by Shey Stahl
I wanted her to know me in the ways I knew her. I knew her as the giggler, the lover of one man. The woman who stole the hearts of two little boys first and the one I looked up to. She was forty-seven. She was too young to die or go through any of this. This family couldn’t work without her. She was our window net, there to hold us all together.
There was never a time when she wasn’t there for any of us. Never had she shut me out and how had I treated her?
I made more of an effort this last year but I vowed to myself I was changing that now.
As I sat there against the wall, I saw a figure appear at the end of the hall walking toward me. I knew that walk.
He was the last person I would have expected to see at that hospital and strangely, exactly who I wanted and needed to see. Someone who would just be there. His mind wasn’t elsewhere. It was on me and just being there for me and my family.
Rager never said a word, as he slid down the wall and sat beside me. I rested my head on his shoulder, he did the same. His arms wrapped around my shoulders pulling me to his side, so warm and comforting I could have slept against him for the first time in days.
He kept his arm around me, his thumb caressing my shoulder.
Sometimes I wondered where I stood with a lot of people, and even Rager at times. Who was I to this person? To him? Was I Jameson’s only daughter? Was I Easton Levi’s wife? Or was I Arie Riley? A lot of people never saw me for who I was. I could probably count on one hand the ones that did. They couldn’t. Not in the shadows in which I lived. I didn’t want the spotlight. I wanted sunlight, beautiful warm rays where, for once, I was just Arie.
In Rager’s arms, I got a little glimpse of that light and what it felt like to be her. I guess I wanted to forget what was happening, so I laughed. “I had sex with you.”
Rager laughed, a gentle chuckle that shook the both of us. “Damn. I missed it…”
“In my dreams,” I clarified twisting around to look at him. “I had sex with you in my dreams.”
“Oh, well,” he drew in a deep breath. “I’ve been there before. I’d say give me details but that’s probably not appropriate right now, huh?”
“Probably not.”
We were both quiet for a moment when he said, “Tell me your favorite memory of her.”
I smiled knowing what he was doing right now.
He was distracting me but also, helping me look at the good things in this life. I twisted back around and relaxed into his chest. He kept his arm firmly around me as I spoke. “Christmas morning when I was twelve. I wanted tickets to a concert… hell, I don’t even remember the concert but dad said I couldn’t go. She went out, got the tickets and gave them to me for Christmas. My dad was pissed but he understood when he saw how excited I was over it. She never thinks about what others will think. She just focuses on one and makes them feel like they’re appreciated. I don’t even know how she does it. It’s natural for her.”
Rager’s lips pressed into my temple, his breathing light and easy. “You’re like her in more ways than you’ll ever understand.”
Was I? Did everyone else see it and I didn’t?
“I’m tired,” I said, snuggling into him closer. This probably didn’t look good, but he was what I needed right now.
“Well, I’d say lay your head down in my lap but that’s probably not a good idea,” he teased, winking at me.
So what changed from then to now? Where was that guy that constantly showed up when I needed him?
He’d lost his grip on the track is what changed and there was nothing I could do about it.
Mom stayed with me and the kids that day. I didn’t know what I would do without her this last year. As she sat beside me, waiting on me hand and foot, I decided to open up to her. Something I’d never been very good at. I was more of a private person, but I couldn’t handle this on my own anymore. Since Rager’s accident, we hadn’t connected. Sure, we had sex, but it wasn’t the same. Nothing was. I knew it had to do with Caden and then how horrible Knoxville went for Rager, but it felt like more.
Looking over at my mom, I sighed. “After Dad’s accident, and he was out of the hospital, was everything normal between the two of you?”
“Fuck no.” Mom laughed, reaching for her wine. “He was so moody and weird. Understandably so, but still, it was hard for all of us.”
I remembered it, not well, but I did. Dad was distant with everyone as he tried to process not only his dad dying, but the fact he had been involved in the crash that killed him.
“So what did you do to fix it?”
“I watched porn.”
I burst out laughing. “What?”
“Porn. You know, people fucking.” I wanted to laugh that she thought I didn’t know what porn was. “But it didn’t work. In the end, it was time he needed. Just… time. To heal, to come to terms with the meaning of his life after something so traumatic.”
She had a point. One I had considered.
Hayden showed up with Thai food around four and I still hadn’t heard from Rager.
“Can I see them?” was her first question to me.
“What? Why?”
“Because I want to see if yours compare to Sway’s.”
Mom’s eyes lit up. “Oh, true. I wonder if they’re different.”
“Yeah, I bet it’s like new cars. Different models for every year,” Hayden added.
What the fuck? But now even I was curious.
Mom waved her hand around. “You should show us, and we’ll decided if that’s the case.”
Just as I flipped my shirt up to show them, fucking Willie walked through the door wearing a black JAR Racing hoodie and board shorts like he’d been at the lake all day. When he took his hat off, his hair told the story. He’d been on Lane’s boat most of the day and probably drunk. He smiled at me. “Did I miss the reveal?”
Mom laughed. “She’s not going to show you her tits.”
Willie frowned. “You showed me yours.”
“True.” And then mom glanced over at me. “You can show him if you want.”
Willie looked hopeful and held out a carton of cookie dough ice cream. “I brought ice cream.”
“She didn’t have her tonsils out.” Hayden reached for the ice cream. “But ice cream cures everything.”
“Oh.” Mom took off to the kitchen. “I’ll get the spoons.”
“So….” Willie eyed my chest.
“I’m not showing you my tits, Willie.”
His shoulders slumped forward. “It was worth a try.”
But I did show my mom and Hayden in the bathroom.
Lily came downstairs. “I got the kids in bed. What’d I miss?”
“Arie showed us her tits. They look amazing.” Hayden kicked back on the couch and then cupped her chest. “I’m thinking of getting mine done now. But Casten’s more of an ass man, so he probably wouldn’t care.”
Mom dropped the spoons on the coffee table in front of us. “I don’t need to know that about my son.”
Hayden snorted, reaching for a spoon. “No, what you don’t need to know is that he has his dick pierced.” Mom’s eyes widened and Hayden laughed. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”
I don’t think Mom knew what to say. Hell, I didn’t either. “I can’t believe my baby boy has his penis pierced. Did it hurt?”
Hayden shrugged. “I have no idea. I know getting my clit did.”
Mom’s cheeks flushed. “I’d like to change the subject to something else. Anything but this.”
Willie grinned. “I’m so glad I came over.”
I glanced over at Willie. “Have you seen my husband?”
“No, but his truck is parked at the Pig Pit. So if he’s not there, his truck is having barbeque for the night.”
Awesome. I wasn’t sure what pissed me off more. Him not being here or the fact that he was eating barbeque without me.
IT WASN’T UNTIL after midnight when I began to panic that he wasn’t home. It was storming outside
and I had all these visions of him crashing his truck. I called my dad. He left the restaurant around ten and Rager was still there. Casten left at eleven with Rager seated at the bar. I even called Rosa who was working and she said he left at closing. So midnight. Where had he gone from there? It was only a five-mile drive.
I tried to track his phone, but he’d turned it off. Probably because I kept calling him. Around three, I heard his truck in competition to the summer storm outside.
Making my way downstairs, I opened the front door to see him standing on the porch staring at the sky. He noticed me and sighed, his gaze lifting to mine. “What?”
“Where have you been?”
The sky rumbled, his eyes lazy and bloodshot, lightning dancing on the horizon. “Bar,” he explained. A slow exhale rose his chest as he watched the streaks scatter overhead.
Bolts of nervous energy shot through my veins. “With who?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to this, but I asked anyway.
At first, he didn’t reply. Maybe he wanted to lie, but we didn’t lie to one another. “Olivia was there.” Our eyes locked, his hiding, mine curious. Rager wouldn’t do this to me though. It wasn’t in him to cheat on me. He was the most loyal man I had ever met besides my father. I knew that, but still, it didn’t stop me from wondering. Loneliness had a way of playing tricks on you.
I bit my lip nervously, staring at my hands. “Just you guys?” And then I looked up, waiting on his words.
“I went there alone.” He swallowed, hard, eyes unblinking. “She showed up later and I let her buy me a fucking beer.” His harshness tore at my heart. “Don’t make it out to be something that it’s not.”
Though I knew Rager would never, ever, do that, your mind could play tricks on you. I didn’t want to believe either one of them would go there, but maybe with alcohol courage and sadness… I didn’t know. I couldn’t even justify what my mind was thinking, let alone Rager doing that to me.
“And you left alone?” Sadness lingered in my words, like an aftertaste of betrayal. Rager wouldn’t. He couldn’t, right?
“Jesus Christ.” His jaw clenched, emotion he’d held down deep surfacing. “Yes.”
“And?” Accelerated beats in my chest shivered up my spine, the anticipation almost too much to bear. Confusion tainted my thoughts like dust on a shelf, floating through my mind like the tiny bits of paranoia I tried so hard to escape.
“And now I’m here.” He sounded defeated. It was hard to watch someone struggle, deflect accusations only to have them thrown back in your face. My heart pleaded with him to speak, but in truth, I didn’t nor would I ever understand what he was going through.
Lightning ripped through the sky. “Are you telling me the truth?”
Right then, the moment he finally let his guard down, a flash through the sky lit the night. He dropped to his knees in the backyard. That was when I finally saw it. I was witnessing what that night in Williams Grove had done to my now cold and restless husband.
It had destroyed him.
“I’m fucking telling you the goddamn truth!” he screamed back at me, his breathing harsh, mine stopping all together. “Why the fuck would I lie to you about this of all things?”
He was burning, so bright I feared the light would go out. And then what? What would be left of my husband then? This sport, one he loved, had taken something from him. Some people had a passion for racing. Others, it was their life and if you said to them, “it’s over; you can’t get back in that car,” well, their life might as well have been over as far as they were concerned.
Since the accident, Rager feared that car and what it’d done to him and the lives of those he cared about. He feared the unknown. This doubt, that wasn’t Rager and me. We weren’t these people. We were a passion. We were a half-lidded glance from across the pits, dirt clinging to our skin. We were a long sigh when the weight of words wouldn’t let up. We were insecurities that collapsed in the heat of the night, foreheads slowly touching and the shaking of our bodies in the quiet, bringing lips closer together until quivering skin followed.
Together, I could get him through this. I stepped toward him, hating what this had done to him. On his knees, his head in his hands, Rager’s body shook and finally he melted into my embrace, his sobs never letting up. When I wrapped my arms around him, my fingers clung to the fabric of his clothes.
Tears fell down my cheeks, and I looked up at the restless moonless sky. Sometimes you looked up and the night was full of stars, burning brightly and shining on you longer than you ever thought they would. And then other nights, there was nothing. Darkness was all you saw. Cold, irritable darkness that took everything from you and left you in the shadows of despair. Hidden behind clouds of doubt, you had to have patience and wait for the night to clear, knowing eventually, your light would return. It wasn’t easy but it was worth the wait.
I wasn’t sure we could wait the darkness out before it broke my husband completely.
I got him inside the house and up to our room. I had no business doing any of this after just having surgery, but I didn’t care about any of that. I wanted to comfort my husband in his time of need.
He cried. Harder than I’d ever seen before. Sobs raked through him as he clung to my body on the bed. He tried to take my clothes off and I stopped him, knowing sex wouldn’t fix this. We couldn’t always turn to that.
“Not tonight.”
He flopped back against the mattress, running the back of his hand over his eyes.
“Tonight was the only time in my life where you haven’t been there for me when I needed you. And I forgive you, because you’re dealing with your own shit. But as my husband, I needed you this week. Not my mom, or Hayden, or Willie.” I paused when Rager lifted his head and rolled his eyes, not surprised Willie had shown up. “Or anyone else that was at our house today, when you weren’t.”
Rager, during our five years together, could talk his way out of anything with a smile and his suggestive flirting. But this, he couldn’t. We had to deal with it. Here and now.
“I can’t be what you need me to be, honey.” His words broke apart. “I can’t even get through the fucking day lately.”
I sat up to face him and righted my shirt. “You can’t keep blaming yourself for Caden’s accident.”
“My accident. I hit him.”
“No.” I cupped his red face in my hands, his tears spilling over my hands. “He was already flipping. You had nowhere to go.”
He let out a harsh breath, as if he couldn’t believe I’d make an excuse for him. “It doesn’t change the fact that his career is over because of me.”
“We don’t know that,” I argued, shifting on the bed to sit up. “There’s new advances every day.”
“Don’t do that,” he snapped, pushing away from me. He sat up and yanked at his hair that had now grown back. “Don’t try to make me see the bright side of this. His fucking career is over, and I’m just supposed to go back to racing like it didn’t happen?” His eyes narrowed on mine as he dropped his hand to the bed. “I don’t think so. Do me a favor. Stop trying to make me feel better.”
“I’m doing this because I have to, because being married to you like this is fucking difficult. When was the last time you let yourself smile and have fun? When was the last time you played with the kids?”
Blinking slowly, he didn’t answer because he couldn’t remember.
“I’m not going to let you keep beating yourself up over this. There’s so much shit that we could blame ourselves for that happens at the track.”
“Do not bring Jack up,” he growled. “Your brother already did.”
“And he’s right to. So many of us could be held responsible for that night, and did. But there comes a point when you have to forgive before you destroy yourself.”
Rager drew in a long breath and closed his eyes. “You know what he said to me? The first thing he said to me when I walked into that room and saw him lying there?”
I was dyi
ng to know. He hadn’t told me anything about their conversation even though I pried many times. “What?”
“Before I could say anything to him, he smiled and said, ‘Don’t you dare apologize, or feel bad for me. Because I’m not mad, or bitter, or whatever else you think I might be feeling. I’m… thankful to still be breathing and given a second chance.’”
Tears rolled down both our cheeks again. “So why can’t you forgive yourself for something that wasn’t in your control?”
“Because he’s nineteen and his entire career was taken from him.”
“Rager, we could argue this all night long. For months, but we shouldn’t. You’re alive. I’m alive.” I opened my shirt and showed him my black and blue chest for the first time. “We don’t have forever. No one does. To waste time feeling sorry for ourselves, or beating ourselves up over what happened doesn’t change it. It only prolongs the hurt.” I took his hand and placed it on my tits, and my heart. “I love you, even though you’ve been a big fat jerk lately.” He snorted, a ghost of a smile surfacing as he stared at my chest.
Breathing slowly, he nodded. “I’ll try to be less of a jerk.”
“Good. Because our sons have that covered,” I teased.
His hand cupped my breast carefully, his lashes wet. “Are you sure we can’t have sex?” He licked his lips slowly. “Because even though these look like you dipped them in grape Kool-Aid, they’re fucking hot.”
I looked down at them. “That’s what Willie said, but don’t get too attached. They’re swollen. They won’t always be this big.”
His jaw snapped closed, his glare instant. I’m thinking it wasn’t the “don’t get too attached” part of what I said that pissed him off. “You fucking showed him your tits before me?”
See? Told you. “No, but might have showed my mom and Hayden… and Lily.”
Growling, he flipped me over so I was flat against the mattress, as carefully as he could. He pinned my hands to the pillow with one of his. Slowly, he brought his weight down on me. “They’re mine. All of you is mine,” he breathed, bringing our mouths together.
I slipped one hand from his and to his chest. “Then let me in here.”