Frankie <3: You are the most distracting thing that’s ever happened to me.
“Good talk with your mom?” Nat drew a line of pearls with icing across a graham cracker and stuck it with so much force to the rooftop of her gingerbread house the entire foundation shifted.
Mateo was attempting to construct a walkway of mini candy canes with amusing focus, a furrowed brow and his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. I plopped down in the dining room chair across from them and stared at my untouched cardboard platform.
“It’s been snowing there for a week,” I said. “That’s all you guys are missing here, white Christmas.”
“I could do without,” Mateo replied, sliding the box of crackers across the table to me. His attention darted to my neckline and he smirked. “How’s Pike holding up?”
I shrugged, blasé. “What makes you think I’ve talked to him?”
He pointed the end of a candy cane directly at my chest. “Your shirt is on inside out and fucking backward, babe.”
I pulled my scoop neckline away to find the tag dangling. Every ounce of dignity left inside me crumbled as I unceremoniously ripped the fucker clear off and took a sliver of fabric with it.
“Chic,” Mateo added. “People pay money for that look.”
Nat giggled. “I’m surprised he didn’t come home tonight.”
“He’s drunk.” I reclined in my chair with a sigh, crossing my legs on the cushion underneath me. “His mom’s boyfriend must have been at dinner.”
“Shit.”
“Shit,” Nat agreed.
Mateo groaned. “Frankie needs to catch a break.”
“You all keep saying that.” My curiosity, while already at an all-time high, peaked. “What happened, exactly?”
Whatever it was, they either didn’t know how I’d respond, or felt like the explanation belonged to Frankie and an invisible boundary was about to be crossed. They stared at each other until Nat nudged her boyfriend and he rapped his knuckles on the table. “The only reason I’m telling you this and not leaving it to him is because I love my best friend but he’d never say a bad word about his ex.”
A muscle in my jaw stiffened and I sucked in an anticipatory breath. “Did she cheat?”
“Cheat?” He scoffed. “Cheating is hiding a couple cards under the table. Stealing the catcher’s signs. Vanessa was fixing the whole fucking game.”
I frowned. “While you were deployed?”
“He found out after she fucked off that it started way before the crash.”
I sat up straighter. “What crash?”
Nat looked between the two of us silently and despondently. Mateo heaved a hard sigh and shifted in his chair, pushing his edible house out of the way to make room for all the eccentric hand movements that accompanied his storytelling.
“They met in North Carolina right before he got picked up for Delta. Only had a few months together before they sent his unit out to the Pacific,” Mateo explained. “But he’d already made up his mind. It’s not easy to be in a relationship in the military. Most guys aren’t doing it for love—if anything it’s benefits, security, boredom.” He shrugged. “Frankie doesn’t do shit out of boredom, Ophelia. He’s a calculated son of a bitch. He wants it, he takes it, and he does it better than anyone else.”
The tightness in my chest lessened to appreciate that with a sad smile. “She didn’t feel the same?”
“Maybe for the first few years. We were gone a lot. A fuck ton of sacrifice is made when that’s the life you choose. I don’t know how men with families do it, I really don’t. It’s lonely, it’s hard work, it’s dangerous. Days pass without taking a shower, months without seeing anyone you love. And they’re just back home, going to the grocery store, seeing a movie, meeting their friends out for dinner. The whole time, he was counting the days to get back to her.”
I swallowed a mixture of pity and jealousy that felt like nails scraping down the dry column of my throat.
“He had to have written her a hundred letters,” Mateo said. “I’m not kidding, every one of us single guys would be out wherever we were stationed, having our plates worth of ass—” Nat pinched him under the arm. “Ow, fuck. I’m telling a story, sweetheart, it’s all part of it.” He lifted her hand and kissed it.
“Let’s leave the ‘plates worth of ass’ at the table,” she remarked.
Mateo regarded me again. “As I was saying, plates worth of ass—and Pike wanted nothing to do with it. He’s loyal to a certifiable degree. She got everything he could give without abandoning the promises he made to himself for his family, and for his country. Vanessa was only ever worried about being taken care of. She was a fucking user.”
I hated her. I didn’t know the woman save for a photo and a story and I fucking hated her. For how she treated Frankie, and for how selfish she was to ever let him go. To be friends with him was wonderful. To be loved by him…would be incredible. I kept that to myself.
I wanted to say a million things in that moment, and all of them led a trail back to the attachment I shouldn’t have, and the feelings I needed to collar.
“How did he find out?” I asked.
“The details are his to tell.” Mateo’s knee bounced under the table and Nat soothed it with her hand. “Pike was medically discharged from Delta right before our contracts were up. It was supposed to be a cut-and-dried op, we were outside the wire, he was in the chopper, shit went sideways, evac was a fucking mess and…he crashed. We crashed.”
“Oh, shit.” My pulse hammered against my neck.
“Recovery took longer than Pike thought it would, but he didn’t help himself either. He didn’t think he deserved it. He blamed everything bad that happened on himself, and never took the people he saved that day into consideration.” I had an innate feeling that this was a conversation the two of them had had many times before. “It was ugly, O, that’s no doubt his biggest regret.”
“Vanessa didn’t stick around when he needed her to,” Nat said.
“Surgeries, recovery, physical therapy, all of it. He needed her and she didn’t step up to the plate. When the going got tough, she got going down to fucking Fayetteville to find someone to dangle shiny things in front of her again. Spoiled bitch.”
Normally I’d be averse to name calling but…spoiled fucking bitch.