30. Chapter 30
Chapter thirty
Frankie
“ I s everybody decent?” Frankie called from the cracked bedroom door. She’d listened to her roomie’s shower progression through the thin slab of wood. Convincing herself that it was to ensure his privacy by not exiting the room until he was fully clothed did little to quell the shame she felt as she imagined what a sight that man would be.
Under a stream of water.
Naked.
She quivered at the thought and tried to focus on something unrelated to the stodgy professor in the other room.
“You’re in the clear, Miss Miller.” She could hear the smirk in his voice and assumed the rinse-off must have done him some good too.
Benjamin poured hot water from the kettle into a pair of mugs on the small table. He wore a one-sided grin that prominently displayed one of those mischievous dimples. A couple locks of still-damp hair hung over his forehead in stark contrast to his typical structured coif. Frankie imagined running her hands through the apparent silkiness and grabbing hold for leverage.
Benjamin glanced up for the first time after replacing the kettle on the stove, perusing her from towel-wrapped hair to cherry red toenails, eyes snagging briefly on the spaghetti straps of her undershirt. Her cheeks flushed under his appraisal, and then she forced herself back into a manufactured aloofness.
“I thought a nightcap might be,” he searched for the right word, settling for “relaxing.”
After their heavy discussion, no doubt he felt just as emotionally drained as she did—if not more. Frankie hadn’t anticipated the tragedy of Benjamin’s broken family. He’d embodied pretension, and she’d just assumed he came from money. A long lineage of “superior” men with fancy degrees and lifetime yacht club memberships. She hadn’t been all that wrong. He had gotten his start in life under those parameters. But the unexpected—and from how he described it—sudden upheaval of his world would have cut deep, changing his entire view of the world in more ways than one.
Marriage is the most asinine institution ever created.
It has the capability to destroy people.
Honestly, Frankie wasn’t sure about the whole marriage thing either. The complete inverse of Benjamin, her start had been rough. She’d learned quickly not to trust people in general. And while the Millers—whom she’d considered Mom and Dad since she was nearly eight—helped to restore her faith in a handful of people, that consideration didn’t expand far beyond their immediate unit.
She perched in one of the chairs and inhaled the herbal fumes of her tea as Benjamin sat opposite her. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He watched with eagle-eye sharpness as Frankie tugged the towel from her head, allowing damp waves to fall about her shoulders. She hung the cloth over the back of her chair to dry then proceeded to finger comb the tangles, doing her very best to disregard the laser beam focus coming from her temporary roommate.
“Can I help you?” she clipped, breaking the spell more for her sake than his .
“Apologies.” He blinked rapidly but continued to analyze her from across the little table. “I can’t help but wonder something.”
Oh hell, this ought to be good.
“Shoot.”
“Johnny hasn’t really told me about the before years leading up to the adoption.”
Frankie stiffened. “I’m not surprised by that.”
“Why not?”
She scanned Benjamin’s face. Long gone was the shrewd scrutiny of an uppity law professor who’d gone out of his way to make his class brutal just for the sake of booting her out. For once, those deep blue eyes and furrowed brows weren’t being wielded in intimidation. Frankie found the concern that oozed off him and the resulting energy intriguing. Almost comforting. Talk about a big, fat shift in dynamic.
“Because he carried a lot of guilt about it.” She shrugged. “Probably still does.”
“Walk me through it.” And then, so as not to sound too demanding, added a gentle, “Please.”
Frankie dragged in a deep breath, expanding her ribs and puffing out her cheeks, then released it noisily.
“Fine.”
Benjamin set down his mug and scuffed his chair to face her. His full attention settled on her like a cozy weighted blanket.
“Our birth parents died in a car accident when I was four and Jon was six. I guess we didn’t have any grandparents left or they weren’t interested in taking us. Either way, the result was the same. Foster care. They split us up because finding a home that had space for the two of us was a struggle.”
Frankie only recalled flashes because she was so young. What stuck was the feeling of immense loss—first her parents, then her big brother.
“Jon ended up in a decent setup with a younger couple who already had a kid, a boy, if I recall, about my age. Anyway, they were nice. They made his lunch for school and bought him clothes when he outgrew his old ones. They even got him a bike secondhand the first Christmas he was there. Long story short, he was lucky.”
She watched the calm waters of Benjamin’s eyes darken like clouds blocking out the sun on the open ocean. He sat there. Attentive yet silent.
“I, on the other hand, got the shit end of the deal.” Running her tongue along her teeth, Frankie engaged the practiced numbness she’d learned to build around her when necessary. “I bounced from place to place. To one family, I was a bit of a handful; to another, I was a wildcat . They could label it however they wanted, but it all boiled down to the same sentiment.”
“Which was?” His tone was flat yet seeking.
“They didn’t want me.”
Benjamin cleared his throat and gripped his forgotten mug.
Frankie swatted away the thick waves of tension that vibrated off him, dismissing the niggling emotion that began to spark inside her chest.
“Anyway, I did finally settle somewhere. But it wasn’t any better than bouncing around.”
The whitening of his knuckles didn’t go unnoticed.
“I was with a couple, the Garbers. They had that old school type of marriage where the man was the head of the household and ‘what he said goes.’ It wasn’t like they beat me or anything like that, but their punishments were pretty harsh.”
“Elaborate.” The sharp demand echoed off the walls of the tiny cabin, resonating a touch longer than it should have.
“Their most common punishment was withholding food. And not only going to bed without dinner—although that happened more often than not. Sometimes I’d go a whole day without more than a glass of water. I can remember the sharp hunger pangs in my gut as I’d lie in bed dreaming about the shitty cooking of the family I’d lived with before. The summer and weekends were the worst because I didn’t have school lunch to fall back on. Once, Mrs. Garber took pity on me and snuck me a sandwich. I think she got beat for that. That’s what it sounded like anyway.
“The only good thing about living with them was that it meant Jon and I were in the same school. I was able to tell him the Garbers’ address, so he’d sneak out some nights and ride his bike over to bring me food. He got caught a couple times, and his foster parents started keeping a better eye on him. One night, he showed up to ‘rescue’ me and took me back to his house. The next morning, they found us snuggled up in his room. It was the best night’s sleep I’d had in a long time.
“Anyway, the next morning, Jon refused to let me go. He stood in front of me shouting that he wouldn’t let anyone take his sister away from him and that anyone who tried could ‘go straight to hell.’” Frankie grinned at the memory, pretty sure that moment had triggered her older brother’s fierce protective streak.
Her eyes collided with Benjamin’s, the darkened depths now a swirl of storming waves. Anger simmered there, just below the surface of his once carefully constructed reserve. She glanced away, finding it very hard to keep her eyes dry in the wake of his apparent outrage.
“They called our social worker, this frazzled, burnt-out woman with way too many cases to manage on her own, and removed us both. She didn’t know what to do other than take us home with her—which is a massive violation, by the way. But after a few days, she managed to find a middle-aged couple willing to take both of us.” Frankie smiled. “The Millers. And the rest is history.”
She recalled the sense of relief that she’d felt all those years ago as though it had just occurred. She and Jon were together again. Those years separated had been bleak, damaging Frankie so deeply that the ability to trust was next to impossible. Slowly and with much care, the Millers showed them what family was. And after three years, they asked Frankie and Jon if they could adopt them officially. She couldn’t have manufactured a better set of parents, and justified that a few years of misery was a small price to pay to be a part of something so wonderful.