Page 4 of Brash for It (Hellions Ride On #11)

The lock screen is a picture of water. He took it from the local pier at sunset, the kind of photo that looks expensive even though it cost nothing.

That is the thing about living here in Indian Beach full time.

Yes, he has a home in Charlotte and another in California.

He only goes to Charlotte for work, California for family, and this little spot in coastal North Carolina he considers our hideaway.

The insecurity finds me again, am I his hideaway? This home is the cheapest of them all even though I’m sure he spent at least two to three million on it. I never thought about how this home serves no purpose for him except to escape work, that’s what he used to say. Now, I question everything.

Two notifications flash up before dimming: Calendar alert for something vague—“Lunch”—and a Messages banner that only gives me a name: Q .

No preview. He changed his settings. He never used to hide previews.

I chew the inside of my cheek. The bathroom fan hums. A muted clunk of shampoo bottle against tile. He’s whistling, off-key.

I know the passcode. I didn’t go looking for it. He gave it to me two years ago, on a drive back from Charlotte, when he needed me to pull up directions and he was going eighty-five.

I repeat the numbers in my head. They fit into my finger like a habit. I wonder if he changed it? Never have I touched his phone. This all feels so wrong but my every instinct pushes me to keep going.

My thumb trembles. I steady it. The phone wakes again. I key in the digits.

It opens. The rush in my veins is victory and nausea together.

I don’t go to Messages first, even though that’s the banner that flashed.

My hand moves toward the Photos app like gravity is stronger there.

The screen brightens. I scroll. The first row is a sea of sunset shots, Rucker’s neon sign, an artfully plated plate of grilled mahi he sent to a client who told him to go live a little. I scroll further.

There she is.

Not her face at first. A mirror selfie taken in a hotel bathroom—the kind with the stone counter and the folded white towels and a complimentary little orchid that’s trying too hard.

Her body is the focus. Black lace. The kind of lingerie that’s more design than fabric. It hugs skin like it has a plan.

I don’t need to see her face to know she’s confident. The angles tell me—deliberate, practiced. A second later, there’s the face—another photo, mouth open on a laugh like the person behind the camera said something funny and she’s used to men saying things that make her smile like that.

My breath punches in as if I’ve run a flight of stairs. The next photo is his hand on her thigh. I recognize the watch. The one I bought him for his birthday. It looks expensive against her skin. It is.

The scroll turns jagged. My thumb won’t listen.

It keeps going, a compulsion I can’t tame.

There’s a picture of the sound side of Indian Beach, a boat wake fanning white with a marker in the water I recognize from this area.

There’s a picture of a menu at a steakhouse we’ve never been to together.

There’s a picture of a hotel key card on a bedside table with a room number I memorize even though it will mean nothing by morning.

There’s a picture of him, lying back on a bed I don’t recognize, shirt open, smile easy in a way I haven’t earned in weeks, maybe months.

He took it himself. The angle makes his jaw look stronger. I hate that it makes him look happy.

I exit Photos like it’s burning me and click open Messages.

The bubbles fall into place and stack themselves into a narrative I’ll never stop hearing once I’ve read it.

The contact at the top is just B with a little black heart.

The thread goes back farther than I want to scroll.

I pick up in the last three days, like I can contain it to a window small enough to survive.

Q: When are you coming back?

Brian: Soon. Play nice.

Q: You like me better when I don’t.

Brian: True.

Q: (photo of the front of her very sheer panties and what looks like jewels on the skin of her vagina)

Brian: Christ.

Q: You promised me Tuesday. Don’t make me wait until Friday like last time.

Brian: I said I’d try. She’s around and I have obligations to her.

Q: She always is.

Brian: You jealous?

Q: I don’t share well.

Brian: I know. ;)

The winky face blew me away because he’s never sent me any kind of flirty text. The next thing is a video I don’t play, because I’m not made of stone and I’m also not made of anything that can survive that. The one after is a text:

Q: You left your toothbrush beside mine. I’ll keep it in that spot on the vanity for you, lover.

Beside mine. She will keep it on the vanity. Not a hotel, then. Not a random. Not a one-off. Something with roots belonging to her. Something that has a place to hold his spare things. The realization is physical. It grabs at my sanity and has me struggling to breathe.

I swipe up to older messages because I want to inflict damage, apparently.

I can’t stop. Two weeks ago, a private joke about a waiter.

Three weeks ago, a photo of a bracelet—a thin gold thing with a tiny charm—and Brian’s comment: Looks good on you.

A month ago, “Happy for you” when she got some job thing I didn’t know he cared about.

If I scroll back far enough, will it hit where he and I overlap? I don’t try. My stomach has limits.

The water in the shower shuts off.

The silence slams like a door. The fan whirs on, then off.

The subtle shift of the air in the house as the bathroom door opens just a crack and steam slips under.

My heart fumbles and drops, then scrambles after the beat like it got startled except it’s shattered so all the pieces are everywhere inside me and I can’t get them back together.

I exit the screen, lock the phone ,and flip it face-down the way he left it.

I set it gently on the nightstand with the precise angle he always puts it at, like it’s a compass and true north will only find him if the black rectangle is pointed toward it just so.

I force myself to stand there and breathe until my hands stop looking like they belong to a person in a horror film.

The door opens. He steps out with a towel slung low on his hips, hair wet and pushed back. He looks like someone else’s fantasy. I blink though and he looks like my partner, my person, and that makes me angrier.

“You want the shower?” he asks, like nothing has shifted on the axis of the earth. His eyes pass over me like he’s searching, but finds nothing wrong and keeps moving.

“I’m fine,” I say, which is the kind of lie you train yourself to tell when fine is the price of entry. I want to rush to the shower and wash every bit of him off me. Then the part of me that loves this man wants to cling to his smell on my skin, the way my body still feels him inside me.

He rakes a hand through his hair and drops the towel to step into fresh boxers, pulling them up like we’re just doing the regular routine of bedtime. The phone sits quiet, innocent, and black as a closed eye.

He heads to the dresser, grabs a T-shirt, pulls it on.

He checks his watch. He doesn’t check his phone.

Not yet. He will. He always does before he sleeps, scrolling through emails and finance apps and whatever else keeps him in rooms with men who speak in numbers and shake hands that feel like decisions.

I watch him watch himself in the mirror, adjust the shirt so it falls a little better on his shoulders, tug it down. The man in the reflection smiles at the man he thinks he is.

“Kristen?” he says, finally catching my stillness.

“Yeah.”

He tilts his head. “You okay?”

There it is. The tiny door opening. He offered it without meaning to. He will hate that in thirty seconds.

I pick up my dress and step into it, because the armor feels better than the exposure. The zipper rasps up my spine. “I’ve got a question.”

He frowns, mild. “Shoot.”

I look at the phone. Then at him. My voice is steady when I don’t recognize it. “Who’s Q.?”

The name floats between us, light as a balloon. Then it pops, and the air in the room changes. Not invisible. You can feel these shifts if you live with a person long enough—pressure dropping before a storm, static prickling before lightning strikes.

His gaze flickers, one microsecond to the nightstand and back. If I wasn’t looking directly at him, I’d miss it. His mouth twists into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Is this what we’re doing?” he asks, lazy, like I’ve brought him a menu he already knows he hates.

I stand straighter. “I asked you a question.”

The silence is a suspended thing. The ocean thrums impatiently beyond the glass.

He exhales. He walks to the nightstand. He picks up the phone.

My heartbeat is a drum solo. He unlocks it with his face and scrolls like he’s bored.

He’s not. A muscle jumps in his jaw, betraying him, and the petty part of me feels a tiny victory.

He sets the phone down again, casually, calmly. “You could have asked me instead of snooping.”

“If I had asked you, would you have told me the truth?”

He laughs. It’s quick, sharp, mean. “You already think you know the truth, Kristen.”

“I saw pictures,” I reply, and I surprise myself by not crying. The tears are somewhere far away, maybe on a beach at low tide, waiting for their turn to roll in. “I saw texts.”

“Right.” He scratches the back of his neck, unaffected. “So you broke my trust to confirm your paranoia because you’re insecure and this is my problem.”

I stare at him. In the bathroom mirror behind him, my face looks like a stranger’s—pale, eyes too big, mouth a flat line someone drew with a ruler. “I broke your trust.”

“Did I stutter?”

“You’ve been sleeping with someone else,” I state, each word a laid-out stone I dare him to step around.

“More than once. For how long now, weeks? Months? I don’t even know.

” My throat tightens again, but the words keep coming because there’s momentum in the truth.

“You laughed in a hotel bed together. You bought her jewelry. You forgot your toothbrush at her place.” My voice changed and I couldn’t help the sharpness in my tone, “don’t worry though, she’s keeping it safe beside hers on the vanity. ”

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even blush. He considers me like I’m a bill he could pay or not. “You done?”

“No,” I whisper.

He rolls his shoulders once and shrugs, the gesture infuriating in its simplicity. “You’re free to leave any time.”

The line lands flat and horrifying. He says it like he’s telling me the time, like he’s pointing out a takeout menu, like generosity. You’re free to leave.

“Brian,” I manage to get my voice back, but it comes out shredded. “That’s your answer?”

He lifts his chin. “You’re not a prisoner here. You don’t like how I handle my life, leave.”

He turns, picks up a pair of slacks from the top of his dresser.

As he slides them on his eyes don’t meet mine.

He grabs his wallet, slips it in his back pocket.

Keys. His phone goes into that favorite pocket like it’s the conclusion of a ritual.

He doesn’t look at me until he’s at the bedroom door.

“Don’t break anything,” he states mildly. “It’s expensive.”

The door opens on his back like I’m an audience to his exit.

He walks down the hall, whistling the tail end of a tune I can’t place, like he didn’t just split the skin of my life with a few expert cuts.

The front door clicks a second later. Then silence.

Not ocean silence. House silence. The particular kind that’s all fan and refrigerator and a slow settling of wood.

The kind that amplifies your breath and makes it sound like someone else’s.

I stand in the middle of the room, every muscle in my body locked, waiting for him to come back and say he didn’t mean it. Waiting for this to be the part of the story where the misunderstanding resolves and he apologizes and we try.

I’m waiting like a fool.

Hoping like an idiot.

Wishing like a na?ve girl that I had it all wrong.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t come home.