And it didn’t end with the Army. He reenlisted, and then joined Delta.
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek and shuffled the photos around in the box, but in doing so a different one caught my eye.
I couldn’t know for sure, of course, but the hollow feeling in my gut as I looked down at the woman in the picture with her arms snug around Frankie’s waist told me it was the infamous ex. She had parts of him I never would, and that made me inappropriately envious. Friends don’t get jealous of their friends having ex-girlfriends. Unless there were feelings involved, and that was something I couldn’t afford to let happen.
“She would look like that,” I whispered to myself. The woman was like a Sports Illustrated cover model. Long curly brown hair, thin nose, upper lip just as big as her lower. I mean, who was actually blessed with that?
She could have been Sofia Vergara’s younger, hotter sister. Same fucking boobs.
They fit each other like two pieces of a puzzle, and he looked down at her smiling into the camera like she hung the goddamn moon, too.
I knew it ended badly, but it was hard to imagine what would have separated them after seven years and all that they had gone through to keep a relationship alive deployment after deployment.
How did you give up on a love like that?
I put the photo back in the box and rooted around for more to confirm that the girl in the picture was who I thought she was. At the bottom of the box was something else though—dozens of something else’s—tri-folded on looseleaf paper.
“Phee! Need some help?” Natalia’s voice rang from the living room.
“Be right there!” I shouted back. I knew I should have stopped while I was ahead, but my stubborn, shrouded brain insisted I push my lapse in character further. I snagged a letter off the top of the bunch and opened it.
No sooner than I read the first line, Dear Vanessa, was it snatched out of my hand and dropped back in the box.
“That’s not a board game.” Frankie’s sharp voice met the shell of my ear.
I lost my balance on the bag beneath me in an instant, yelping as my feet and head threatened to switch places.
A strong arm wrapped around my waist and righted me before I could hit the ground, depositing me back on the hardwood floor beside him.
“You scared the shit out of me.” I held a palm to my chest.
“Boo,” he teased, trading me a glass of chilled white wine for the shoe box I miraculously still held onto.
I stood there studying my socks like a kid that just got caught stealing money from their mother’s purse as Frankie reorganized the mess I’d made. He reached up and slid the box back to where I’d found it, then reached up one more shelf and grabbed two board games that were absolutely unmissable from his height and pulled them down for me.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured. “I should not have been so nosy. That was totally fucked up.”
“You’re using my uniforms as a stepladder and reading my Dear John letters in the dark now, Ophelia?”
I stuttered out a string of vowels. “Y–you’re right. I’m so embarrassed. What a creep.”
His lips flattened into a line and a crease formed between his brows for a moment. If he was going to be angry at me, at least let him keep it between us. It was mortifying to explain myself once; I didn’t need to be making excuses to leave the party early to save some face with Mateo, too.
“Sorry,” I muttered again. My lower lip trembled.
“I’m fucking messing with you, Trouble.” Frankie reached out and pinched it. “O, I’m not mad. Relax.”
The balloon of air that had accumulated in my chest released in a deep sigh. “God, you suck.” I punched his arm. “But I guess I fucking deserved that.”
Frankie looked back at the open closet door before kicking it closed behind him. “You want to know anything about me, all you need to do is ask.”
“Snooping through your supply closet was so much easier.”
“You should have checked my underwear drawer. All the good stuff is in there.”
My embarrassment eased. Had I caught a guy I barely knew helping himself to my shoe box of intimate memories, it would have disqualified him immediately. Now, however, I was even more curious about the past Frankie was clearly avoiding confronting.
Vanessa. The supermodel. The woman he sent letters to while he was at war like he was headlining a romance novel. The ex that screwed him up so good he swore off dating for years.
I was not his ex. In fact, we probably couldn’t have been more different. If I had to pass judgment, Vanessa would be the type that carried a different designer bag around every day and drove an Audi. She was the woman who survived on a strictly liquid diet and had one of those fifteen percent, first name discount codes on a sportswear website that paid her to take a photo in their clothes.
I wore mom jeans and I wasn’t even a mom.
In the living room the coffee table was cleared of my carefully curated festive decorations to make space for a few bowls of snacks and coasters for our glasses. The whole house smelled like caramel popcorn and melted chocolate, soft murmurs of Bing Crosby drifted from the radio, and the Christmas lights outside shone through the cracks in the blinds casting a warm glow onto the carpet. Frankie walked over to the fireplace and lit the tiny flame, adding even more cozy ambiance to the room.
Four days until Christmas and it finally, actually felt like a holiday again to me. The bells had stopped jingling the year my parents separated, which was also the year I stopped believing in the myth, uncoincidentally. Things started to make sense when I realized the Santa that visited my dad’s apartment wrapped gifts the same way Frankie did, and also hid the wrapping paper in the closet of the spare bedroom （my bedroom） instead of at the North Pole.
“What kind of Christmas pajamas are those, Pike?” Mateo laughed.
Frankie glanced down at his worn, faded, flannel bottoms. The drawstring was completely uneven and there was a very obvious hole in the inseam of his right thigh.
“They’re fucking plaid, man.” Frankie huffed. “Sorry, I’m not like you with your matching set of candy canes.” Nat and Mateo made the same mildly insulted face as they sat there wearing the his and hers version of the same outfit.
I laughed and my sauvignon went directly up my nose.
“Just sit down and help us pick a movie,” Mateo suggested. “Don’t do it too fast though, or you’ll tear that hole all the way to your ass.”
Frankie took a seat next to me on the floor in front of the coffee table and I nudged him playfully.
“I like your pjs,” I said. “Classic. Timeless.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” He leaned over, whispering. His fingers walked a trail from my knee to the hem of my cotton shorts. “I actually sleep naked.”
My skin lit up where he touched it. Like candle wax searing into me. Blaming it on the wine was a cop-out—I barely had a buzz yet. The implications of the night weren’t lost on either of us. I could feel it like a layer of dust in the air. This was all fun, wine, popcorn, and games until bedtime. When Mateo and Nat waddled off to their sound studio and Frankie and I were left to fill in each other’s blanks. My nerves were on edge, despite how casual the hooking up was meant to be. It hadn’t been as long for me as it was for Frankie, but I was still out of practice and the pressure to satisfy him loomed.