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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 UNTILafter 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.