“We’ll give you guys a minute,” Nat said, backing toward the front door.
No words felt significant enough to eclipse what the past three weeks had meant to me. The more I tried to string it together the harder it was to articulate, until I was just shaking my head with fragile little tears clouding my eyes.
“Baby.” Frankie enveloped me, closing me into the cave of his arms with my head pressed into the center of his chest. “Please, don’t.”
“I think I’m about to get my period or something.” I shrugged, hiding my red nose in his cotton T-shirt.
He let me have the excuse, instead running his fingers through the tangled waves of my hair, caressing my spine, swaying us gently on an invisible gust of wind.
“We don’t really have to say bye, you know,” he murmured. “I’ll be there before you know it, the end of the month. I’ll call you, and you can let me take you somewhere fancy for dinner.”
His heartbeat rang in my ears. “And then what?” I asked vulnerably. “A couple weeks? A few more months?” Frankie’s hold on me tightened, his fingers halting in place. “Am I waiting for something to be real between us, or am I just prolonging the end?”
“This is real, Ophelia.” He lifted my chin and I couldn’t hide the emotion streaking across my face. “Don’t ever fucking minimize what this is. Your name is right here.” As he lifted his hand to point at the center of his chest, his fingers were shaking. “It’s under my skin.”
I leaned forward and pressed my lips to the place his fingers were.
“I’m trying,” Frankie confessed, sentiment scratching his throat.
I knew how nuanced that was. He was trying to be more emotionally available, trying not to fall into old habits, trying to separate his old life from a new one, forgive himself for things he couldn’t have controlled, believe he could be the person I knew he was.
“So, no,” he tacked on. “I’m going to save my goodbye. I know that goes against all these rules we had, but we fucked all those to hell anyway.”
“Okay,” I stammered out in a breath of amusement. “I’ll save mine, too.”
“Good.”
Frankie dragged me closer. His lips met my forehead, then slid down the curve of my nose and connected there, finally falling right on top of my own and opening me gently to the familiar caress of his tongue. We kissed for a long time, training our memories with it, filling our cups. I would dream about his mouth on me forever.
“This was the best Christmas I’ve had in longer than I can remember,” Frankie vowed once we’d broken apart.
“By far,” I agreed.
We could have stood there all night “not saying goodbye”, finding more things to blissfully agree on, stealing one more deeper kiss. I was the one to rip the bandage off and start the slow, silent trek to the front door.
“I’ll see you in a few weeks, Trouble.” Frankie tucked a strand of loose hair behind my ear. “Don’t be getting in too much of it.”
“As long as you promise not to lose my number the second you walk outside again.”
A flicker of color returned to his dark eyes. “Who else would I have to sext at one in the morning?”
“The ladies at the retirement home, probably.”
He scoffed alongside a smile, running his tongue across his top teeth. “Do me a favor?” Frankie asked as he cracked open the front door and stepped a foot outside. “Delete that fucking dating app off your phone.”
I was pulled across the threshold into one final claiming kiss, and before the cold had fully swept out with the closed door behind him, I was emptying an entire folder on my cell into a trash bin.
42
I woke up before the birds. Earlier than my usual. The house was still dark, and a tiny sliver of moonlight cut through the windows into the living room. I stared at the coffee machine for a while before deciding to skip it, then opened the fridge and contemplated a beer before slamming it shut.
Routinely there’d be about an hour of time I spent alone in the house before Mateo rolled reluctantly out of bed. I’d have already showered, done some kind of cardio or weights with the rusting barbells in the garage. I’d have read the news, eaten some cereal, walked down to the mailbox and back and waved at the neighbors leaving for work like the good guy I was.
That regimen had been steamrolled by a western wind that made me never want to get out of bed in the morning again. Unless bringing her some breakfast or to brush my teeth and end up right back between her legs where I was supposed to be.
Instead sleep evaded me entirely and I found myself in the backyard with the indigo backdrop of still burning stars to keep me company. That lasted for about a half hour—before sitting in silence turned into sparring with my own thoughts. The best way I could imagine to curb that was by turning on the lawn mower and cutting three weeks of neglected grass down to a golfing green at five o’clock in the morning.
By six I was looking for gardening shears for the bushes, which turned into reorganizing the entire shed with a flashlight clenched between my teeth. When it was done, the sun was up and dogs had started barking around the block. I was covered in a sheet of dirt, sweating through my tee, and no less pathetically irritated with myself over Ophelia.
So I went to the fridge and took that beer.
I didn’t even look up from the spot I’d zoned out staring at on the patio when the back door closed behind me.
“Tally just sent me two pictures and asked which color I liked better—Meet Me at Midnight, or Grease Lightning,” Cap trilled. “Maybe I’m colorblind but I’m looking at the same fucking black suit.”
“Just assume you’re always wrong,” I said.
Mateo sat at my side. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” I felt his judgmental stare before he dusted a finger down my arm. “Where’d you bury the body?”
“Shed was a disaster.”
“Yeah, well you missed a spot on the lawn, too.”
I sat up. “Like fucking hell I did.”
“I’m pretty sure there has to be laws against cutting your grass before the ass crack of dawn.”
My lips pursed as I shot a look over the fence at Gino’s house with a smidge of regret. “Can I be honest about something?”
“About time,” Cap replied.
I fidgeted, tapping the armrest of the chair. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”
“You’re drinking a beer in the backyard at eight in the morning. You’re covered in dirt, you’re practically jobless, soon to be homeless, and the best thing that’s happened to you in years is getting on a plane right now while you sulk about it to the only person who isn’t gonna give it to you covered in lube.”
I buried my tongue in my cheek. “Can’t you pretend?”
“Then I wouldn’t be your best friend.”