Christmas in Coconut Creek (Dirty Delta, #1)(90)
“I’ve been married fifty-three years.” The old man stuck his shears in a garden tote and tucked the bowl of tomatoes underneath his arm. “Not one day has been easy. But every single one has been worth it. You do good by them, be a good man, a good lover, a faithful partner, a solid wall. So what she doesn’t live here—because that would be easy, eh? Easy is comfortable.”
Gino took a few steps toward his house as his wife came out onto the stone patio and waved to me. She was too far away to hear the last notes of conversation. “Does your chest hurt, Francesco?”
I inhaled, dragging my fingers across the plane of my chest, sticking them like little daggers into the cavity, almost forcing myself to feel something.
Pain. Discomfort. A pulse.
The fact that I was begging myself to react at all told a silent secret. The person I was around Ophelia would know the answer to that question right away. He was like an open book, feeling things to extremes, without remorse, without embarrassment. She was like a master key to my psyche.
By the time I stopped trying to decipher pain from placebo, Gino was guiding his wife by the small of her back into their house. I was alone again in the backyard, my coffee was cold, and my head was spinning like a carousel.
I didn’t want to imagine a Christmas morning ever again that didn’t look like this one. Waking up next to her, soft, sensual sex, coffee on the patio. Then deep inside my mind I imagined something more than that. A big, lazy dog hanging out at the foot of our bed, a clan of kids crashing through the bedroom door in their Christmas pjs. Santa came, Dad. Santa came.
My throat dried like a fucking tumbleweed. Was that what was missing? My own family to care for the way I did best? A purpose beyond working and providing for the people around me and never myself? The only thing that would ever truly slow me the fuck down.
My perspective had shifted into a completely different realm. I used to be content being stagnant; now I wanted a life I’d thought up so badly it felt like I would never know happiness until I had it.
She was doing this to me. Everything I was learning about myself started and ended with Ophelia—I wasn’t so naive to deny it. One day I’d look back and thank the higher powers for sending her into my life, even just passing through, because it was exactly what I needed when I didn’t think I needed anything at all.
29
I’d never seen a better-looking piece of meat in my entire life. Thick, pink, and round, juices dripping out of every pore onto my careful fingers. I took an innocent look around the room, biting my lip before bringing them to my mouth for a sly taste. Salty tang exploded on my tongue.
God. I groaned as my nostrils flared. That’s fucking delicious.
I admired it a minute longer—the girth, the weight, the way it sweated under the bright lights. I pulled out my phone and took a picture. Even put that shit on portrait mode because what was in front of me was nothing less than a piece of modern art. I captioned it Ophelia’s Meat braggingly, and sent the image away in a group text.
Then, just like my mother always taught me, in a tragically Shakesperean show—I stabbed the fucker.
Then I stabbed it again with a giddy smile and wooden toothpick pierced with a round ring of pineapple and maraschino cherry.
The famous Brody family Christmas ham.
Pride blossomed in my chest at the perfectly roasted, dressed, and tended dinner I’d prepared for our little group of four. I’d never cooked for a holiday; I wasn’t even confident I could pull it off by myself with the scarce directions in the string of half-assed text messages from my mother. Autocorrect repelled her on her most focused days, never mind Christmas morning with pre-teens.
Growing up Mom had a very specific way of doing things, and you either followed directions or got swatted out of the kitchen by a wet dish towel. I learned my lesson early on that the latter wasn’t worth the former. But as an adult, spending my very first Christmas away from the familiar doily-lined tablecloth, I was testing my ability to extend all these traditions.
“Need some help?” Frankie slid down the island at my side and pressed his cold bottle of beer to the back of my neck.
For the first time in hours my shoulders relaxed and the muscles in my back loosened. “I’m sweating like this pig right now.”
“I want to eat you just as badly, too.”
Natalia stopped folding cured meat into flower petals on the charcuterie board across from us to tilt her head curiously. A bashful blush crept up my neck. “I could use one of those beers, if you don’t mind.”
Frankie dragged the head of his bottle up my jaw and to my parted lips, tipping it back, feeding me a refreshing mix of hoppy liquid. Not the most hydrating option by a long shot, but replenishing enough to widen my heavy eyes. His focus zeroed in on my mouth, and as soon as the bottle came back down, he leaned in and replaced it with a kiss.
It was chaste and sweet, and as quickly as it was there it was gone, along with it Frankie, who nonchalantly moved to the refrigerator and returned with a fresh, unopened beer.
“I like you bossy,” he remarked, snapping the cap off with a bottle opener and placing it on the counter. “What’s next?”
“He just kissed your mouth.” Natalia pointed a spoon at Frankie. Fig jam slid off the tip and hit the white marble counter. “You’re kissing each other's mouths out in the open now.”