I reached over and rotated the box diagonally, then handed him the roll of tape. “Have you never wrapped a gift before in your entire heckin’ life?”
“You’re sitting across from someone that made a career in the military. Please refrain from using the term heckin’, Ophelia.” His voice was terse and distracted. I curled my lips into my teeth, amused.
Tasking Frankie with the smallest, squarest items was my first mistake. Especially after seeing that every cut of paper he managed came out an unnamed oblong shape that would better suit a circle. As I was busy wrapping more intricate gifts with tissue paper and burlap bows, Mr. Smooth was accidentally ripping the decorative side of the wrapping off with Scotch tape.
“Need some help?” I teased.
“My fingers are much more useful for other things,” he grunted, tearing the tape and snapping his digits together until the clear plastic flung across the living room. “Who’s the poor kid that gets this sad wrap job?”
“My stepdad.” I giggled. Josh was a simple man. Where my mom was a busy bee bred for social interaction and planning, her husband was a laid-back stoner. He kept her grounded and filled her cup, and she fed his artistic soul with endless projects. They yin and yanged.
“What about all these other ones?” Frankie gestured to the floor.
I went on to explain how my two oldest half-brothers were near impossible to shop for nowadays, so they were getting sweatshirts and gift cards, because they’d probably hate anything I tried to pick out anyway. Teenagers.
But Gavin was always barricaded in his room playing video games, so I bought a few of them despite knowing absolutely nothing about it, or if he even played those ones in particular.
Leo loved fishing with my dad on the weekends, and Florida had some amazing bait and tackle accessories in a little shop I found walking around downtown. I bought those with some stickers to add to his tackle box because he was always collecting.
The twins were obsessing over makeup, so I splurged on the good stuff that I usually bought for myself so they weren’t stuck with my stepmom’s used drugstore palettes to play with anymore. Then I went a little crazy at the thrift shop because for some reason every twelve-year-old was dressing like Fran Drescher in the goddamn nineties.
Finally Laila, who was only seven but already over her head in books in the second grade, was getting the full collection of Junie B. Jones that I’d already secured back home, and one of those collectable name keychains that said LAILA in all capital letters across a Florida license plate.
Frankie listened with rapt attention the entire time, leaning back on both palms on the carpet with a smile on his face. “They’re very lucky to have you as a sister.”
I waved it off, blushing.
“No, seriously,” he continued. “It’s obvious how much you care about them, your attention to the little things. They’re young, and maybe they don’t understand now, but one day they will. You’re making them feel seen and special, which is something kids really fucking need.”
I, too, was feeling very seen and special at the moment. Frankie brought on that weird tingly feeling in my stomach far more in the last week than I’d felt in twenty-six years.
The truth was, I did crave that validation from my younger siblings. I wanted them to know how much they meant to me, regardless of the intense age gap, and I wanted them to return that love. I’d never be as close to Leo as he was with his twin sisters, or be able to share a bedroom wall and chat through the floor vents like Gavin and Laila. But I still wanted to be there.
“I think gift giving is just my love language,” I joked. “It makes me happy.”
“Your love language?”
“Yeah, everyone has one, or a couple.” I tossed Frankie the scissors and instructed him to start cutting again. “Gift giving, acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time.”
He didn’t look like he believed me.
“It’s how you show love to others and want love shown back to you. It’s a real thing, look it up.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he murmured. “I guess mine is…acts of service. No wait—physical touch.”
“I think you just like to touch,” I quipped.
Frankie’s eyes dimmed a shade darker, and that smirk was accompanied by the swipe of his tongue across his bottom lip.
I liked looking at him way too much for my own good. With a hat on, he was brooding and boyish, but in this perfect orange lighting with his thick, shaggy, finger-combed hair—Frankie was fuckable. There was no better word.
“I agree with acts of service.” I nodded. “I noticed it even when we were on the plane.”
“Sitting next to you is considered an act of service?”
“No.” I snorted, twisting a piece of burlap into a bow. “Filling my soda cup for me, pulling my bag off the carousel, little things. But things a stranger wouldn’t normally do. Then that night when I was drunk you totally babied me.”
The oven sheet panged from the kitchen and the entire house smelled like mouth-watering chocolate chip cookies as Frankie sat there contemplating. “I didn’t baby you, I…”
“Serviced me.”
He grinned. “No, that wasn’t until a few days later.”
I ignored him and organized a new present into the middle of the silver foil fray. “You’re distracting me.” Quickly, I measured the paper, cut it, folded it neatly over the rectangular box, and cinched it with tape.
“Now you’re just showing off,” he commented. “Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned gift bag?”
The eyeshadow palette he was wrestling with looked like it’d been wrapped by a blind elf with no thumbs, but he did it without complaining. It would be an interesting day answering for the state of the gifts to my family, and I had half a mind to blame the entire thing on Natalia instead of explaining who Frankie was to me.
I wasn’t even sure who Frankie was to me.
A casual hook-up? A one-time fling? A friend? Friends didn’t go back and forth the way the two of us had for the last week. As much as I loved my friends back home, I most definitely wasn’t looking at them like I was looking at the man across from me.
I wasn’t letting them talk to me or touch me like he did either.
With Frankie it was like zero to sixty with no breaks, and that was terrifying and exhilarating because I knew we were destined to hit a wall. A very large, hard, unmoving wall.
But I’d rather take my chances on the airbags than not experience the ride.
“All right.” I stopped wrapping. “What did you want to talk about?”
Frankie stopped fidgeting and took a deep breath. I could tell his tongue was perusing the roof of his mouth and his mind was moving a mile a minute, which was about as long as it took for him to say anything.
He straightened his back with a weak grunt, and clasped his hands together on his lap. “Have sex with me.”