TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel (6 page)

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,
anti
socially 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.”