Heat spread at my center like running water. I understood nothing but what my body was telling me to, and that was to spread my legs at the simple sound of the voice speaking to me. Being around Frankie was like having a fever. One minute I was comfortable, the next I was burning up. Everything ached in one way or another, my head swam, my focus wavered, and things stopped making complete sense.
I must not have answered his question, because he continued on, slithering his hand across the back of my neck and holding it. “I’m going to take my time, and use my tongue, and you’re going to come apart all pretty for me like I know you do.”
I leaned over the console, daring him confidently while a nervous knot tightened in my stomach. “You promise?” The previous vow to behave earlier had been all but forgotten. I brought my elbows together, pushing until my breasts started to spill over the top of my shirt.
His eyes dropped slowly, and a long sharp breath pulled through his teeth. I didn’t need his words then, telling me something I already knew the answer to. I just needed his mouth.
“Come here,” I whispered.
Frankie’s grip on me tightened as we crashed together frantically. A day's worth of tension coming to life through the hungry motion of our lips sparring one another. He dragged his tongue across mine, tasting every unexpressed moan of desperation as I let them go freely. My fingers latched onto the wind-swept locks of his hair, and he knocked his hat off my head to the floor and dragged me even closer to him.
Everything that wasn’t Frankie and I disappeared into the background of our kiss. Roaming hands and soft sighs fueled that feeling of complete intoxication the longer we remained attached.
He pulled at my lips with his teeth, our mingling breaths igniting pleasure down my body. My skin hummed for touch, and the tighter his fingers dug into my hair, the more ravenous my need became.
I reached out and palmed his shorts and he groaned into my open mouth before throwing his head back against the seat.
“I want this,” I breathed.
“God, you’re fucking hot when you’re desperate.” Frankie’s hips shifted and more of him pressed into my hold.
His mouth claimed me again, both his hands wandering to my ribs, and then my chest, circling my breasts and kneading them. The car was stifling, fog starting to cloud the windows, enclosing us into a perfect storm.
Frankie wrapped his arms around my back and pulled me, intent to bring me completely onto his lap. And I would have gone—if a wild head of black hair, attached to an amused, entirely too excited face hadn’t materialized just outside the driver’s side window.
“Time’s up, horndogs!” Nat knocked on the pane behind Frankie and he jolted, instinctively shielding me in his shadow.
“Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, straightening my shirt and slinking back to the passenger seat.
Frankie exhaled shakily, composing himself before entertaining my short spritely best friend hoisting herself up on the running boards to peer inside at us.
“Tally.” He rolled down the window reluctantly. “You’re killing me, babe.”
“You’ve had her all morning. I won’t let you steal any more of my precious quality time.”
“Ten minutes wouldn’t make a difference.”
“Ten minutes is amateur work, Francesco.” She scrunched her nose. “What are you gonna do in ten minutes?”
“I’m sure O would have filled you in,” he said pointedly.
“You think Gino wants to come outside to water his hydrangeas and see you humping in the driveway?”
I snorted, shouldering my bag and letting myself out of the car. Natalia circled to join me, her hazel eyes flaring with excitement and more than a little bit of mischief as she tried to comb through my hair with her fingers. The evidence of the last five minutes was clear as day on my complexion, and secretly left me lukewarm and sticky between my legs.
Frankie joined us slowly, with his hat on his head again and a defeated expression.
“If Santa doesn’t put coal in your stocking, Tally, I fucking will.”
“Tell Ms. Casado I said hello tomorrow.” She patted him on the shoulder and turned to me. “Ready?”
“Mm-hmm,” I hummed, walking slowly backward down the driveway toward the car. Frankie’s eyes pierced me longingly, holding a layer of emotion I wasn’t neutral enough to pick apart, but made me hesitate with the need to kiss him goodbye. “Text me,” I settled on.
“Sext her!” Nat shouted from the driver’s side.
That beat of amusement cut the tethered line of tension stretching like a rubber band between us. I shrugged suggestively, and Frankie stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts and followed me to the passenger door.
“Good luck with the garden.”
He nodded, pausing for a moment before he said, “I’ll see you Friday,” and then shut me safely inside.
24
The house I grew up in was a modest, one-level, single-family home on a corner lot in Coral Grove. The siding was steel blue, the shutters were eggshell white, and the oversized bay window off the front-facing living room never had any curtains; my mother loved the natural, brandishing sunlight and apparently hated privacy.
You could always see the Marlins game playing clear as day from the driveway, or the street, or even down the fucking street, because our house was one that every car drove by, every family walked past with their stroller after dinner, and every kid in the neighborhood stopped at to whistle me and my sister out the front door.
My father spent any time that he wasn’t at work outside in the yard, talking to neighbors, holding the sprinkling spout of our hose over his azalea bushes, and nitpicking the way I mowed the lawn that week. He said it was an outward representation of how people viewed us as a family, and nobody would want to invite the Lumpy-lawn Casados to potluck.
He was kidding, but my father inadvertently prepared me for bootcamp by regularly instilling me with the fear of missing out on pigs in blankets and seven-layer bean dip.
After he died, I mowed the lawn once a week, religiously, exactly the way he would have wanted it done, and I kept the bushes trimmed and watered, and tried to make small talk with Mr. Santana across the street.
When I joined the Army I wasn’t home to do the work myself anymore, but I hired a guy and paid him every week from wherever I was, sometimes months in advance, to cut the grass for my mom so she never had to do it herself. Part of me thought she would take it upon herself to keep up the landscaping because by then it had been almost six years since we’d lost Dad, but I knew deep down that much like the garden that she’d let perish, it was the same stitched wound.
Now, reminding her not only of my father, but of me being gone, too.
So my heart dropped like lead into my stomach as I pulled into the familiar, white stone driveway of the home I was raised in to see the front yard perfectly dressed. Black mulch, trimmed hedges, the flowering plants bright and dappled in moisture as if they’d just been watered.
I stood outside the dark wooden door on the front step, assessing the home like I’d somehow accidentally ended up at the wrong one.
The gutters were different, replaced from the rusted, splintered metal I’d last seen hanging over the windows to a brand new, sturdy white finish. My eyebrow furrowed and I scratched at my short beard.