Page 52 of Avenged

ME: Yes.

ELI: ***laughing emoji*** Have fun.

ME: Seriously, got to stop implying that kind of shit.

ELI: Protective much?

ME: *** one-fingered emoji***

I shut the phone off and looked at Jersey who was staring out the window at the taco truck as if she’d never seen the place. My wife… It kept surprising me somehow. Those words. Words I’d used to tease her just as Eli was teasing me. She’d been deep in thought the entire ride back to New London, and I’d left her alone. My own thoughts had been whirling with everything the doctor had said, and it wasn’t even my body going through it, so I’d wanted to give her what I would have needed: space to process it all.

I finally spoke, and it drew her eyes to me. “Want to order and take it out to the pier?”

“You don’t have to babysit me. I’m okay now,” she said, and I smiled because I had known we wouldn’t go long without her opposing me. It was her natural instinct to decline anything that looked like help, and I wanted to know why she was that way. What had hurt her so badly she couldn’t take someone holding her hand?

I got out of the truck and was halfway around to grabbing her door when she slid out onto the pavement. I grabbed her hand and shut the door behind us, locking it with my fob. “Maybe I’m the one who needs the babysitter,” I told her with a smile.

She rolled her eyes. “You really can be such a child.”

But she didn’t pull her hand from mine, and I had to think that was the biggest win we’d had all day.

My brain was on her hand and how our skin seemed to fit perfectly together, which caused the doctor’s words about sex and oils and orgasms to echo through my male brain, and I lost myself to fantasies of creamy white skin. I was drawn from the images by whispering behind us. I didn’t think much of it until I felt Jersey stiffen next to me. Until I felt her yank her hand from mine and cross her arms over her chest.

The quiet calm that had settled on her during the ride back to New London instantly disappeared, and I went on high alert, my ears straining for every word and sound as if I were boarding an unknown vessel. As if I were waiting for the click of a gun.

“The nerve…as if…nothing wrong… poor Jerard can’t… Ana’s hand…”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I flipped around and found—to my surprise—that I was staring at two women in their forties or fifties. I’d expected younger women. Someone who would gossip and go on like some Mean Girl reality show.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I growled out, but that was the wrong thing, because Jersey stiffened more and pulled on my arm.

“Let’s just go,” she said, her voice pleading, but I wouldn’t go. I was waiting for a response from the two women.

“Wrong with us?” the older woman asked. “How does she have the audacity to stay in this town?”

Violet’s words about the crash and the town rammed home into my brain, and I ground out from clenched teeth, “She wasn’t the one behind the wheel of the car.”

“She might as well have been. She was the reason he got in the car to begin with,” the younger of the two women said with a huff and a flip of the hair.

“Travis, please. Let’s just go,” Jersey said, tugging on my arm again.

“This is ridiculous. They can’t blame you for your father’s actions.”

“Please,” she said, but I was still so angry at the two women in front of me who were making her feel shame for something which hadn’t been her fault that I couldn’t look at her. I was still eyeing them down and making them squirm.

“Travis…please,” she begged quietly.

And that got me. The begging. I looked down at her and saw her eyes were full of more tears on a face that still bore the signs of the ones from earlier. I wanted to throw something. I wanted to throw the women who were causing her more pain, but I also didn’t want to be the reason she cried again, so I let her pull me from the line and back to the truck. She tried the handle, but it was locked. I turned her to face me, putting both my arms on either side of her head so she couldn’t escape. “Do you get that a lot?”

She looked down, skittering away, hiding again. My cheek began to twitch, and the tension in my jaw reached an all-time high.

“Not as much as we used to,” she said.

“How can they blame you for what your father did?”

“Because it was my fault. Just like they said.”

“You didn’t force him into the car.”

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