Chapter 15
Jillian
“Frankie, we’re just trying to have a drink here,” my date said. “Back up.”
Cash’s big thigh was warm against mine as he took another sip of his beer. It was a strange sensation to be sitting next to another man while Frankie stood in front of me, his hands shredding up paper straws nervously.
But every minute it was getting easier.
Cash and I had. . . just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’d gotten the timing wrong. I didn’t think two serious people would work.
And I had been in love, completely and totally, with Frankie, had been in love since the first day I saw him, at a college surfing competition.
I was hanging around the edges, digging my toes in the sand, Cash and a few other friends with me, and Cash was trying to convince me to go out with him again.
“I just think we’re too alike,” I laughed. “Both of us are too serious, too stubborn.”
But of course he still tried to convince me, his dark eyes looking intently into mine.
Cash was telling me about how he had plans, big plans, to leave the coast and make it big in the city when someone surfing caught my eye.
This man was athletic and trim, shaggy brown hair with blonde highlights, his body tanned and glistening, his eyes concentrating on the wave, and he rode it to the last possible moment, falling into the water with a joyful whoop that went right down to my toes.
He was so beautiful and I wanted him so badly.
It had been a dream that he’d ever looked my way.
But that dream was over, even though he was standing right in front of me begging for a second chance.
“I’m not—going to just give up,” Frankie said between gritted teeth. “I’m going to fight for us, Jillian.”
“Booo, hissss,” Ronnie called out. “Your acting sucks.”
“I’m not acting!” Frankie yelled back.
My nails tapped lightly on my mug. I was trying to pace myself, because I had a tendency to get very outgoing when I drank and I didn’t want to do anything too silly.
Like run my hand up Cash’s strong forearm.
But the bright bubbles of Tuppy’s home-brewed ale were making me feel bubbly, too.
“Give it up, Frankie,” I said. “It’s over. Our marriage. A mug of Tuppy’s ale is more reliable than you.”
Suddenly it all seemed so ridiculous that the only thing I could do was snicker.
There was a big picture of Frankie and I above the bar, from a year or two ago. It was in the middle of summer and I had golden tints in my hair, while Frankie still had a smear of sand on his forehead. We looked like two fools in love.
I got up and walked over to the picture, taking it off the wall and turning it around in my hands.
That was how it had always been. Frankie and Jillian, bringing egg salad sandwiches and Jell-O to the sandcastle building competition.
Frankie and Jillian at the surfing exhibition, Frankie cracking jokes as the MC in between riding the waves, me taking tickets and laughing at every joke, louder than everyone.
“Look at us,” Frankie said, coming up behind me, his voice cracking. “Look at how happy we were.”
I cocked my head as I contemplated the picture. The cluster of diamonds on my finger sparkled in the sunlight.
We looked like the perfect couple.
Frankie’s hands were on either side of me, bracing himself on the bar as he murmured in my ear.
“I want that again. I’ve always wanted that. I’m so sorry for hurting you.”
I said nothing and he made a low noise, bending down to my ear.
“Please. I love you so much. I fucked up so bad, I’m so sorry.”
I raised the picture between my fingers and felt Frankie’s eager eyes follow it. Then I released my grip and dropped it into the garbage with a tinkle as the glass shattered.
“Out with the old,” I said.
“In with the new.”
Ducking under his arms, I walked back to my seat.
Cash grinned that crooked smile at me, rubbing one hand over his stubbly chin.
What would that stubble feel like up my thighs. . .
He had been such a comfort to me. Never giving me pity. Just support.
Everyone in the bar hooted and hollered their appreciation as I went to sit by Cash again.
“YOU CAN DO BETTER,” Augustus trumpeted, as his boss Earnest poked him in the ribs and whispered hastily in his ear.
“TAKE MY BOSS,” he added. “I HEAR HE COOKS QUALITY LASAGNA FROM SCRATCH!”
“Come on,” Frankie said, following me back to my seat and doing a goofy little tap dance. “You gotta forgive me. You’re like my own personal brand of protein powder.”
You could have heard a pin drop. There was absolute silence in the pub at his joke and everyone stared at him in cold-eyed disdain.
Well, when a man who is used to every audience eating out of the palm of his hand suddenly has to face a hostile crowd, he doesn’t do well.
“You know, like—what Edward says to Bella—like—because he loves the scent of her blood—“
“Shut up about Twilight!” Bonnie shrieked. “Just go away! No one wants you here.”
Frankie dropped to his knees in front of me in appeal.
“Please,” he begged, clasping his hands together. “I don’t care how long it takes! Let me make up for my mistake!”
And then Christabelle came in.
The entire bar erupted in boos again.
Frankie looked distressed. “Get out of here!”
“Franklin, we don’t have to hide it anymore!” Christabelle smirked. She already looked a bit tipsy and as she walked in she grabbed someone’s shot and drained it. “Our secret is out and it’s better this way. Jillian, I never meant to hurt you.”
The entire bar booed again, loudly, and I saw Ronnie and Bonnie make sinister clicking motions with their knitting needles.
“We don’t want your kind in here!” Tuppy said warningly. “By your kind, I mean skanky trollops.”
I shrugged.
“She doesn’t have to leave on my account. At first, I was surprised, but maybe this is for the best.”
Christabelle once again looked uncertain, like she was expecting me to be broken down, but I was underneath Cash’s big arm and against his thick thigh.
Frankie looked green. “Go away!”
“Oh, please,” Christabelle said. Her lipstick was a little crooked.
“Don’t act like she’s not devastated after her perfect little life at the coffee shop got exposed as a lie.”
So apparently Frankie liked this kind of small-minded cruelty. It just went to show I didn’t really know him at all.
And I didn’t think Cash would mind if I used him to taunt the other woman.
I shrugged again.
“I can always get another man.”
Christabelle must be drunker than I thought, because at this she turned and flung the contents of Earnest’s wine glass at me.
Cash lunged across the table and knocked the glass away so fast I could only gasp in shock as the wine splattered down Christabelle’s white dress instead of me.
The glass rattled noisily across the floor in the pin-drop silence of the pub. Suddenly I felt furious.
“Is this what you want, Frankie? This is what you’ve been secretly yearning for and missing? You’re welcome to her, because this isn’t who I fell in love with. I fell in love with a lie.”
“Jilly, no—” Frankie cried, his voice breaking, but my heart was hardened against him.
“I need some fresh air,” I told Cash, and he put an arm around my waist as I scooted out of the booth.
“Dude, take your weird side piece and go,” Cash said.
“She is not my side piece!” Frankie said through gritted teeth and unfortunately for him in his haste to get to me, he stumbled over the wine glass on the floor and lunged toward Cash with his arms outstretched like some kind of Frankenstein.
Cash put up his forearm to block the charge and Frankie ran headfirst into his fist and went down like a sack of bricks.
There was the sound of someone clapping as the rest of us stood and looked at the Ramshackle Bay mayor sprawled out unconscious on the floor.
“All right, boys, let’s get him out of here,” Tuppy said.
“Sorry, Jillian,” Cash groaned, looked embarrassed. “I guess I don’t know my own strength.”
Bonnie and Ronnie had their knitting needles out and were jabbing Christabelle with them and running her out of the bar as she whimpered and begged.
“What do you want us to do with him?” Tuppy asked, and they all looked toward me for direction.
My heart felt full seeing all of them.
“Thank you—for not pitying me,” I said.
“Pitying you?” Ronnie barked out. “We pity him. For being such an idiot and losing you.”
“Let’s deposit him at Mrs. Greenberg’s,” I suggested, and Cash grabbed Frankie by the ankles, while Tuppy and Augustus (closely supervised by Earnest, who said he did not want to get dirty) grabbed each arm, and I followed as they dragged him back down Main Street.
After ringing the bell, everyone dispersed, and Cash walked me back to my house next door.
“Sorry things took a turn there,” Cash said. “And I know you probably see me only as a friend, so no pressure, Jillian. Just—if you ever want more than friendship, I’m here.”
I wasn’t drunk in the slightest, but there was something sparkly and bubbly inside me.
There was a whole world outside Frankie. My whole life had been wrapped up in him for so long—his surfing competitions, his job as the Mayor, my role as the Mayor’s wife.
“I’m not ready for anything serious,” I said. “But that was hot.”
He laughed, low and rumbly, and put both hands on my face. “I’ve wanted you for so long.”
Then he kissed me.
I was afraid it would feel weird to kiss anyone but Frankie, but it didn’t. Cash’s mouth was gentle but firm on mine, his stubbly beard a little sensual nip on my face, his big hands surrounding my waist, making me feel tiny.
I opened the door of my house and let him in.