Chapter 18 #2
What sort of delusion land was he living in? She actually knew the answer to that. Tristan got what Tristan wanted. He always had. He was good-looking, tall, smart, funny, charming, charismatic, athletic, oh, and rich. There were not a lot of doors that were closed to him, if any.
“Don’t you think you’ve made your point?” he said in what might have been the most condescending tone she’d ever heard in her entire life.
Made my point?
Frankie opened her mouth, not sure what would come out of it.
Huh? she thought. Now she knew how Liam felt. He was always saying he never knew what she was going to say.
Would she say something scathing and make him cry?
Would she go with something more subtle, sarcasm perhaps, and there would be a good chance half of it would go over his head?
Or would she just be straight up and to the point, leaving no room for misinterpretation that, in the immortal words of Taylor Swift, they were never, ever, ever getting back together?
She had no idea, but they were both about to find out.
“I don’t care—”
Before she got out her fourth word, which she felt would have really set the tone of her retort, her phone vibrated and lit up with a call. She glanced at the screen, and the relief she felt was so visceral she almost wept.
Zion was calling.
She’d never needed to speak to her bestie more in her life. He was back in the States, or at least within range of service.
Tristan leaned over her, trying to see her screen. “Who is that?”
The tone in his voice was not curious, it was suspicious.
“None of your business.” She angled the phone so he couldn’t see, her voice cool as a cucumber for the first time all night.
He gave her a look—half hurt, half annoyed—as he pointed to her phone. “Is that why you’ve been so weird since we got here?”
Most of the things that had come out of Tristan’s mouth tonight had stunned her, but the nerve it took for him to say that was just un-fucking-believable.
“Weird? If I’m acting weird, it’s because you didn’t tell me you were coming to California with our parents, who are getting married in six days and who we have to act like a happy couple in front of.”
“Whose fault is that? You are the one who bounced out of state and stopped talking to me a month ago. You are the one who didn’t want to upset your mom by telling her that truth.”
“She was on vacation. In Europe. I didn’t expect her, or you, or your father to show up on my porch. A heads-up that you were all coming to Hope Falls would not have been too much to ask for. You ambushed me.”
Tristan shook his head. “You act like you’re the only one with feelings in this relationship, like you’re the only one who was ambushed. I got home one day, and my fiancée was gone. I had to track you on your phone to find out where you were.”
She knew that he’d tracked her. She hadn’t told him where she was, and he kept asking her, but she knew he knew the entire time. It would have bothered him too much not to know.
Her phone stopped ringing and then vibrated again.
She glanced down and saw it was a text from Zion with only a string of emojis portraying his shock and concern, including the face screaming in fear, skull, exploding head, astonished face, face with spiral eyes, and more.
She’d sent him over fifteen voice notes, each at their two-minute capacity, explaining the entire situation.
The only detail she omitted was that she and Liam slept together, but she included everything else—the hiking, meeting his family, him Mission Impossible-ing Yaya’s house, all of it.
She’d told him about Tristan and Em, her mom and Dr. Sterling’s European adventures, and that they’d shown up at Yaya’s.
She’d even texted him while packing up her things that they were all now staying at Liam’s for the week.
Her phone started ringing again, and she clutched it tightly to her chest, the bed suddenly suffocating her, the air in the room thick as syrup. She pressed her lips together, forcing herself not to scream as she swung her legs off the bed and walked toward the balcony.
“Where are you going?” Tristan demanded in accusation.
“To Disneyland,” she stated sarcastically.
Tristan scoffed. “Yeah, run away. You’re good at that.”
“Why don’t you go have sex with your clients and then rate them with fleshlights? You’re good at that,” Frankie shot back, she hadn’t planned on bringing it up, but he pushed her to her limit. She was so tired of him pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
Tristan shot up to a sitting position. “What?! What are you talking about?!”
“Save it, Tristan. I don’t even—”
“I’m serious, Frankie.” He got out of the bed and started walking towards her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
This performance was even better than the first. He deserved an Oscar for this one.
She rolled her eyes and forwarded him the information his assistant had sent her.
His phone dinged with the notification as she grabbed her hoodie off the armchair in the corner, which was actually Liam’s hoodie she’d borrowed during the hike, and pushed her arms through the sleeves.
Before she went out to the balcony, she glanced back and saw Tristan hovering over his phone, staring down at his screen. She slipped out the sliding door and shut it behind her. The air was fresh and smelled of pine and firewood.
The ringing stopped as soon as she lowered down into the chair. Frankie exhaled, trying to steady her hands enough to unlock her phone. The mountains across the valley looked solid and reassuring, and the crisp night air cut through the haze of anger like a blade.
She called him back, but it went straight to voicemail.
That happened with the two of them a lot.
If one of them missed a call, they called back at the same time the other was trying to get ahold of them again, they truly did share one brain.
She hung up and waited for him to call, staring down at her screen, willing it to light up with his perfectly symmetrical face before her toes turned into icicles.
As she waited, a wave of realization hit her of just how much she’d missed him.
He was such a big presence in her life. Not just physically, although he was tall.
Zion Ash was six and a half feet of living, breathing confidence, but never in a way that was overbearing, always in a way that was precisely calibrated to the situation at hand.
His body, maintained from his teen modeling days, still moved with the grace of someone who’d learned how to wear a tux before he learned how to ride a bike.
His father was Nigerian royalty, and his mother was a British diplomat, giving him a multicultural, mixed-nationality background that resulted in his passport being stamped with more countries before he turned ten than most people have their entire lives.
His hair was a halo of tight curls that he wore with an ever-evolving array of artistic colors.
His dark, thick lashes outlined golden brown eyes that glinted with a private joke at all times.
Frankie met Zion her second day at NYU. They somehow ended up in the same “team building” group, and they were paired together to do a trust fall, which was a questionable piece of event planning considering no one could be trusted to catch a six-foot-five man except perhaps a sumo wrestler or a small forklift.
It was the perfect storm of dysfunctional personality types.
Zee, with the supreme confidence of someone who’d spent his life being photographed for J.
Crew catalogs, catered to, and waited on, he simply closed his eyes, folded his arms, and tipped backwards.
Frankie—five-one on her best hair day—held out her arms with the gumption of a lifetime of keeping up with the boys and never backing down from a challenge.
The two ended up falling backwards and breaking a table, which they both thought was hilarious.
From that day forward, they’d been inseparable.
After graduation Zee let Frankie move into his East Village high-rise apartment and live there rent-free for six months until she moved into Tristan’s Downtown Brooklyn brownstone.
Zee followed her to Brooklyn Heights and bought a penthouse.
When Tristan decided they had to move to a townhouse in Soho, Zee sold his penthouse and moved to a luxury loft apartment two blocks away.
Not being able to talk to him while her life was imploding had been hell. When he didn’t call her back, she finally called him, and it went to voicemail again. She disconnected the call, and he texted her, saying that he was calling her.
It rang once, and she answered, “He—”
“What the fuck?” He skipped the pleasantries and got right to the WTF of it all.
“Yeah.” Just hearing Zee’s voice made Frankie want to cry. Tears may have swelled in her eyes, but she ignored them. “Are you back in New York?”
“No. I’m in Jaipur.”
She had no clue where that was.
“India.”
“Oh, okay.”
“I was going to stay another two weeks, but I can come ho—”
“No,” she cut him off as she sniffed back emotion. “Stay. I’m fine. There’s nothing you can do. This is… I don’t even know what this is.”
“Fucked up, that’s what this is.”
“Yeah.”
“So T-bag still doesn’t know why you left?”
“Tea bag?”
“It’s when men put their balls in—”
“I know what it is. I just…that’s a new nickname I hadn’t heard before.”
“Well, if he wants to go dip his dick and balls in everyone, then I figured—”
“Okay, fine.” Frankie shook her head and glanced over her shoulder.
Tristan was pacing up and down the room, speaking on the phone.
She couldn’t hear him, but he looked pissed.
She hoped she didn’t get his assistant fired, but honestly, she never liked her.
Petra had always given her weird vibes. She worshipped Tristan, which he enjoyed but was strange.
And she acted like she wanted to be friends with Frankie, but all she did was talk about Tristan.
About a month into her employment, she asked Frankie if she could cut off a swatch of her hair to bring it to the stylist for a color match.
Frankie said she didn’t feel comfortable with that, but the next week, lo and behold, she came in with hair frighteningly close to hers.
She even started dressing like her, and she began adopting phrases and vernacular similar to Frankie’s.
People in the office noticed, and they thought that Petra looked up to Frankie, but Frankie always had a feeling it had more to do with Petra’s unhealthy obsession with Tristan and nothing to do with her.
“Tristan knows, I just told him.”
“How did that go?”
“He denied it.”
“How? It’s a video.”
“Before he knew about the video, he said ‘I don’t know what you heard,’ I said no one said anything, then he said I don’t know what you think you saw, so I showed him the video.”
“And…” Zee prompted.
Frankie was building this up purpose. Zee loved a dramatic reveal. “He said, and I quote, ‘It’s amazing what they can do with AI,’ and, ‘Emmanuelle’s husband is bitter.’”
When the line went silent, Frankie glanced at the phone to make sure the call hadn’t disconnected. She put it back to her ear just as her friend said, “I mean, I don’t want to be insensitive to you, and you know I want to kill him, but that’s—”
“It’s impressive, right?” she finished his thought. “Yeah. I thought the same thing.”
Zee sighed audibly with relief. “Okay, good.”
“But when I told him it was on the cloud, all the fight drained out of him.” She glanced back over her shoulder and watched as he spoke on the phone. She knew that tense jaw and brow furrow, it was his litigation face. It was the look he got when he was devising a strategy to go into court.
“What?” Zee asked. “Where did you just go?”
“I, um, before I came out here, I told him I knew about the other clients he slept with and that he rated them with fleshlights—”
“Which can I just say, is so…I don’t know, that doesn’t even sound like him.
” Zee put in his two cents. “I mean, he’s a piece of shit for cheating on you, but it was with Emmanuelle.
Not saying that’s okay, but she’s…Emmanuelle.
But sleeping with random clients and then the fleshlights—that’s tacky, it’s so low rent for Tristan.
He must be having an early midlife crisis. ”
“I know and I told him, and he got a look on his face I’ve never seen and I’ve known him basically all his life.
It was, I don’t know alarmed. Surprised.
I’m not sure. I know he’s a liar, but he really looked like he had no clue what I was talking about.
So I forwarded him the information I got from Petra and—”
“Wait. You got that information from Petra?”
“Yeah.”
“Petra, who Single White Female’d you because she’s in love with Tristan?”
“Do you think she lied?” Frankie asked.
“I hate to be on Tristan’s side about anything, but, yes, I absolutely think she lied.
She probably knew about the Emmanuelle thing and thought it wouldn’t last, because she’s Emmanuelle and he’s, well, Tristan, and she got scared you’d take him back, so she wanted you to think he’d done it a lot of times in the past to put the final nail in the cheater coffin. ”
“Oh.” It was strange, but that actually made more sense than if he had been cheating on her all that time and then rating his clients.
Either way, nothing changed as far as whether or not she wanted to be back together with Tristan, but at least she felt like if that wasn’t true, she could still be friends with him.
It was strange, but the person she wanted to discuss this with was just downstairs.
He was only a few feet away but so far at the same time.
She looked over the balcony at the Liam’s darkened bedroom window.
She wished so badly she could crawl through it like she used to when they were kids.
If she did, she hoped he wouldn’t sleep on the floor.
She missed him. Really missed him. Like her body ached, missed him.
One week. Just one week. They just had to make it through one week.