Chapter 29 #3
Frankie squared her shoulders defiantly.
“Yes. I did. It was easier. She acted as if the world would implode if it had been you, and you don’t know what it was like when her world implodes.
What it was like with her after my dad died.
” Tears started filling Frankie’s eyes and sliding down her face, but she wiped them away as fast as they appeared.
“You didn’t live in that cottage. For years…
she was… I know she’s better now, but I just wanted to make sure this weekend, her wedding weekend, didn’t trigger her. That’s it. So fucking sue me.”
Liam stood up, feeling the familiar pulse of frustration and longing tangle together in his chest. He could see the confusion and pain written so plainly across Frankie’s face, her mouth set in a stubborn line, her jaw trembling even as her eyes tried to hurl daggers his way.
But he didn’t want to fight. Not anymore, not with her.
He just wanted to lay the truth out in the open, strip it bare, the way she always demanded, no matter who it hurt.
“Oh, that’s not all.” She took a step back. “This morning my mom was looking for towels and asked if I knew where any were. I said no, because I didn’t. So she goes looking and calls my name. I go down this hall past the kitchen to a secret—"
“Frankie, I was—” Liam knew what she was going to say, and he wanted to tell her, but when?
He wasn’t going to show her the room the first night she came to his house, the same night she told him she broke up with his brother and they slept together.
The next day his dad, her mom, and Tristan showed up.
“No, I’m not finished.” She held up her hand and took a step back putting distance between them.
“I walk in and see my dream art room. It has everything I talked about, the wall of windows, the brick wall, the cement floors, it even has a rolling library ladder. I even forgot I wanted that.” Tears began slipping down her cheeks.
“Don’t cry.” He hated seeing the pain she was in and knowing he was the one who had made her feel it.
She wiped her cheeks roughly as she sniffed.
“Not only is it my perfect dream fantasy art studio, which would have been crazy enough, but you have all my art. Everything. Every drawing, every project, every card, every everything. Even the cigar box I used to doodle on. Why? How? I sold those pieces to other people. Were they fake people?”
“No. They weren’t fake people.”
“So how did you get them?”
He looked down at the floor.
“How!?” she yelled.
He lifted his head and hoped he wasn’t throwing her brother under the bus by being honest, but he couldn’t risk lying to her. “I asked AJ to find out who bought them.”
“AJ?” She shook her head. “What? Why?”
“I asked him to figure out who they were. You know, to do his cyber stuff. And then when I had their information, I emailed them and asked if they would consider selling and, if so, to name their price. It was all legal. I mean, I guess except for the AJ part.”
“Why?” Her eyes were searching his. Searching for answers he wasn’t sure he could give her.
He sighed as he scrubbed his hands over his face.
“I just…I don’t know. It started when I found that rainbow picture in the trash, I took it out because I liked it.
Then I found the coffee picture on the lawn.
I kept them because they were good, and they were…
you. Then I noticed a pattern, you would finish a piece and trash it impulsively and regret it later, so my plan was to collect them, keep them, and then give them to you when you graduated college.
But then…” He took a deep breath. “Then, you know, we weren’t talking, so I couldn’t.
And when you started selling things, it just felt wrong to have your work out there, in the world.
I felt empty without them. It was like they weren’t … home.”
He reached out for her hand, but she jerked her arm away.
“You can’t do that.” She pushed her hands against his chest, but he didn’t move.
“Do what?”
“Say things like that. Do things like that and then stop speaking to me because you get bored or butt hurt or abducted by aliens or develop amnesia.”
“Abducted by aliens?” He did love that he never knew what Frankie would say, but this was really out of left field.
“Whatever your dumbass reason was for not speaking to me. You didn’t answer my texts.
My calls. That was fucked up. Do you know how that made me feel?
And now this.” She waved her arm around the cabin as more tears fell down her cheeks, but she swiped them away and set her jaw, refusing to let herself collapse in front of him, voice quivering but stubborn.
“You were with someone. You don’t have to lie.
So, who was here?” Her words were shaky, but she forced them out anyway, as if willing them to hurt less by saying them quickly.
He looked at her, really looked, and saw the hurricane of emotions swirling behind her eyes.
The challenge. The hurt. She held her head high and he could see she was bracing herself.
Bracing herself for the inevitable pain the impact of his answer was going to cause her.
The desperate hope that he’d say something—anything—that would make this better.
He was furious at himself for making her feel like he had.
All the time he’d been selfish, protecting himself.
Everything he’d accused his brother of, he’d done.
He hadn’t considered what his silence was doing to her.
He assumed she was busy, busy with Tristan, busy with Zion.
Taking a deep breath, he held her gaze and stripped away all his defenses.
“No one was here.”
She stared up at him, confusion clouding her gaze. “Then why were you in the shower?”
“I tried to help Athena off the dance floor, she got sick on me, your Aunt Joanna slipped in it and clocked me in the face, and I got a bloody nose. I came to take a shower and clean up.”
Her eyes turned from anger to worry in a single blink. She closed the gap between them, peering up at his nose as she lifted her hand. “Oh, my god, are you okay?”
His automatic response to being the subject of care or concern was to flinch and turn his head. He hated when people fussed over him. “I’m fine.”
Frankie took his recoil as a rebuke and retreated, her lips pressed tightly together, gaze dropping to the worn planks of the floor.
It was the smallest movement, but the effect landed like a hammer blow in Liam’s chest. When she looked back up at him, he could see that there was a distance between them, not physically, but emotionally, that he’d created.
She was the most confident, self-assured, badass woman he’d ever known. She was Mighty Mouse. The fact that she’d offered him, with a look, a gesture, the softest underbelly of her heart, and he’d kicked it made him feel, once again, like the biggest asshole in the world.
He was used to being the person who had the walls up, who protected himself, it took him this long to see that Frankie was protecting herself, too. From him. That was the moment something vital broke loose inside him. He wasn’t going to let this be the day she gave up first.
The misunderstandings were over. From that night forward, Frankie would never have to question how he felt about her again.