His gray T-shirt was darker down his spine and under his arms, and his grunts of exertion, while completely innocent, registered oppositely in the little neutral headspace I had left. My mouth went completely dry thinking about getting that man home and treating him to a long, soapy shower.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I murmured.
Frankie straightened and lifted his hat, wiping the moisture from his forehead with his sleeve. He huffed, catching his breath, and before I could stop myself I was reaching out and wiping away a bead of sweat that threatened to get lost in his facial hair.
Such a shameless gesture, and yet it stole the air between us. Frankie’s eyes flared.
I’d slowly become obsessed with touching him. In small insignificant ways: a pinch, a pull, fixing the tag sticking out of his collar, tapping the face of his watch to see the time despite my phone sitting in my pocket. I knew this showed attachment, and disregarded it.
As soon as the holidays were over it would be like turning out the lights at the end of the night.
Frankie took my hand, inspecting it as if it’d burned him, and then dried my thumb by running it down the center of his chest. Too slowly to be harmless, too quickly for someone shopping around us to notice. The rhythmic thump of his heartbeat picked up beneath my touch, and the muscles in his abdomen twitched the lower my fingers dropped.
“I think we have everything we need,” Frankie muttered. He looked around the room and shuffled closer to me. My stomach flipped as he guided my hand lower, to his belt, then lower again. “All day like this,” he whispered. “All day for you.”
I gasped, feeling him hard against my hand. Our eyes met, and that same dark, glazed look from the parking lot was back—and with fervor.
“I’m ready to go home,” he said.
“We didn’t find anything for your sister.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he assured me, nodding his head toward checkout. “You did good, O. Thank you.”
“I don’t know if you’re talking about the flowers or the hard-on,” I remarked.
“Yes you do.” A playful smile danced on his lips. “You know me better than most people by now.”
My heart and my brain were playing a game of tug of war with the need I felt between my legs. One second Frankie was irritatingly sweet and playful, and the next making me wish we could be cloaked in darkness and going at it against a wall.
He was like a patchwork quilt of all the qualities I’d ever found attractive in a man sewn together. Nothing matched, the thread was different colors in places, there were parts I’d forgotten existed somewhere down a tunnel between adolescence and adulthood. But if I waved it out and held it far enough in front of me, everything looked pretty fucking on theme, and soft as butter to boot.
I liked him. I wanted to spend time with him, get to know him, sleep with him. And I could have every last one of those things if I wanted it—so goddamnit, I was going to be selfish for once in my life and deal with the consequences later.
“I can hear you thinking,” he said curiously.
We stopped against the checkout counter and Frankie pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, handing over a card to the store clerk.
“It’s mostly elevator music,” I lied.
He wrapped his forearm around my lower back, and slipped what he could fit of his fingers into the back pocket of my shorts. There was the faintest of squeezes, a secret, cheeky gesture between the two of us. “Can I listen, too?”
That dragged an embarrassing smile out of me and I bit my tongue to suppress it. “Get me back to the house and I’ll give you every little depraved detail,” I promised.
Twenty minutes later the bed of Frankie’s truck was packed and we were taking each and every road home so gingerly you would think there was a sleeping baby strapped in the back seat.
The radio blared as he sang out of tune to a country song sifting through the speakers. His voice hopped, skipped and jumped over the notes, cutting in and out, sometimes throwing a bluesy twang on the end of a line. Every time I laughed, Frankie got a little louder, finding some type of satisfaction in bringing the high-pitched sound out of me.
The cool, December air filtered through all four windows as we drove, the breeze knocking every untamed hair out of my loose bun until it was dancing freely, whipping me in the face, sticking to the headrest. I tried and failed to tie it back up until my arms were aching above my head. With a disgruntled sigh I let it all fall gracelessly down my shoulders, ready to give up entirely until I felt the plop of a hat on my head.
My attention jolted to Frankie, his wild brown locks being thrown this way and that, a cute, barely-there crease right above his ear that wrapped around the back of his head.
“Better?” he asked, assessing me softly.
I adjusted his hat on my head, tucking the flyaways under the bill so I could see clearly out the window again. His scent fell over me, masculine and inviting, comforting in a way I wanted poured into candle wax so I could have it all the time. On every cold, winter night back in Colorado and also every wet, rainy afternoon. I wanted it for the evenings while I was grading papers, and in the autumn when the leaves started crisping and falling to the dry, grassy floor.
I smiled appreciatively. “Better.”
The highway turned into suburbs, and the truck slowed to a crawl through the development leading up to the house. Then, instead of a right turn onto his road, Frankie forked and took a left, driving us in a different direction.
I opened my mouth and then shut it, deciding to give myself freely to spontaneity, trusting I wouldn’t regret my impulse to let him take me wherever he wanted to.
Apparently though, it wasn’t anywhere specific. We zig-zagged down streets in the neighborhood, making a right turn and then two more. My forehead creased in confusion. But nothing about circling the same pond three times was as odd as Frankie’s quiet reverence and I started to wonder if our elevator music sounded the same. The fourth time we paused at the same stop sign, beside the beige barn mailbox with the rooster on the roof, I got suspicious.
Was he…prolonging the drive?
“Lost your way?” I joked.
“I’m thinking about something.”
“Yeah?”
Another left turn and the houses started looking familiar. I realized we were just approaching their well-decorated driveway from a different direction.
“About how I’m going to get you into my house, and then into my very well-pressurized shower, and back into my bed without your best friend noticing first.”
My pulse picked up. Part of me wanted him just as he was, sitting beside me in the car. Ripe from the day, tense with longing, more than a little aggressive if I was reading the situation right. But then, just as before, I started imagining the flow of water sliding down the planes of his chest, his long hair slicked back, the muscles in our bodies relaxing in the heat against each other.
“Well,” I drawled, “that would take skill and training that I’m not sure anyone has.”
“I’m overly willing to test that.”
“We could pull over somewhere,” I proposed.
Frankie rounded a curve and turned into the driveway a moment later. The ignition idled over our silence for an extended second before he rolled the windows up and cut it. “When we finally do this, I’m not getting you quick and dirty in the back seat. Do you understand that?”