Lauren Ash || A Tig Trager Love Story

10

I spent the evening sorting through my mother's bedroom and crying.

I had found some of my old stuff and broke down on her bedroom floor which is where Alex found me when he got to the house about two in the morning.

"Baby," he said softly as he walked in.

I just shook my head. I'd held it together and gotten a lot of her stuff sorted through, but I just lost it when I found my old diaries that I'd asked her to destroy. I didn't want to hold onto the memories in them and yet she'd kept the small notebooks anyways.

"Let's go to bed," Alex said.

I didn't move and he came to squat in front of me.

"Ren."

I wiped my eyes and looked up at him. He seemed different. Something had happened with the club.

"What's wrong Alex?" I asked.

"I don't want to talk about it baby. Let's go to bed."

"You know where the bed is," I said. I stood up and went back to pulling boxes from my mother's closet.

"Ren, it's two in the morning, please let's go to bed. This will be here in the morning," he said.

"Something happened with Clay tonight and I'm not sharing a bed with a man who doesn't trust me," I said. I sat the box down on the bed and opened it. It was mostly pictures. I closed it and added it to the keep in storage pile.

"I do trust you," he said. He was getting angry but that wasn't really my problem.

"What is it then? Why can't you tell me?"

"It's club shit Lauren," he said.

"Fuck off," I said. "That's bullshit."

"I can't tell you Lauren."

I started ignoring him in favor of pulling more boxes from my mom's closet.

"Ren, please," he said. I continued to ignore him as I worked.

"Lauren, I know you love me but that will change if I tell you," he said.

"Did you cheat on me?" I asked.

"No," he said.

"Then what the hell would make me no longer love you?"

"I killed someone. It was for the club. He was going to hurt us," Alex said. He sat down on the bed and was crying.

"Hey, look, the club's your family Alex. I'll never get upset about you protecting them," I said. "I'm annoyed you thought I'd hate you."

"I killed a man Ren. You deserve to hate me. You deserve to walk away."

"Alex," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

I went and stood between his legs, making him look up at me. "I love you Alex."

I leaned down and kissed his lips. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me as close as I could get to him.

"I love you too Lauren," he said. We stayed like that for a few moments before I went back to the boxes I'd pulled from the closet. I opened the top one in a stack and it was more pictures and papers from when I was a kid. Most of it was trash except for the pictures. The second box was some of my old high school stuff.

"Alex," I said, holding up a picture of the two of us. It was an old Polaroid. He took it from my hands and smiled at the small image. We'd skipped homecoming in favor of partying and had left the party early to go home and watch scary movies. We'd fallen asleep on the couch and Mom had taken a couple pictures of us. That one included.

"Wanna go watch a movie?"

"Can we just go lay down?" I asked softly. He nodded and took out his wallet, sticking the picture in it before offering me a hand and leading me to my bedroom.