I, too, was feeling very seen and special at the moment. Frankie brought on that weird tingly feeling in my stomach far more in the last week than I’d felt in twenty-six years.
The truth was, I did crave that validation from my younger siblings. I wanted them to know how much they meant to me, regardless of the intense age gap, and I wanted them to return that love. I’d never be as close to Leo as he was with his twin sisters, or be able to share a bedroom wall and chat through the floor vents like Gavin and Laila. But I still wanted to be there.
“I think gift giving is just my love language,” I joked. “It makes me happy.”
“Your love language?”
“Yeah, everyone has one, or a couple.” I tossed Frankie the scissors and instructed him to start cutting again. “Gift giving, acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time.”
He didn’t look like he believed me.
“It’s how you show love to others and want love shown back to you. It’s a real thing, look it up.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he murmured. “I guess mine is…acts of service. No wait—physical touch.”
“I think you just like to touch,” I quipped.
Frankie’s eyes dimmed a shade darker, and that smirk was accompanied by the swipe of his tongue across his bottom lip.
I liked looking at him way too much for my own good. With a hat on, he was brooding and boyish, but in this perfect orange lighting with his thick, shaggy, finger-combed hair—Frankie was fuckable. There was no better word.
“I agree with acts of service.” I nodded. “I noticed it even when we were on the plane.”
“Sitting next to you is considered an act of service?”
“No.” I snorted, twisting a piece of burlap into a bow. “Filling my soda cup for me, pulling my bag off the carousel, little things. But things a stranger wouldn’t normally do. Then that night when I was drunk you totally babied me.”
The oven sheet panged from the kitchen and the entire house smelled like mouth-watering chocolate chip cookies as Frankie sat there contemplating. “I didn’t baby you, I…”
“Serviced me.”
He grinned. “No, that wasn’t until a few days later.”
I ignored him and organized a new present into the middle of the silver foil fray. “You’re distracting me.” Quickly, I measured the paper, cut it, folded it neatly over the rectangular box, and cinched it with tape.
“Now you’re just showing off,” he commented. “Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned gift bag?”
The eyeshadow palette he was wrestling with looked like it’d been wrapped by a blind elf with no thumbs, but he did it without complaining. It would be an interesting day answering for the state of the gifts to my family, and I had half a mind to blame the entire thing on Natalia instead of explaining who Frankie was to me.
I wasn’t even sure who Frankie was to me.
A casual hook-up? A one-time fling? A friend? Friends didn’t go back and forth the way the two of us had for the last week. As much as I loved my friends back home, I most definitely wasn’t looking at them like I was looking at the man across from me.
I wasn’t letting them talk to me or touch me like he did either.
With Frankie it was like zero to sixty with no breaks, and that was terrifying and exhilarating because I knew we were destined to hit a wall. A very large, hard, unmoving wall.
But I’d rather take my chances on the airbags than not experience the ride.
“All right.” I stopped wrapping. “What did you want to talk about?”
Frankie stopped fidgeting and took a deep breath. I could tell his tongue was perusing the roof of his mouth and his mind was moving a mile a minute, which was about as long as it took for him to say anything.
He straightened his back with a weak grunt, and clasped his hands together on his lap. “Have sex with me.”
I blinked rapidly, and my pulse stuttered.
That was the most blatant way a man had ever tried to coerce me into doing him. It was also comical that this was what Frankie needed so desperately to talk to me about that he stopped doing the string of things that would have led directly to me having sex with him.
I was so taken aback that the only real response I gave was a confused, nervous laugh.
“Yes, Ophelia. Have a lot of mind-blowing, filthy sex with me.”
“What’s the catch here?” I asked. “You’re saying a lot of things that I’m liking, but I know there’s something else rattling around in that head.”
“It’s obvious that we’re in dangerous waters with each other,” he said. “I can’t look at you for more than ten seconds in those fucking shorts without thinking about what they’d look like on my bedroom floor.”
Now I couldn’t either.
“There's no hiding that I have my shit with my ex. I’m just looking for someone to get me back on track, and I know you’re a hundred Olympic snowboarders deep in Colorado.”
I snorted. “I fucking wish.”
“The point is, both of us are in a situation where we can have some fun right now.”
“Like, friends with benefits?” I raised my eyebrow.
“Like friends with benefits.”
I must have fallen asleep and started dreaming. The only reason I was even moderately hesitant with Frankie was for fear of forming an attachment when we lived so far away from one another. Him being the one to bring the title to the table was not only incredibly assertive, but also made parts of me weep that weren’t my eyes.
It would be like signing a contract. Transactional pleasure for the both of us, no emotion down, and then my hot-pilot-fuckbuddy lease was up in two weeks—satisfaction guaranteed.
My head swam with the possibility. There was only one hiccup.
“What’s in it for me?” I asked.
“What?”
“I’m here to visit Florida and spend time with my Nat. What happens when we’re done hooking up or she’s holed up with Mateo for the night?”
“You know you’re welcome in my bed as long as you’d like, O.”
An idea formed like a storm cloud in my head. I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “No, if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it right. You want to start dating again, you need some help, some gentle nudges back onto the lady scene—let me be your crash test dummy.”
Frankie narrowed his eyes. “You want me to practice how to date with you?”
“The last time you dated casually cell phones didn't even have internet. There’s been an entire revival of women since then, and not all of them are falling for your broody pilot act.”
“Act?” He scoffed. “I’m a fucking retired fighter pilot. I’ve seen shit, Ophelia.”
“You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a millennial on Bath and Body Works Candle Day.”
“You are chock full of weird little analogies, you know that?”
“Think about it,” I prompted him. “Treat me like you would any other date you picked up on Hook（Up）， and I’ll be like a live critique partner.”
Teaching was literally my thing. I didn’t get a master’s in education and spend six years peer reviewing others in my field for nothing. I was the perfect guinea pig, and I got to have sex with him as an added bonus? My highlighters were itching.