t remember, don’t think, don’t remember, don’t think, don’t remember…

  Twenty minutes later, as I huddled in a tiny sweatbox that passed for a phone booth, my face puffy, cheek pressed so hard against the receiver I thought it might leave a mark, I tried my best to make Jennie understand.

  “But Dee-Dee, I don’t want to live with the girls, I want to live with you,” her voice came across, high and thin and reedy. She hiccupped; she always got the hiccups before she started crying. I wanted to get off the phone before the tears started. I didn’t think I could bear to hear her crying. That would make me force Trigger to drive back immediately, just to scoop her up in my arms, press my nose into her Johnson & Johnson scented hair, and rock her until she fell asleep.

  But I didn’t want to do that. Especially not after speaking with Jackie, whose alarm at hearing what I had to say melted quickly – almost too quickly for my liking – into sympathetic acceptance.

  “Of course, for as long as you need, dear,” she’d said. “As long as you need.”

  “I don’t know…I don’t know how long…it could be…it could be…”

  “Like I said, honey,” Jackie had said, interrupting me with a tone that said more than words ever could. “As long as you need.”

  “You know where the spare key is, right? Her stuff is all in her room…her documents, in case you need them, medical stuff…birth certificate…it’s in the desk, second drawer, pink folder.”

  “Okay,” Jackie had said. This was when I expected to hear some sort of alarm, a hint that I was asking for more than she was ready to deliver. “We’ll take care of her. I promise, Cass. You know we love her, right?”

  “I know,” I said, throat closing over my words. “That’s the only reason…the only reason…”

  “You do whatever you need to do, sweetheart,” Jackie’s voice came across strong, a lightning bolt of confidence striking the barren soil of my ego. “You know you’re stronger than you think, right?”

  I was silent, letting the words sink in. I knew that Jackie and her partner were all too aware of what Jennie and I lived with. They never said anything aloud, but their eyes spoke volumes.

  “We’ll love her like a daughter,” she continued. “And I’ll pray for you. You are beautiful and strong and wise, Cass. Don’t forget that.”

  I wanted to say thank you, but all that came out was a sort of coughing hiccup.

  “I’m going to put your sister on now, okay, Cass? I’ll give you a minute.”

  I heard her smother the phone, the muffled sound of her calling Jennie to the phone. I took the moment to breathe deeply, gather myself as best I could. When Jennie’s excitable little voice came on the line, though, it was all I could do hold myself together.

  She’d been confused, first, her querulous “but when are you coming home” repeated over and over as I answered, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “They’re gonna take such good care of you, Jennie. You know Jackie and Gloria love you. You’re gonna have fun with them, you can hang out with Rufus and the fishes…”

  “I don’t want Rufus and the fishes,” she said, petulant.

  “I’m going to see you soon, Jennie, and I’m going to call all the time. Okay? Be a big brave girl for me, now, okay? Please? I love you. I love you more than anything,” I said, closing my eyes, one hand wrapped around telephone wire while the other clutched in a fist against my chest, my ribs aching to contain my heart as it swelled and swelled with love for her, and pain for all the moments I would miss out on, all the love I would never be able to give her in the form of kisses and hugs and bedtime stories.

  I thought of her hair, lovely and long as I ran a brush through it, and brought the fist up to my mouth, biting hard on the knuckle to stop myself sobbing.

  “You wouldn’t leave me here if you loved me,” Jennie said on the other end of the line, her voice suddenly a million times older than I’d ever heard it before. It cut me right through to the quick, and I nearly dropped the receiver in my shock. When did my sister leap forward in time to being 17 and angsty?

  Probably when you abandoned her to the devices of a pair of well-meaning lesbians so you can gallivant around New England with a murderous biker, I thought, though I knew that wasn’t entirely fair to myself. Somehow, the combination of her surly tone and that diminishing self-assessment jolted me into a completely different frame of mind, and I found myself speaking as though I hadn’t been too sad to speak a moment earlier.

  “Listen, Jennie,” I spat, “I’m doing what’s best for you. I don’t expect you to understand it, but you have to understand that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and it’s the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do. And if you ever – ever – dare to think that I didn’t do it because I love you more than anything on this planet, you’re ungrateful. Do you understand? Don’t you ever question my love again. Ever.”

  The silence on the line spoke volumes; I could almost see her, eyes wide, tears vanquished for the moment by utter surprise, trying to take in what her beloved, idolized older sister had just told her. She was too young to understand how you might have to do the thing you hate most because it’s the best thing for the ones you love, but this would be her first lesson, and dammit if I wasn’t going to drive it home. The thought of leaving her was one thing. The thought of her thinking I’d left her because I didn’t love her was another thing entirely.

  Just when I thought that maybe I had been a bit too harsh, she exhaled, a squeaking sound.

  “Okay,” she said, sniffling. “I love you too, Dee-Dee.”

  “Be strong for me, baby girl,” I said, all the wind leaving my chest, the emotional bravado going with it. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

  As we lingered over our goodbyes, I watched Trigger walk out of the KFC wher
e he’d been buying our dinner and trot to the car, looking around him manically. I winced. This had been hard – but it wasn’t about to get easier. When I finally hung up the phone, he had already pulled the car around.

  I pulled open the door and was immediately assaulted by the smell of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese. Before I knew what was happening, I was on my hands and knees, retching on the pavement. Trigger shouted an expletive and came around to my side, holding me by the waist as I expelled what little I had to expel from my stomach.