“Nat is so colorful, isn’t she?” I coughed.
Frankie drummed his thumb against the steering wheel and shook his head, barely hiding a smirk. God, he looked sexy and self-satisfied, and now he knew that my texts were a petri dish of unsavory conversations about him. Heat blossomed on the apples of my cheeks.
“My born-again virginity, huh?”
“Three years is a long dry spell.” I tried to drown the flame but instead doused it. “For your age.”
“My age hasn’t bothered you yet. You like to make jokes but I think it turns you on, Ophelia.”
I started to laugh, but it tapered into a little deceiving gasp of a thing when he locked the doors with a click. His seatbelt unwound and he turned to face me, the air thickening with my shallow breaths until it felt claustrophobic.
“Am I the oldest guy you’ve ever fucked around with?”
“No,” I answered quickly. Then I thought harder, with my tongue in my cheek. “Maybe.”
“Which is it?” he pressed. “Am I your type, or do you have some extremely unaddressed daddy issues you need me to work out of you?”
That was a great question. My lips parted to reply, but before I could, Frankie reached across again and pulled my chin toward him.
“Because, I think,” he murmured, the soft skate of his breath against my lips, “I’m the first man that’s ever gotten you there, and no matter who you take to bed after me, you never forget your first.”
A single, pathetic sound escaped me defiantly, and Frankie’s mouth twitched.
“Yeah.” He nodded triumphantly. “Just like when I told you to get up this morning and get in my truck, if I wanted you to call me daddy, sweetheart, you fucking would. And something also tells me…” He looked down as I squirmed. “If I told you to get in the back seat so I could eat that desperate little pussy I know is begging for some relief right now—you might react the same.”
A lump formed in my throat as any protest got caught there. Usually I didn’t fold over and put my ass in the air like that, but he hit it like checking off items on a grocery list. We were in no place to be working each other up so intensely, and the outside of the garden center at Levi’s Homestore was a shadeless, privateless place. There wasn’t a chance in the world we would get away with it.
But hell if I wasn’t considering it.
Frankie and I were like an hourglass being turned over and over again without ever letting the sand completely siphon out. When he turned away, hopping out of the car, it was like flipping it back over again.
He rounded to the passenger side, slowly, seemingly battling something in his mind, before he pulled open my door. A soft crease split his brows, and his pupils were dilated. Hidden behind the door where only I could see it, he reached down and adjusted himself in his shorts.
“Let’s try to cool down,” he suggested, but his hands asked for the opposite. I shifted in his direction and calloused palms slid up my outer thighs and he leaned in, running his nose across the dip of my neckline. “I know I like to mess around,” he said, his voice vulnerable, “but don’t let me convince you that you’re not affecting me the same fucking way, O.”
“That’s why you’re preying on my weaknesses?” I briefly wound my fingers through the sweat-damp locks at the nape of his neck.
“I am, aren’t I?” He retracted a step, giving me his hand to help me hop onto the ground.
“Now my therapist has to hear about how the underlying trauma from my parents' failed marriage has inadvertently fed into my sexual deviancy as an adult.”
I hadn’t really thought about it until that moment, and there wasn’t a handbook for teens whose parents got divorced and started new lives. I was so far removed from that chapter anyway that I couldn’t tell if I displayed a behavior in certain situations as a response to it, or if it was just an easy excuse.
Everyone preferred honesty, nobody liked to be deceived, people expected open communication in relationships, and commitment, and connection, and that had nothing to do with the things I’d experienced, or the lack thereof, in my youth. I, now, as a result, knew what I wanted and what I didn’t, but if that also had something to do with being manhandled in the bedroom then so fucking be it.
“You think I’m onto something?” Frankie guided me into the large greenhouse and we were immediately hit with the earthy, humid scent of herbs and terracotta. The walls were wet with condensation, and my skin took it on like a sticky film.
“I know that most of the things I feel inadequate about in my life directly correlate to either abandonment, or overcompensation,” I explained. “I’m competitive as a reflex, I’m impulsive because I don’t want to miss opportunities, and I’m, embarrassingly enough, an attention seeker, so I do things that are memorable and over the top as a response.”
“You’re saying all of those things as if they’re negative.” Frankie grabbed a cart and started loading topsoil into it while I held it still for him. “Why don’t you turn it around and think about all the good things that come out of those in-your-face, psycho-analytical buzzwords?”
“Do you go to therapy?”
“Physical.” He grunted as he hauled a giant ceramic pot into the cart. “It doesn’t take a professional to see that you think there’s something wrong with you that needs to be fixed—when maybe you just need to rewire the system.”
“How computer-techy of you.”
“Seriously,” Frankie said. “Competition is healthy. Impulsivity is your way of trusting your gut. There’s nothing wrong with being a little fucking cocky either.” He picked up two pairs of gardening gloves off a rack and held them next to each other for me to choose.
“You’re right.” I pointed to the yellow and orange ones. “But we’re talking about major life decisions. Like, who I’m going to potentially marry and have children with. That needs a considerable amount of calculation.”
Frankie turned his back to me and started filing through the display of seed packets. “I don’t think you really know how a guy is gonna be with kids until you give him kids. Or what he’s going to be like as a husband until he becomes a husband. It’s all educated guesses up to that point. You can’t make someone be the right person for you—they just are.”
I sighed. “This is why dating apps are fucked. In a perfect world I’m not flipping through pictures of men all day with blind hope.”
He snorted, looking at me over his shoulder. “You don’t think Prince Charming is in Pine Ridge?”
“If he is, he's already married with kids.”
“Or he’s just not in Pine Ridge.” Frankie shrugged, pulling the cart along without another word.
I walked beside our growing pile of potted plants and gardening tools playing botanist, picking out the brightest petals and biggest flowers. Frankie paid less and less attention to my choices and more to the sheen of sweat on my collarbones every time I asked him to load another into the cart.
I was no better, because Frankie pushing me aside to do the heavy lifting was like watching softcore porn. His shirt was stuck to his body with sweat, and the hair on his neck was curling in damp waves. Every muscle from his broad shoulders to his calves flexed for my personal enjoyment.