I glanced toward the nightstand, where I kept James’s letters. “Um, well . . . Why don’t you tell me about you and your fella?”
Frankie reached for my hands then and gripped them in her own. She sat down across from me and stared right through me. My anger stilled at her touch. “They have to crackle off each other like a match and flint. Like when you look in his eyes and feel that fire in your gut, that hunger that could eat you from the inside out.”
I nodded, but I had no idea what she was talking about. Not really. I imagined it, when I watched Lauren Bacall on screen; I tried to imagine it now, staring back at Frankie and her eyes like tarnished bronze. A current ran between us as she was consumed in her words; her hands tightened around mine, and I didn’t want her to let go.
“You want nothing more than skin on skin, every inch of you burning and open to the other person’s touch . . .”
The first tear sliced down my cheek, hot as a welding torch. “We’ve barely even kissed.” More tears came, but I couldn’t stop myself now. “I care for James, but I don’t feel any of what you’re — I mean, I just don’t get that from him, or from any man, and I —”
“Shhhh.” Frankie squeezed my hands. “I know. I know how it is.”
Then she leaned toward me and kissed my right eyelid. I clenched my eyes shut, not knowing what to do, unable to move as she kissed my left eyelid as well. It was a motherly kiss, a patient kiss — nothing like the slobbery mess I’d made kissing James, but somehow it felt more right to me than all of those combined. I opened my eyes, shaking, to find Frankie’s face looming in front of mine. She let go of my hands and pressed one quick, gentle kiss to my lips.
Before I could react, she stood up. “Get some rest, Evie,” she said.
But it sounded like a greeting, not a good-bye.
Though she was gone when I woke up that morning, I couldn’t push Frankie from my thoughts. Not only the way she’d looked at me, as if she knew a secret about me that I didn’t know, but the rest of her too. Her confidence, her silky way of moving and flowing to embody whatever she needed to be. I dreaded seeing her at the factory — had it all been a foolish moment, the sort she’d flit away from like she did everything else? But she was waiting for me with her rivet gun cocked in one hand, and tossed out a Kitty Cohen line —“Looks to me like we’re gonna have to share this town, Detective”— and I knew I had no reason to fear.
I corrected her grip on the rivet gun, and she actually followed my instructions for once.
After that, she wound up at Mrs. M’s more evenings than not, sharing her meat ration when she was lucky enough to snag one, entertaining us with monologues after dinner before the evening news broadcast. When she acted, she was electrified. I listened to the passion in her voice and saw the sharpness in her eyes and I felt that fire spreading through me. The passion she’d spoken of.
And we’d go into my room, and she’d seize my cheeks and kiss me.
Slow, fast, didn’t matter; it set my head spinning with hunger. For soft skin and her hardened stare. For the swell of her hips and the dip of her waist, all feminine, all beauty, all weaponized girl. Our fingers tangled together and then parted, and we’d sleep knotted up together, her scent filling my nostrils and my dreams.
But when I awoke, I’d remember — James. My duties, my promise to be a wife if not a homemaker, though I’d always wondered if he thought one would follow the other. I’d imagine him looking down on us and wondering why he’d never awakened that fire in me, why I’d never craved him like I craved Frankie and her starlight.
“I love you,” Frankie would murmur, usually in her sleep, but one day she slipped it in between our struggle with a massive sheet of metal. No one was around to hear — I barely heard her through the din — but I was certain she’d said it.
The words weighed like rope around my neck. Were we allowed to love each other? Was I in love with her? What did it mean for us to love; where could it even go?
“What about Danny?” I asked her.
She just shrugged and held the sheet still while I worked the edges into place. “Oh, he doesn’t care. He understands.”
Understands what? I wanted to scream, but I was too afraid. I didn’t know what we were — laughing and kissing and dreaming together, but never looking more than a day into our future. Our future together, that was; Frankie dreamed of her own future, name in lights and face on posters.
But maybe Danny understood. Maybe this was something that could be understood. Maybe James would understand too.
Dear James, I typed on my Underwood. My dearest James. No, cross that out.