“They want me back at the end of January for another interview.”
We couldn’t see two feet in either direction through the rain. It dripped down my lips, and wet my teeth as my mouth bowed into an animated smile. My heart lurched against my chest as I squeezed him harder. “That’s good?” I nodded. “That’s fantastic, right? This is amazing.”
Frankie’s arms cradled my lower back briefly and then dropped to my thighs, scooping me off the ground and bringing us face-to-face. My fingers wound through the wet hair at the nape of his neck.
The answer was in his eyes, tracing me in a pointed triangle. Pupil to pupil to parted, waiting lips. The gesture felt like a promise—a cross your heart, or mark the spot, or write your name in blood dramatically promise.
Frankie nudged my nose to the side, angling our mouths, and then he kissed me.
We spun in a slow circle, rain pouring down, expressing every emotion in a hard, sensual, never-ending clash. Frankie’s tongue swept through my mouth, playing with mine, the tip of his nose digging into my cheek as we both tried to feel one another deeper. Dull fingernails caressed my ass, holding me tightly against his stable body.
His hat cascaded to the blacktop, the thunder a glorious and fitting backdrop as I nipped and licked at his plush lips. Satisfaction rumbled out of him through every short, shared breath we took.
We were a spinning, doting, devouring spectacle and I would have drowned with him like that. Or let the tide rise up and kick our already unsteady feet out from underneath us and carry me and Frankie into the brutal surf. Swept away was the perfect metaphor.
But like taking a fork to an outlet, a horn chirped several times, and headlights shone toward us through the rain. It was too late to feel embarrassed; we’d been caught hilariously and ostentatiously red-handed.
“You can touch each other in the back seat!” a familiar grating voice called out of the driver’s side window as Mateo rolled it down a smidge. Frankie bowed his forehead into mine and exhaled as he lowered me to my feet. “And you’re lucky these seats are leather!”
33
I am inherently a decision maker.
Or I’d taken on that title as an unfortunate circumstance of the life I was both given and then the one I chose out of primordial obligation.
I didn’t love being faced with options. I liked having one, and that option being the right one, and then everything else just effortlessly falling into place behind it. If you gave me a conflict, I would likely spend no more than five minutes finding a solution, ingesting the red or blue pill, and then following the expected map of events until I was faced with another crossroads of metaphorical medication.
My father died and I swallowed the responsibility pill. That looked like early mornings, paper routes, teaching myself how to use a pair of pliers, how to tie my own tie, blood trickling down my neck as I stared in the mirror with a dull, forgotten razor I’d found in the medicine cabinet in my hand. It was shoes that didn’t fit right, answering the door to strangers, suspending belief in things like the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus so that Adriana didn’t have to.
It was cutting my finger open with the utility knife and needing stitches, but wrapping it up in paper towels and electrical tape and shoving it into the pocket of my one, too-small sweatshirt because that was a medical bill we had no business paying.
I knew all my teachers, and all my sister’s teachers, and the mailman, and the Culligan man, and the FedEx driver. The neighbors, their kids, their grandkids. I befriended the ladies at the grocery store checkout, and the pharmacy, and the church on Sunday. Accepted every hand-on-head prayer when I knew full well if there was a God, he was a dickhead at best, and my obligation to be there for my mother’s sake was perfunctory and performative if not already obvious.
I approached decision-making like a blueprint rolled out on a table. Do this thing…and then this one. Here are all the pieces: follow the directions, study the key, take your time, build the foundation first, take a step back, reassess.
And I did that, until it came time to ship out for the Army. That was swallowing a completely different, muskier tasting, settled in your stomach like a ship hitting the bottom of the ocean supplement. That one meant I had made a decision, and now I would forget what it felt like to ever have to make a decision again. There were only orders.
The Army dictated, and that’s what I wanted. The most submissive I’d ever been in my life was signing my name across that contract. Giving a piece of paper the power to disarm me.
Still, a decision nonetheless. One I made just as easily as I did the first, and one that I was proud of and had not once regretted in almost twenty years. Not even now. Not after flight school, or the Middle East, or South America. Not after my accident, or Vanessa, or the last few years of learning how to literally and figuratively stand on two feet again.
That trip out to the base in Colorado was a small blip in the canvas, an ink stain on the floor plan. Half of me treated it like a joke—not the actual interview of course—but the set-up with Tyler, letting Mateo find me a suit, the fucking Hook(Up) dating in Colorado Springs as if I could return to the early-twenties era of my life and play the field like a kid that finally got to go away to college. If I didn’t get the job, or if I realized I didn’t want it in the first place, there was no permanent harm done. I just…continued on.
But then I got on that plane…and somehow ended up with the most beautiful woman in the world attached to my side like the piece of a warped puzzle I expected would never have a perfect match again. Her curves marrying my lack of, her fingers stitching perfectly into the gaps in mine.
Ophelia—soft, warm, full of untainted innocence and that bright, unbreakable outlook on life I had no business believing I deserved. But as we lay in my bed, her nails running in figure eights up and down my bare, shuddering torso, kissing my ribs every few minutes, letting me know she was still awake, I did believe it. I knew that parts of me needed parts of her, and I didn’t want to let her go back to whatever life she lived before we met. I didn’t want her to see me as a lesson, or practice, or a fun time when our lives inevitably crossed paths again. I didn’t want her giving herself to a man that wasn’t me. Holding a hand that wasn’t mine. Having someone else elicit that throaty, sweet laugh, sharing moments yet to come in her life that should belong to me.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.