13. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Tripp

"I want you so bad right now," June admitted to me.

"The feeling is mutual, but we can't."

"Oh, we most definitely can," she insisted as the infuriating woman tugged at my belt buckle. I stopped her with my hands over hers and eventually managed to bring hers up between our two bodies near my lower chest, away from my suspiciously absent erection. It was weird that my body didn't respond to her, but that could be because I have these thoughts in the back of my head about how I don't want to be the other man in her life.

"We can't because things need to be settled with your husband before we go there."

June threw her head back as she laughed boisterously as if I'd just told her the world's funniest joke. "I'm being serious."

Her laughter tapered off as she took in the tone of my voice and the fact that I was indeed serious. "You're kidding, right?"

"No," I shook my head. "I mean it. I don't want to start us off with an affair or a scandal."

She scoffed at that. "Isn't that how you started things off with your ex-wife?"

"My deceased wife, not my ex. And did it occur to you that I learned a lesson from how things started with Kim and me."

"Don't say her name," she demanded in a humiliated whisper.

"She was my wife. I have kids with her whose lives I am very much involved in. If you can't stand to hear her name, then this will never work between us anyway."

I could see June's attempt to pull in her temper. "It's still hard for me to remember those days."

"Why?" It didn't really matter what her answer might have been. "Listen, June, either we're putting our past behind us and starting fresh here, or…" I left the rest hanging for her to fill in. It would never work to rekindle something if she was going to hold my teenage choices against me.

"If that's the case, then why are you so worried about my husband? He told me he spoke to you and told you that it was okay for us to be intimate."

I blew out a frustrated breath. "June, for exactly that reason. You are presently tied to him, and I shouldn't need another man's permission to go there with you. I don't want to be the other man in your present scenario. When we take things to the next level, I need to be the only man in your life. I told you, I learned my lessons where infidelity is concerned and there won't be a repeat performance, no matter which end of the chain I'm on."

She huffed and then sighed before her shoulders finally released all the tension they were holding. "It should make me happy that you feel that way, especially considering what happened to break us up."

"We were young. What happened with Kim only happened because we were already having problems back then. It was a symptom of our bigger issues, and we were too young to deal with them. I'm not that kid anymore, June. When something isn't sitting right, I'm of a mind that it needs to be fixed not shoved into the background."

She nodded her head. "I agree. I guess, I just thought that since he has his affairs, and we were married for convenience only, that it wasn't the same. I see your point, though. You're right. You deserve to start this relationship with a clean slate. No more history getting in the way and no other men. We already started the process. It doesn't take long in Georgia when the divorce is uncontested, but there are things we will have to work through. My inheritance and what he thought he'd be getting out of it is a big deal. I don't just want to see my father's bank go to my husband in a divorce. That wouldn't be fair to me."

"I understand that things are complicated. I'm not going anywhere, June."

Her hands shook as they reached for my own and held them tightly, pulling the two of us closer together again. "That is my biggest fear."

"What is?"

"That you will go somewhere else. That you'll get tired of waiting like…" She bit off the rest of it, clearly having been about to say something about the time she went to Europe, and how I didn't wait for her. Staring down into June's eyes, the worry hit me again that maybe exes should stay exes.

Nostalgia for an old flame was one thing, but to constantly be crucified for something I did when I was barely a man wasn't something I'd sign up for.

"I know what you're thinking," June whispered to me as her eyes came up to meet mine. "I promise, it's not that I'm holding it against you. There's just always this little bit of worry in the back of my mind. You know that little voice of doubt that tells me that I'm not good enough, or that I'm not worth the wait." She waved away my denial before I could even get it out. "I know. It's just in my head. You were right. We weren't in the best place when I left that summer. Even if everything else hadn't happened, there was no guarantee that we would have stayed together.

I would have gone off to college, and I know now that you would have never followed. Your club meant too much for you to leave it. That was something that I couldn't comprehend back then. They were your family, your livelihood, and I was just a high school girl."

"You weren't just any high school girl, June. You were my first girlfriend."

There was a glimmer of something in her eyes that looked a lot like triumph at my admission. It wasn't like that was ever a secret, though. We dated through most of high school, and I wasn't stingy with my feelings the way some of the club's brothers were at the time. Those crusty bastards seemed almost afraid to make a declaration of love to a woman. I didn't have that problem. By high school, there was no denying that life was short, and you had to tell people how you felt about them before you lost your chance. That much I knew, and I've lived by that.

A brief flash of the one time I didn't hit me square in the chest. I'd lost my chance to see if anything could come from a possibility with Davina. She shouldn't even come to mind while standing there with June. Still, it was one of the few regrets I harbored and one of the only times I kept my mouth shut about my interest in someone. There just seemed to be too many obstacles in the way at the time. Her age. The fact that she was a club girl. My kids and what they might have thought about it.

I shrugged the thought off and pulled June into my arms, as if to apologize for thinking of another woman yet again when we were trying to work through whether we should give it a try again.

"I really think this is finally our time," June mumbled into my shirt before placing a kiss over the President patch on my cut.

"Yeah? Even if we have to wait for your divorce to be finalized before we take the next step?"

"The way I see it, we'll have time to get to know one another as the adults we are now. It'll give us a stronger foundation to start on than when we were just two crazy, hormonal kids."

I held her tighter and placed a kiss on the top of her head. It was unfortunate that she still over-processed her hair with all the dyes, but nothing could be done for that.

"Why didn't you ever have kids?"

"The right man to have them with got away." She shrugged as she insinuated that I was the one who should have fathered her children. I couldn't and wouldn't feel bad about that or the fact that I had my children with another woman. "My husband was a convenience and neither of us were too inclined to bring children into the mix."

"Do you regret it?" I asked. "I'm guessing that ship has already sailed now."

"There isn't a chance for me to have them biologically any longer," she admitted, though she didn't seem too torn up over the fact.

"You good with that, or would you want to try for adoption or something?"

"No. I'm good with it. I made my peace years ago and I don't mind having all that extra time with you. Call me selfish, but we waited this long to get our second chance, I want it to be just us."

"I do still have grown kids and a grand baby in my life. So, it won't always be just us."

She tucked her head into my chest, so I couldn't see her face, but there was no missing the way her body froze up for a second either. "Yeah, I know all that. It's fine. It's not like they're around twenty-four-seven the way it would be if they were children."

"That's true."