I frowned. “While you were deployed?”
“He found out after she fucked off that it started way before the crash.”
I sat up straighter. “What crash?”
Nat looked between the two of us silently and despondently. Mateo heaved a hard sigh and shifted in his chair, pushing his edible house out of the way to make room for all the eccentric hand movements that accompanied his storytelling.
“They met in North Carolina right before he got picked up for Delta. Only had a few months together before they sent his unit out to the Pacific,” Mateo explained. “But he’d already made up his mind. It’s not easy to be in a relationship in the military. Most guys aren’t doing it for love—if anything it’s benefits, security, boredom.” He shrugged. “Frankie doesn’t do shit out of boredom, Ophelia. He’s a calculated son of a bitch. He wants it, he takes it, and he does it better than anyone else.”
The tightness in my chest lessened to appreciate that with a sad smile. “She didn’t feel the same?”
“Maybe for the first few years. We were gone a lot. A fuck ton of sacrifice is made when that’s the life you choose. I don’t know how men with families do it, I really don’t. It’s lonely, it’s hard work, it’s dangerous. Days pass without taking a shower, months without seeing anyone you love. And they’re just back home, going to the grocery store, seeing a movie, meeting their friends out for dinner. The whole time, he was counting the days to get back to her.”
I swallowed a mixture of pity and jealousy that felt like nails scraping down the dry column of my throat.
“He had to have written her a hundred letters,” Mateo said. “I’m not kidding, every one of us single guys would be out wherever we were stationed, having our plates worth of ass—” Nat pinched him under the arm. “Ow, fuck. I’m telling a story, sweetheart, it’s all part of it.” He lifted her hand and kissed it.
“Let’s leave the ‘plates worth of ass’ at the table,” she remarked.
Mateo regarded me again. “As I was saying, plates worth of ass—and Pike wanted nothing to do with it. He’s loyal to a certifiable degree. She got everything he could give without abandoning the promises he made to himself for his family, and for his country. Vanessa was only ever worried about being taken care of. She was a fucking user.”
I hated her. I didn’t know the woman save for a photo and a story and I fucking hated her. For how she treated Frankie, and for how selfish she was to ever let him go. To be friends with him was wonderful. To be loved by him…would be incredible. I kept that to myself.
I wanted to say a million things in that moment, and all of them led a trail back to the attachment I shouldn’t have, and the feelings I needed to collar.
“How did he find out?” I asked.
“The details are his to tell.” Mateo’s knee bounced under the table and Nat soothed it with her hand. “Pike was medically discharged from Delta right before our contracts were up. It was supposed to be a cut-and-dried op, we were outside the wire, he was in the chopper, shit went sideways, evac was a fucking mess and…he crashed. We crashed.”
“Oh, shit.” My pulse hammered against my neck.
“Recovery took longer than Pike thought it would, but he didn’t help himself either. He didn’t think he deserved it. He blamed everything bad that happened on himself, and never took the people he saved that day into consideration.” I had an innate feeling that this was a conversation the two of them had had many times before. “It was ugly, O, that’s no doubt his biggest regret.”
“Vanessa didn’t stick around when he needed her to,” Nat said.
“Surgeries, recovery, physical therapy, all of it. He needed her and she didn’t step up to the plate. When the going got tough, she got going down to fucking Fayetteville to find someone to dangle shiny things in front of her again. Spoiled bitch.”
Normally I’d be averse to name calling but…spoiled fucking bitch.
“They were two complete opposite sides of a coin." Mateo continued. "Pike saw her through rose-colored glasses, and he still does. He still faults himself for her leaving and stepping out on him. He thinks if he was home more, if he had asked her to marry him before we deployed, if he’d pulled himself out of the depressive episode after the accident, that would have fixed everything. But he doesn’t see what we do.”
I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around myself in what felt like the closest thing to a hug. My understanding of Frankie waxed and waned with every passing hour. I was on a boat that was sinking, without a raft, and the worst part was that I was the one letting the water in. I was becoming obsessed with knowing him, learning him, being a part of his life, getting too involved. Finding out about his ex only made me want him more. Because he was so deserving of everything he ever dreamed of having in life that it overwhelmed my own self-preservation.
It made me think about Colorado. How good we could be for each other if we ever had the chance to make something real out of this. How much of each other we still had to discover.
Mateo’s explanation of what had happened with Vanessa only added several pieces to an already intricate and still unsolved puzzle. I was saving those bits of curved, edged information instead of trying to shove them into place, confident patience would prosper and every missing jigsaw was something I had yet to experience. Perfectly incomplete.
As if his ears were ringing, we all looked down at my phone buzzing to life on the table with Frankie’s name etched across the screen. Tell Cap he’s not out of the woods for keeping secrets for my mom.
I laughed quietly, a brazen smile taking over the moroseness.
“He says you’re in trouble,” I relayed across the table.
Mateo chuckled, pulling Nat into his side and rubbing away an invisible chill down her arm. “That’s my favorite place to be.”
The Christmas tree sparkled wistfully behind them in the living room, raindrops of light sprinkling down onto the gifts waiting to be opened underneath. The reflection of the three of us sitting there played off the uncovered windows where night blackened the world outside and turned us kaleidoscopic.
Ophelia: This isn’t very friends with benefits of me, but I kind of miss you
As eagerly as it was sent, another message returned.
Frankie <3: This isn’t very friends with benefits of me either, but I told my mom about you, too
27
Christmas Eves growing up were spent in quiet solitude or utter chaos. My dad was somewhat estranged from his family from the moment he married my mom, and the grandparents I had on my mother’s side moved south when I was old enough to start school. I saw them in the summer on a trip to Arizona every year, but when the holidays came around we remained a family of three.
As a teenager, every other Christmas I got one parent or the other, and then one set of siblings or the other, and the least magical morning you could ever imagine, spent holding an industrial-sized garbage bag open for all the younger siblings’ torn bits of sparkly wrapping paper.
In adulthood I was the “can you grab an extra bag of ice” or “I forgot to pick up cookies to leave out for Santa” daughter, and the twenty-fourth of December made me feel like the stretched-thin elf of your worst nightmare.