“It’s going to be amazing,” I assured Natalia. Regardless of if it were me or one of her sisters taking on the maid of honor title, nothing would be getting in the way of a perfect wedding.
I would make sure that every last inch of fabric—dress or tablecloth, curtain or gossamer drapery, was ironed and pleated to the very nines. The flowers would smell like someone plucked them fresh that morning, there would be a mimosa in every hand at the twitch of Natalia’s perfectly manicured fingers, and there wouldn’t be a goddamn cell phone poking out of the crowd during the ceremony or I would remove the wrist that held it myself.
I was born for this responsibility. Lists and schedules were my thing. Checking boxes next to my swirly, decorative, honestly obnoxious ballpoint penmanship was like a shot of serotonin straight to my veins. I craved structure, loved deadlines, and there was a very specific and probably certifiable definition for the pinball machine in my brain that only all of the above did anything to sooth.
I’d only ever found one thing interesting enough to slow down time, and he was ephemeral.
Storm clouds rolled toward us, rumbling down the beach. Pink lightning struck through the newly gray sky. It amazed me how minutes prior there wasn’t a hint of rain in the forecast, and if you looked a few miles up the beach, it still glowed with the blue promise of a sunny day. The lifeguards stood on their white cedar stands, waving their arms at the people caught out in the thickening surf and whistled everyone to pack up and head off the beach.
“It’ll pass in a minute,” Nat complained. “I don’t understand why we can’t just wait it out. It’s not even four p.m.” Another crackle of lightning cascaded down to argue.
“Not all of us are blessed with a natural bronze,” I said, packing my high-powered SPF away as the wind picked up and tendrils of hair escaped from my ponytail. “My sunburned ass is more than ready for a shower.”
“Agreed,” Mateo grunted, busting his way through several layers of sand and coming out of it looking like a freshly dusted sugar cookie. He shook his entire body like a dog and covered all three of us in the runoff.
“You’re hosing off before you get in my car,” Nat said pointedly.
Frankie reached over as the first cold drop of rain fell onto my shoulder, handing me my bundled bathing suit cover-up, and pulling me to my feet. Our fingers tightened reflexively around one another.
“I’m ready to get you home,” Frankie said, mumbling between only us. His heavy gaze drifted down my body, cataloging it. We were very clearly about to have another one of those long, sleepless nights like the previous three. My body had already adapted something of a Pavlovian response to his attention. Tender nipples, blushing cunt, heat rising in all the secret, intimate places it knew he’d soon be taking care of like his own.
“Shit,” Nat groaned, reluctantly gathering her beach bags and folding her chair underneath her arm. Her colorful bangles rattled as she picked herself up from the beach, pouting and stalking in the direction of the street access, leaving Mateo half-dressed and scrambling behind.
More rain pelted down as Frankie and I rushed to shake out our towels and slip back into clothes and shoes. Our slow walk to the parking lot turned into a lazy jog through the sand and my shins were screaming as we reached the pavement and the sky opened up, drenching us.
Mother Nature was a temperamental bitch. Thunder boomed and every crack of lightning turned the gray clouds cotton candy pink.
“Let’s go!” Mateo yelled over his shoulder as he caught up to Nat and pulled her along in her dangerously wet sandals. Eventually he stopped and bent into a half-squat so she could jump onto his back and continue.
I turned to request the same from Frankie just as his phone rang, muffled and trilling through the pounding of rain on the pavement. He fished it out of his bathing suit pocket as we fell further and further behind the other two. Frankie stopped walking completely, holding a finger to one ear and his phone to the other beneath the torrential rain.
Nat and Mateo sprinted and I remained in a limbo between the two.
The flimsy cover-up I threw on was glued to my body like silk tulle and my hair was soaked to my scalp. I thought about complaining, but that emotion came out in a sprinkle of laughter instead. I tilted my head toward the sky, spread my arms like wings at my sides, and let the full rush of the storm envelope my senses. The salty brine of the ocean sweeping under my nose, howling wind at my neck, goosebumps sharpening on my body as cold rain met warm skin. With my eyes closed I was submerged; the world outside those receptive walls didn’t exist.
I couldn’t remember the last time I stopped like that, to let myself become overwhelmed. When I was a kid, maybe. In the snow on the mountain, like I’d told Frankie. Wispy flakes of fresh powder dancing onto my nose. Snow angels in the moonlight, dark skies, Ursa Major, Orion, the Little Dipper. The crunch of cold, packed earth beneath my head, the frozen lick of melted snow dripping down my neck. Pink, tingling fingertips, icicle eyelashes, the puff of hot breath gone into the air as quickly as I breathed it.
Life flashed like reels in an old film between the two, molding the feeling of each core memory into one grounding, starkly human experience. Standing in the rain, lying in the snow, letting myself be elementally taken over for a brief, pretty moment.
I’d been standing there for several minutes when two strong hands braced against my biceps and pulled me into a solid, soaking wall of muscle. “Hey, you.” Frankie smiled down at me. Raindrops dripped from the bill of his hat and landed on my cheeks.
“All good?” I looked him up and down, searching. “Everything okay?”
Frankie’s grin extended up his cheeks, those fine lines of age crinkling the corners of his eyes, and his grip on me tightened as if full of energy he needed a place to exude. “That was the base in Colorado.”
“Oh?” I herded my response like wild animals into a pen as my stomach tightened into a nervous knot.
“Yeah,” he breathed. His cotton T-shirt was drenched straight through and I curled my fingers into it right at his chest.
“And?”
The real possibility of Frankie moving to Colorado was exhilarating—and terrifying. It seeded a hope inside me that I could have him, all the time. I wouldn’t have to waste my time looking for a person to replace what he was to me, in whatever unsatisfying way they would attempt to, because I didn’t see it possible. We could continue on this unusual and magnificent friendship, see it bud into something more relationship-shaped. Water the soil.
What was terrifying was doing all of those things, hoping for something beautiful and being crushed if it didn’t come to fruition. The more my heart was willing to take that chance for him, the more my head pushed back rationally. Still, optimism took precedence.