R. Lilley - Lovely Trigger

That suited me fine.  Dahlia needed to find a new focus for her infatuation.

THREE YEARS AFTER THE ACCIDENT

DANIKA

The stars had aligned, and Bev threw a huge neighborhood BBQ in her backyard during one of my business trips to Vegas at the same time that Dahlia was visiting her least favorite town on the planet.

I got to spend the afternoon in the pool with Mat, Ivan, and little Jack.  It was a charmed day, and so rare that I knew to savor every second of it.

The boys were nine and eleven now, and I still saw them often, but every time I set eyes on them again, I couldn’t believe how much they’d grown and changed.

They hadn’t seen much of Jack, but they went out of their way to be nice to him, and spend time playing games with him.  They were darling boys, and they loved me almost as much as I adored them, and since Jack was my family, they treated him like their family.  Bev and Jerry did it too.  It was heartwarming.

Dahlia hung back a bit from it all, but I knew that it was rare for her to get a break from caring for Jack, and so she enjoyed an afternoon of sunbathing, headphones keeping her from even so much as hearing the loud pool party going on around her.

I didn’t mind a bit.  I was only too happy to get in all the time I could and grateful that she trusted me to care for Jack amidst the chaos.

I played pool games for hours with my three boys and several of the neighbor kids.  I was still good in the water.  Better than I was at walking, in fact.  My knee, with all of its lost cartilage, was lighter there.

I had a blast with those boys.  More fun than I’d had in ages.  And all the while, I had to keep my mind from agonizing over the fact that I’d never get to have any of my own.

I’d always loved kids, always had such a knack for caring for them.  I tried not to rage against the unfairness of it all.

The dark thoughts never lasted long, as the boys were always pulling me back into their games.

It was such a wonderful day, but it was ruined by the most unlikely source.

Bev and Jerry’s relationship was stronger than ever, and very occasionally, they had random moments of PDA.

The boys had grown a lot, but upon seeing their parents kissing, they still howled in disgusted dismay.

I was holding Jack when it happened.  He was getting big, but not too big to perch on my hip and carry around the pool.

“They kissin’?” Jack asked me.

I glanced back at Bev and Jerry.  They were really going at it.  “Yeah, Cap’n Jack, they are kissing.  Probably giving each other cooties as we speak.”  I demonstrated by giving him a big smacking kiss on the cheek that made him dissolve into giggles.

“Mommy and Unca Twistan kiss, too,” he gasped out when I let up.

It goes without saying, I didn’t take that well.

I had to sit down, suddenly feeling weak.  I’m not proud of the fact that I then had to interrogate a three year old.

My sister was just so secretive that I didn’t expect to get enough answers out of her to satisfy me.  I’d rather go into a conversation with her with some answers already in hand.

“You have an Uncle Tristan, Jack?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual.

He nodded happily.  “He’s stwongest man in the world.  He tells me to eat my bwoccoli, and takes me to the park.”

I had a few insane moments where I tried to reason to myself that it could be a different Tristan, but I was an odds player, and what were the odds?

“He has magic.”

Any hope I’d had disappeared in a puff of smoke.  “What kind of magic?”

“He teaches me card twicks and can make anything disappear.  Anything.”

“Do you see him often?”

He nodded vigorously.  “All the time.  I wish he lived with us.  And you.  I wish you lived with us.”

“I live close enough, cap’n.  I visit all the time too.  Would you say he visits you more or less often than I do?”

Jack, a three year old that was quickly growing bored with the conversation, didn’t even hear that last question.  He was pointing across the yard, where Ivan had begun to fill up a ridiculous amount of water balloons.

Sighing, I let him run over to help.

I had no intention of letting the subject go, though.  I had to know what this meant.  My very sanity depended on it.

He would not do that, I told myself.  He would not go near my sister, not like that, not after everything we’d been through together.  He’d have known that would kill me.

No, I told myself again.  He just wouldn’t.  There has to be some explanation.

I tapped her bare shoulder.

She was sprawled out in a tiny yellow bikini, her pale skin gleaming in the sun.  I didn’t know how she wasn’t burning, she’d been laying out so long.

She lowered her shades to peer at me, but didn’t take out her headphones.

I tapped my own ear, feeling impatient.

She took one ear bud out, raising her brow at me.  “What’s up?  Is Jack behaving?”

“He’s fine,” I told her tersely.  “Bev is keeping an eye on him for a few minutes.  We need to talk.”

She wrinkled her nose.  “Not right now.  I’m relaxing.”

“Right now,” I shot back.

Her eyes widened at my tone.  I usually treated her with kid gloves.

I didn’t drag her out of her lounge chair, but it was a close thing.

I took her all the way to my old room, shutting the door behind us.

“Are you seeing Tristan?” I asked her, voice shaking.  I couldn’t keep my cool for even a second about this.

She sighed and sat on the bed.  She reminded me of a sulky teenager, with the way she curled her lip at me.  “Jack said something,” she guessed.

I nodded, mouth tight, fists clenched.  “He said he saw you kissing.  Tell me the truth.  Are you seeing him?”

She rolled her eyes.  “I don’t want to talk about this.  You and Tristan!  God!  I refuse to talk about him with you.”

“Are you seeing him?” I asked again through clenched teeth.

I wanted to shake her, or worse, though I knew the true source of my anger wasn’t her.  It was him.  She was my sister, but it felt like the real betrayal was coming from him.

Logic had left the building.

She let out an annoyed little grunt, exactly like a teenager.  “I’ve started seeing Adair, okay?  Tristan still comes around, helps with Jack, gives him some of the male attention he needs, but anything that happened, anything between us, ugh, it’s over.”  She grinned suddenly.  “I know what you’re thinking; I’m making my way through the entire band.”  She laughed like that was funny.

My eyes were wide on her and filled with horror.  “That is not what I was thinking.  Is that what you’re doing?”

She laughed again.  She was way too amused by all of this, when I wanted to tear my own hair out.  Tear her hair out.

“No, that’s not what I’m doing.  It’s just, you know, how it probably would look to some people.”

“I’m not asking how it looks.  I’m asking how it is.  What happened between you and Tristan?  Why did Jack tell me he saw you kissing?”

She waved that off.  “I don’t want to talk about it, and like I said, whatever it was, it’s over now.”  Her eyes narrowed on me suddenly.  “You don’t get to throw him away and then decide who he gets to see.  I never would have thrown him away.”

My heads translation for that; he’d dumped her.

I was livid.  “You have no clue what he and I have been through, no clue why I had to walk away.  This is none of your business, but I did not throw him away.  I barely made it out of that relationship intact.  And yes, he and I are done, but there are rules to this kind of thing.  You and him…no, that’s just wrong.  You’re my sister.  He is not allowed to go near you.”

“Relax, okay?  We’re just friends now.  I’m seeing Adair now, and it’s going really well.  And I am done talking about this.  You turn into a nutcase when it comes to Tristan.  And vice versa.”

She wouldn’t talk about it anymore, no matter how I pried, but that didn’t mean it stopped bothering me.  It ate at me, because I still didn’t know what had happened, and probably never would.

His name was Milton Sagar.  He was an NFL quarterback who’d just been drafted to play for San Diego.  I met him at a gallery showing in L.A. on a Friday night.  He came to visit me in the Vegas gallery on the following Monday.

He was charming, intelligent, good-looking, and very, very interested, and for the first time in a long time, I found that I was genuinely interested back.

Not good on paper interested.

Heart rate accelerating interested.

That hadn’t happened to me since Tristan.  I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or horrified by the development.

He was very persistent.  I turned him down twice.

He had huge arms, gorgeous black hair, kind blue eyes.  He even had dimples.  He probably flirted in his sleep.

He was just the type of guy I should avoid.

The third time he very charmingly asked me out, I said yes to having lunch with him in Vegas, on my break at work.  He flew in just to see me.

I had no intention of letting it go one step further than that.

“So you live in Vegas, but you work in L.A. a lot?” he asked me over appetizers.

I shook my head.  “Just the opposite.  I live in L.A., but I’m in Vegas quite a bit at the moment.  I’m managing both galleries until I can train someone here.”

“L.A. isn’t too far from San Diego.”  He smiled.

I smiled back, admiring his dimples.  I told myself I was utterly whacked in the head.

His smile faded just a tad.  “I have the strangest question for you.  I hope you don’t mind my bringing this up, but a buddy of mine told me something that’s been…bothering me.  I guess he knows your ex-husband.”

I was taking a drink of wine and nearly choked on it.  “My ex-husband?!” I asked, trying hard to sound casual.  “This friend of yours has the wrong girl.”

Only a few people on the planet knew I’d been married for one hot, dysfunctional minute.

He looked surprised but not displeased.  “Oh yeah?  Well, that’s good.  Obviously I can defend myself, but he had me spooked.”

I couldn’t leave it at that.  It was just too bizarre.  “What’s the name of this friend of yours?”

“Tristan Vega.  I’m sure you’ve seen him around.  He does the magic show here.  It’s really good.”

I felt myself pale.  Very carefully, I set down my glass, placing both hands carefully into my lap where I could clench them as hard as I needed to without looking crazy.  “What exactly did Tristan tell you?”

“Oh, so you do know him?  Not much.  He just kind of…warned me off, in a vague sort of way.  He said you had an ex-husband that was liable to stab me in my sleep if I laid a hand on you.  He said he was huge, and insanely violent when it came to you, or rather who you date.  He basically told me that your ex would go to jail for murder before he’d let you go out with a guy like me.”

The sheer gall of that, the utter hypocritical nerve of it made me want to scream.

I smiled tightly.  “Tristan has a twisted sense of humor.  He was just messing with you.  I was never married.”

We did, unfortunately, run into each other occasionally, but that night was the first time I’d sought Tristan out deliberately since the accident.

Working at the hotel got me backstage before his show, and eventually, his dressing room.  It was very handy to be on a first name basis with every security guard on the property.

He met me, his jaw clenched, at the door.

I barged in, fuming.  I waited to speak until he closed the door, giving us privacy.

“How dare you?!” I hissed, shaking.  It felt surreal to be alone in a room with him.  The only thing that made it bearable was my unadulterated rage.

“I know why you’re here,” he said calmly.  “I can explain.”

“Oh please do.  I would love to hear it.”

He took a few steps toward me, but I backed just as many steps away, keeping my distance.  “Don’t you dare try to touch me.”

He looked down, taking a deep breath.  “Of course, Danika.  I know how you feel about that.  I take it this is about Milton?”

I nodded, biting back several sarcastic things that came to mind.  “Of course it is.  Why else would I be here?”