Inked Armour

22 HAYDEN

We were four blocks from home when we hit a sobriety checkpoint. Normally this wouldn’t have posed a problem. The two drinks I’d had this afternoon were long out of my system. There’d been plenty of time, food, and activity to dilute their effects. However, my frame of mind was shit. Getting it on in semipublic locations had never before been an issue, but pushing it on Tenley in her emotional state left me feeling hollow. Not to mention that Tenley looked a right mess.

She was curled up in the passenger seat, legs pulled up under her, her dress fanning out to cover her calves and feet. She had reclined the seat so she was almost prone, lying on her side, facing me. Her eyes were closed, her mouth lax, her breathing slow and deep. She’d fallen asleep. Which should have made me feel better, but meant that I’d worn her out.

When the car came to a stop, Tenley sat up, blinking blearily. She glanced out the windshield at the flashing lights of the cop cars lining the street.

“What’s going on? Was there an accident?”

“They’re just doing a drunk check.”

“Oh.”

She adjusted her seat back into a sitting position but she didn’t relax. She rubbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her coat, leaving a mascara smear on the pale fabric. Unable to keep still, she wiped at the mark on her sleeve. Eventually she gave up and stared out the window as the line of cars moved forward. As the flashing lights got closer, Tenley became edgier.

I stretched my arm across her seat and burrowed through her hair, resting my palm on the back of her neck. “You might want to grab a tissue from the glove box. Your mascara ran a little.”

I was seriously downplaying it. She looked like a Tim Burton movie character. Not ideal, considering we were about to chat with the cops, but I didn’t want to stress her out more. She did as I suggested, rooting around in the glove compartment for the small packet of travel tissues I kept there. She withdrew a row of condoms. Fuckity-Fuckerson.

We’d only used condoms the first couple of times, before we had the awkward discussion about safety and previous partners and all that shit. Awkward for me, anyway, because of my dodgy past. I’d evaded providing any details at the time, and she’d trusted me enough to take my word. That conversation alone told me a lot about the limitations of her experience.

“They’re probably expired,” I said.

I fought the urge to throw them out the window—they weren’t something I wanted to explain on an already shitty night.

Tenley squinted at the tiny date pressed into the foil square. “They’re good for another six months.” She tossed them at me and they hit me in the shoulder, falling between my seat and the center console.

“I forgot I even had them.”

“Is there anything else in here you may have forgotten about?” she asked sharply.

“Like what?” I glanced at her as she rifled through the glove box, surprised by her tone.

Her lips were pursed in a tight line. “Oh, I don’t know. A stack of random girls’ numbers? A little black book? Maybe a pair of trophy panties.”

“That’s a joke, right?”

“No black book, then? Oh, of course not, you didn’t do repeat offenses. Aside from Sienna, right? Silly me. I forgot.”

She was snippy, which was totally unlike her. Tenley wasn’t petty, and she never used my past against me.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Why would I be mad?” She found the tissues and pulled one out with too much force, tearing it in half.

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly flummoxed. “But you sound like you’re pissed and I’m not sure what I did. Those condoms have been there since before I met you. I’m serious when I say I forgot about them. And I’m not so fucked up that I’d keep trophies of a previous partner’s underwear.”

“That’s reassuring.” She swiped under her eyes, black smudges appearing on the white tissue.

“What’s the deal? Where is this coming from?”

“It’s nothing. It’s been a long day. I’m tired.”

Her shoulders sagged and she dabbed at her eyes. She was hiding that she was crying. There was way more to this than she was letting on.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked, pulling up another car length.

Only a few cars were in front of me now, and I worried we were gearing up for a fight. I wasn’t all that keen on getting into a verbal battle, especially with her so fragile and me already feeling like a huge dick. Add some police officers into the mix, and I was looking at a veritable shit show. I was fully aware of the stereotype I perpetuated, especially if Tenley ended up in tears. With the way she looked right now they’d think she was a victim of abuse, emotional or otherwise.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Today’s been hard.”

“You don’t need to apologize. I know today’s been difficult. I just want to know why you’re so upset so I can do something to help.”

I kneaded the back of her neck. Her shoulders tensed so I backed off. She was silent for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

Then in a tiny, shamed voice she whispered, “I found a box of condoms in Connor’s car when I was cleaning it out last week.”

Hearing his name in this context inspired the sensation of spiders crawling all over me. “In the douche mobile?”

Another car passed through the police barricade.

She nodded.

Talking about Connor like this made me uncomfortable for a number of reasons, but I’d set aside my self-doubt if she’d confide in me. I was desperate to understand where she was at right now.

“I’m sorry. I’m not seeing how that would be a problem,” I replied, confused.

From the pictures I’d seen of him, he was a jockish, polo-wearing Boy Scout, so it made sense he’d want to be prepared. If she and I still needed to use condoms, I’d be wearing them as a belt.

“There were four missing.”

“Maybe he kept them in his wallet?”

It was a reasonable thing to do, though four seemed like overkill. Yet the first night I went over to Tenley’s, I brought three. And back then, I’d been avoiding that scenario.

“I’ve been getting the shot for years,” she said. “I went on it pretty much right after we started dating because Connor hated condoms and I didn’t want to take any chances. There was never a reason for him to need them.”

My stomach bottomed out as what she was telling me hit. I thought back to those photo albums I’d gone through, and that period of time when Connor was absent from the pictures. There had to be a story there I didn’t know. Had her insecurities and second thoughts originated there?

“There has to be a reasonable explanation.”

“I’ll never know what it was, though, will I?” She wrapped her arms around her waist, folding in on herself.

From the way she was shutting down, she had already formulated her own hypothesis—the worst one possible. To discover this after he was gone was fucked up. Since she couldn’t know for sure, those doubts would linger forever, tainting his memory. While I felt threatened by him, I didn’t want him demonized.

It was better for him to be enshrined in her past. Because finding out that he might have been fucking someone else led to one truth: all that death might have been avoidable if she’d known.

“Maybe they belonged to a buddy? Chris used to leave his all over the place. He got Jamie in a world of shit once when Lisa found a box stashed under the passenger seat of the Beetle.”

“Maybe,” Tenley replied, but obviously she didn’t believe it.

We moved forward again. Only one more car was in front of us.

“There was never anyone else when you were gone,” I said, seeking to reassure her that I would never do that to her. This information explained so much about her past reactions, particularly to Sienna.

“I know that.” She wiped at her eyes with a fresh tissue, leaving new mascara smudges behind.

“The thought of being with someone other than you made me feel sick.” I smoothed my palm down her back, along the ridges of her spine. “It still does.”

The car in front of us pulled through the barricade. I moved forward, annoyed at the interruption to our heavy conversation. My headlights washed over the officer inspecting the cars, and I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles went white.

“Son of a bitch.”

Just when I thought my night couldn’t get any worse.