It was clear that I wasn’t in any real danger, and Mateo’s joke still played on a loop, setting me off again once I’d caught my breath. A real, honest-to-God, howling laugh that I couldn’t restrain.
Ophelia’s girlish giggling joined mine. Behind it I could make out the deeper chuckle that was Mateo, stacked on top of Tally’s own warm bellow of amusement.
In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t even that funny, but sometimes things just tickled you the right way. Laughter indicated more than levity; it was a looking glass to happiness, fulfillment, pleasure.
I was a bubbling mixture of all of those things, finally spilling over.
31
“Okay.” I pressed my fingers to my lips. Hot tub jets sloshed warm water around my torso, and the only thing illuminating Frankie and I save for the full moon was a soft red glow of lights beneath the water. “Worst date you’ve ever been on?”
He stretched out across from me, hiding a humored smile behind the lip of a beer bottle. “I’m not drunk enough for this.”
“Oh, come on,” I flicked water at him and his jaw clenched as the splash trickled down his cheek. “Whatever your story is, I bet I could top it.”
“What are we betting?” He splayed both arms out on either edge of the tub until he was all broad chest and shoulders above water.
“Anything you want,” I offered evocatively.
Frankie's interest piqued, gears shifting in his head before a devious flare darkened his playful expression. “When I was twenty-two I was home on leave and decided to take a girl I met at the bar out for ice cream.”
“Very PG.” I smirked.
“I let it slip that I speak Spanish, and apparently she’d been trying to teach herself how to speak it for a while, fucking Rosetta Stone or some shit like that.”
“God, you are a dinosaur.”
“That’s enough commentary from the peanut gallery.” He splashed the water back in my direction. “Because she was learning, she insisted on communicating in Spanish for the entire date. Literally every sentence. I spent more time correcting her than having an actual conversation with her. It felt like a tutoring session.”
I covered my mouth. “You’re kidding.”
“Halfway through my cone I was faking brain freeze to put an end to it, but that’s not even the kicker.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“When I eventually took her home, we pulled into the driveway at her parents’ house and she leaned over expecting a kiss.” Frankie snorted to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose. “But doing that, she tipped her entire milkshake over and spilled sixteen ounces of chocolate malt into my fucking lap.”
“Nooooo.” I grimaced, holding onto a laugh.
“She was profusely apologetic—in Spanish still—very dedicated to the character. All while patting the crotch of my pants with a bundle of paper napkins like her life depended on it. And that is just not the sight a father wants to see when he looks out the window to make sure his daughter made it home safely from a date.”
My jaw unhinged, secondhand embarrassment flaming through my body.
“I take back what I said.” I cackled. “I don’t have anything that’ll top that. That’s the shit you see in movies.”
Frankie rubbed a hand down his face, smoothing down the fine hairs on his cheeks and above his lip. The tips of his shaggy hair were wet with condensation as steam lifted from the water, blanketing us in warm fog.
“I have a lot of stories.” His tone dipped into self-reflection as he picked at the label on his bottle. “Some good, most bad and ugly.”
I tilted my head, demanding Frankie’s attention remain connected to mine. He was distancing himself from the deeper conversation we were on the precipice of. I wanted to meet him in the middle, but I didn’t want to push him too far.
“Do the jets feel good on your back?” I traversed gingerly.
Frankie’s lips twisted, his eyes thinning curiously. A silent understanding passed between us.
I’d seen his scars, he had to know that, and it wouldn’t take a professional to ascertain that they were surgical. Even if I played dumb, I could see in the change of his posture across from me that Frankie knew the truth.
His arms folded anxiously over his chest, as if guarding the very heart beating behind it. There was nothing outwardly fragile about him, and Frankie did well to protect that image. We were similar in so many ways, great at shoving our grief into boxes without considering first that the walls are glass. You can watch it fester from afar, taking it on in other ways, or the feeling itself gets so violent the containment shatters.
“Don’t be angry with Mateo,” I said.
Frankie’s eyes fell closed transiently, but reopened with a glimmer of relief. Like I’d pulled out a splinter and he could put pressure on that part of himself again.
“I should have expected it,” Frankie said. “Cap’s got the biggest mouth, and he also holds the longest grudges.”
“Is this why you’re so cynical about the job in Colorado? The pressure? You’re worried about not meeting their standards?”
“No, Ophelia. I’m worried about not meeting my standards.” He let out a heavy exhale. “How much did he say?”
“I know you weren’t at work this morning,” I admitted, picking at my softened cuticles under the water. “You were at PT because you were in some kind of crash in Central America that got you medically discharged from Delta.”
Frankie worried his bottom lip between his teeth. “What else?”
I didn’t want to say her name, because I didn’t want to give credence to it. Mateo’s warning that Frankie would never speak maliciously about the woman who broke his heart did something like driving a nail into mine.
But, we were so close to everything that had been willingly left unsaid.
Frankie and I were never meant to be more than placeholders to one another, but the time we spent together had changed that. The boundary that had been drawn like a curtain between heedless enjoyment and a deeper connection thinned to a translucent veil.
“Your ex,” I muttered.
His disposition softened. “I already told you I would tell you anything you wanted to know.”
“I want to know everything,” I confessed before I could stop the words from tripping out of me.
Frankie took another long sip of his beer and discarded the empty bottle. “This is your one chance to tap out,” he offered lightly. “We can shelf this and just go back to doing what we do best.”
“I think I can handle it,” I assured him. “But it’s up to you.”
His body shifted, making me bob in the short wake of waves. “The crash happened on one of our last ops in Costa Rica, right before we were set to ship back home. Great timing,” he added sarcastically. “The whole thing was routine. Our unit was going in to clear what was tipped off to us as a link in a chain of illegal arms checkpoints, those of which were funneling into the states. Cap led, Wink…” He paused, then clarified, “Sam Swan, you’ll meet him, is a sniper. His brother Tyler, who we call Echo, was the muscle behind the two of them and at least four more guys filing in together. My job was extraction.”