Christmas in Coconut Creek (Dirty Delta, #1)(89)
She stirred and my entire body straightened like a board. If I woke her up I’d feel like a fucking dick, especially after the night we had. We could both use a shower and a few bottles of water, but not until the sun was up first. I was content to lay in it for a while longer. The flowery smell of the perfume she wore to dinner still on my hands, dried sweat like a film across my brow. Not something I wanted washed away.
Greed was a terrible thing but nothing else came close to describing what she did to me. I could be possessive, predatory, addicted, unhinged, but I’d never wanted to take like I did with Ophelia. I wanted to bleed whatever endorphin this was dry.
When she settled again I wormed my way out from under her, pulling the dead limb of my arm from beneath her heavy head, wiggling my fingers back to life. The mattress creaked as I stood and I froze for a second time, watching her rib cage expand and contract in that same soft rhythm until I was sure she was still asleep. Before I escaped the room I tugged on a pair of sweatpants and pulled the blanket to her shoulders.
The kitchen was dark and stagnant. I kept the lights off and moved around by the soft glow of morning seeping through the living room windows. Over the half wall the tree remained dimly lit. My eyes scoured where O and I had been rolling on the floor and my cock twitched.
I needed a coffee, some fresh air, and time alone to talk myself out of the fantasy that was waking up every morning the way I just had.
After a one-sided argument with the world’s noisiest coffee machine I stepped out onto the patio where the dew wasn’t yet dry and the orange sunrise was peeking over the backyard fence. It was too cold to be shirtless, but the breeze had the perfect amount of bite to wake up the parts of my body the coffee couldn’t reach fast enough.
That early in the morning, I felt like the only person alive. Or so I thought.
“Merry Christmas, Francesco.”
I twitched away from the sound of a voice in the neighbor’s backyard as a pair of garden shears lifted just above the fence and snipped the air. “Shit! Mr. Barry, I didn’t know you were out here.”
Gino’s short frame toddled to the edge of the property line and I looked over as he tended to several buckets of plush red tomato plants. The man was fully dressed and put together. Beige slacks and a red button-down tucked into them. Brown belt, brown shoes, the Catholic cross hanging around his neck.
“Merry Christmas,” I returned. “Going somewhere?”
“Church.”
“Ah, right. My mom will be on her way there soon, too.”
Gino assessed me with squinted eyes. Crow’s feet stretched at the corners and wrinkles ran like crop lines across his forehead. I hadn’t gotten too good a look at myself, but if Gino’s expression were a mirror I’d say I looked fucked. Literally, physically.
I instinctually ran my fingers through my hair to tame it and crossed my arms over my bare chest.
“No church for you?” he asked, continuing to spin and pick the ripe fruit, placing them in a yellow speckled bowl.
I looked back at the house. “I have some company.”
Gino hummed. “You’re in love.”
“I wouldn’t say love.” I quipped.
“What is it then?”
The mug I was holding was scalding my palm, but that was more comfortable than trying to classify my relationship with Ophelia to the prying old man that lived next door.
I’d never had a conversation about relationships with someone outside my buddies. It was easy to talk about sex—locker room shit, the tasteless back and forth I never felt fully comfortable participating in but learned to live with, especially in the Army.
My father passed before I had my first kiss. The one time I got caught with my dick in my hand my mother cried every time she looked at me for three days. When I was fifteen I asked a girl to homecoming and the next day there was a box of Trojans on my nightstand and we never spoke about it again. The familial history I had with intimacy was thereby nonexistent.
“It’s just fun.” I shrugged complacently. “I’m figuring it out.”
“You’re too old for just fun, Francesco.”
My eyebrows inched together and I perched my arms on the top of the fence. “I’m thirty-five,” I stressed. “Why has every time I’ve talked to someone in the last few weeks felt like watching my life fall through an hourglass?”
“Because you finally found a person that makes it feel like exactly that.”
I opened my mouth to argue but my jaw snapped right back shut.
“You know.” Gino abandoned his tomatoes and pointed a finger at the center of his chest. “You know right here when it’s right, because it starts to hurt. Even when you’re happy, it hurts. Because it aches to imagine not having that happiness. You worry, you lose sleep, you act out. Anything to keep that feeling from becoming comfortable. When you can bear it, it’s lost.”
My teeth caught raw flesh on the inside of my cheek as a half-circle of sun peeked over the palm trees, cold air dissipating into a band of warmth. “She doesn’t live here,” I found myself saying.
“Home is subjective.” He waved my words out of the air. “A smell, a place, a feeling, a memory. A person.”
“Sounds great.” My smile didn’t reach my eyes. “And easy. Things for me are never that easy.”
The world around us yawned, dark blue skies bleeding into cobalt like God turned a dial. Bird song became background music, damp grass dried beneath my feet. The glass door at the back of Gino’s house slid open and a sweet face peered out at the two of us.