Christmas in Coconut Creek (Dirty Delta, #1)(102)
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.
“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.