The water stopped and Nat’s hand jutted out to pull a towel off the wall. A minute later she stepped out of the shower with her hair spun up in it.
“You really do have the perfect tits for porn,” I commented.
She looked down at her chest with a smirk. “Have you talked to your parents by the way?”
I sighed. “I sent a group text with that picture of me that Frankie took at the butterfly museum.”
“And?”
“My mom asked if the dress I was wearing was hers, because she could have sworn she had the same one. My dad sent a Bitmoji of himself wearing a butterfly costume, and Stella was my only sibling to answer and she asked if I could sneak one of them home in my luggage as a Christmas present.”
“God, I’m sorry, Phee.” She rubbed a dab of lotion into her cheeks. “Forget that I asked.”
“Everyone’s busy,” I justified. “It’s not like that.”
It was definitely like that. But deep down it felt selfish and immature to demand attention from adults when I was an adult, and my siblings didn’t know any better.
“Push it to the back of your mind anyway. We’re gonna have fun tonight. Without cooking, baking, or indecent exposure.”
“Unsolicited indecent exposure.”
She pulled the towel off her head and whipped me in the ass with it on her way toward the door. “Shower, trim your bikini line, spray some perfume on your panties.”
“Can’t I just wear my pjs?”
She snapped her fingers and pointed at me, wide-eyed. “You beautiful genius. Christmas pajama party.”
I rummaged through the spare closet in the hallway searching for the board games Mateo swore were on the second shelf from the top. As far as I could see there were some dumbbells, a box of old DVDs, and a stack of paper that looked like a terms and conditions agreement.
At my feet, I was stepping on two camouflage duffle bags full of God knows what, trying to see as far back as my height would allow. I tested the durability of one with my toes. Sturdy enough. If I lost my balance and fell, at least it was only a foot to the ground and the worst thing that could happen was a small set of free weights crashing down on top of me.
I stepped off the bag and bent over, fluffing it with my hands to double check.
Sliding everything out of the way, I hoisted myself up and got a better look into the closet. Behind were two old shoe boxes kept together by layers of silver electrical tape, one unmarked, the other labeled PIKE in black Sharpie.
I chewed my lip.
Down the hallway I could hear Nat’s soft laughter, and Frankie had yet to come out of his bedroom after we arrived and told him to get his pjs on for our Hallmark special occasion.
Was I above a total invasion of privacy? Yes. Was I still curious enough about the man I was finagling with? Also yes. I’d probably just be looking at some souvenirs from overseas, or pins and medals or whatever it was they gave you in the military that didn’t really rank as home decor but you definitely shouldn’t throw in the garbage.
The box was much lighter than I expected when I pulled it down, balancing the edge against my ribs as I flipped the lid open and peeked inside.
“Cute.”
I picked up a photo of a much more youthful, much less scruffy Frankie with a buzzcut. He was stone-faced, staring into the camera in his Army uniform. He had to have been twenty pounds lighter and over a decade younger.
The same piercing brown eyes, but somehow the ones I had been introduced to were a shade darker. Like a cloud hung over them where there used to be sunshine. Beautiful, in a more devastating way.
There were dozens more photos behind it, several stages of his career, in different places with different people. I stopped on one with the same familiar faces from the picture Frankie and Mateo kept on their mantle.
Four friends, sitting in thick mud and rain together in all their gear. Frankie had one eye open as he laid back against a tree trunk, Mateo sat beside him making a ridiculous face and a “hang loose” hand gesture. The two others sat on either side of them looking wet and uncomfortable.
I flipped the photo over and saw written in pen, Swan boys, Colombia.
Mateo mentioned something about the brothers that were coming to visit for the new year. Somehow every single man added to this insane equation was ridiculously attractive and looked great in muted greens.
Maybe I wasn’t as immune to a uniform as I initially thought I was. Or maybe a certain insistent, salacious soldier was getting to me a little too much.
I continued fanning through, wondering where Frankie kept all the film rolls it must have taken to develop that many pictures. In the corners of most were faded numerical dates from the years before a camera and a phone were one and the same. I spent those same years out at recess striking out in fucking kickball while the two men in the other room were risking their lives every day halfway across the world.
My perspective shifted substantially, realizing that what Frankie did to take care of his mother and his sister was literally gambling his life. That even if anything happened to him at war, they would be taken care of by the government that sent him out to die.
And it didn’t end with the Army. He reenlisted, and then joined Delta.
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek and shuffled the photos around in the box, but in doing so a different one caught my eye.
I couldn’t know for sure, of course, but the hollow feeling in my gut as I looked down at the woman in the picture with her arms snug around Frankie’s waist told me it was the infamous ex. She had parts of him I never would, and that made me inappropriately envious. Friends don’t get jealous of their friends having ex-girlfriends. Unless there were feelings involved, and that was something I couldn’t afford to let happen.
“She would look like that,” I whispered to myself. The woman was like a Sports Illustrated cover model. Long curly brown hair, thin nose, upper lip just as big as her lower. I mean, who was actually blessed with that?
She could have been Sofia Vergara’s younger, hotter sister. Same fucking boobs.
They fit each other like two pieces of a puzzle, and he looked down at her smiling into the camera like she hung the goddamn moon, too.
I knew it ended badly, but it was hard to imagine what would have separated them after seven years and all that they had gone through to keep a relationship alive deployment after deployment.
How did you give up on a love like that?
I put the photo back in the box and rooted around for more to confirm that the girl in the picture was who I thought she was. At the bottom of the box was something else though—dozens of something else’s—tri-folded on looseleaf paper.
“Phee! Need some help?” Natalia’s voice rang from the living room.
“Be right there!” I shouted back. I knew I should have stopped while I was ahead, but my stubborn, shrouded brain insisted I push my lapse in character further. I snagged a letter off the top of the bunch and opened it.
No sooner than I read the first line, Dear Vanessa, was it snatched out of my hand and dropped back in the box.