11. — daddy issues and daddy’s issues.
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Lower Manhattan, New York
Frankie, Greenwich Village
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“Wake up.” The soft words accompanied gentle kisses against Frankie’s closed eyelids. Nico’s lips found the apple of her cheeks next, the caramel coffee he liked so much whispering across her skin, before he kissed her forehead last. “I gotta go.”
She mumbled unhappily, turning her face slightly into the pillow to prolong the inevitable. “If I say five more minutes, can we just pretend you don’t still run back to the estate before the clock hits three?”
Nico’s hand tugged her back, his palm cupping her jaw and cheek while his thumb found her chin and the center of her bottom lip.
He pressed just hard enough to get her attention, that said he wanted to kiss her, but it also made her open her eyes.
He didn’t even turn on the bedside lamp Frankie had picked up at a thrift store yesterday, leaving the room cloaked in darkness but for the glow outside from the wall of windows looking out from the penthouse bedroom.
On the other side of the place, another glass wall overlooked the waterfront.
She really needed draperies...but goddamn.
He looked beautiful in a dark light.
“Are you teasing me about a curfew?” he asked, grinning.
“Is it gonna make you stay in bed for another five minutes?”
His smile deepened to something sexier.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” he asked her, but his tone remained playful.
“Get what?”
Nico’s knee hit the side the bare mattress sitting on hardwood floors so he could lean in and snatch his next kiss.
The slight stubble on his face awakened her tender skin while that mouth and tongue of his did wonderful work on hers.
She didn’t understand how he did it. How he kissed her ravenously, his teeth finding her lip to bite and tug every time he had the chance, but he held himself back, too.
He never pushed unless she did. He never took unless she gave first.
Even though she wanted him to.
Even though he made her ache.
“Five more minutes,” she breathed against his mouth when their foreheads met. “Tell me no and mean it, Nico.”
He kissed her again, but harder, and he didn’t linger, saying, “You don’t get it. There’s more than one reason I’ve gotta follow your father’s rules. You’re a big one.”
“It’s only five freakin’ min—”
Nico kissed her again, his pointer finger and thumb pinching her chin gently as he pulled away. She tried not to pout as he reached for his black hoodie. “You need to get some furniture in here,” he told her.
“Hey, I have a box spring and a mattress.”
“And a lamp without a shade,” he added, jerking his head toward the offending item in question sitting on a cardboard box. “I’m bringing you sheets the next time I show up.”
She swallowed hard. “When’s that gonna be?”
Lately, it’d been every night. Sometime after dinner. She’d venture into the city to go thrifting for things she didn’t buy and wasted her late afternoons in cafés just because, but come back to find him with cinnamon buns and iced coffee when he showed up in the mornings.
“I don’t know,” Nico eventually replied, fixing the hood around his head and then staring at her. “If I can, I’ll be around like usual.”
“What are you doing all day, anyway?”
He gave her a look she couldn’t decipher. “What do you mean?”
“You’re working, right?”
“In a sense.”
Frankie rolled over to her side, using her balled up fist as a perch for her chin so she could watch him shimmy up his jeans. “Do you not want to tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, shrugging. “I handle some shit for a guy out of New Jersey. It was supposed to be one thing, but it’s turned into another. I see him a couple of times a week. I can’t really talk more about it.”
“But you could...someday?”
At her question, Nico froze buttoning his jeans. “I mean, in theory.”
“Your word games are not appreciated at...” Her hand slid around beneath the one blanket on the mattress until she found the missing item currently keeping the time from her. One-thirty, it read. “It’s like an hour drive. You’re leaving super early.”
She didn’t mean to come off whiny, but...
Nico came close enough to put both fists into the mattress.
She dropped her phone at the same time he came in for another burning kiss that made her lungs squeeze in the best way.
She wished it were his hands doing the squeezing instead.
How was it supposed to make her feel that she could lay practically naked in a bed with him for hours upon hours just so he could hold and kiss her?
She knew exactly how it made her feel.
Safe and strange. So needy.
“I figured out last night,” he told her as he pulled back just far enough to tip his head to the side while they watched one another, “that if I just got up a half hour early, I wouldn’t have to earn myself three photo radar tickets on the way back because I keep agreeing to give you five more minutes. ”
Her smile grew knowing. “Does that mean...?”
He pushed her back into the bed, her fit of happy laughter being drowned in the wave of his tongue and lips finding her throat.
She melted into the one pillow she brought from her bed back home, and he melded easily in between her thighs.
The roughness of his jeans only added to the sensation of his weight pressing her down, and the heat of him took her someplace else.
Where things didn’t hurt and neither did people.
“So, you’re making me lose a half hour of sleep, then?” she joked.
Wordlessly, he shrugged, and then promptly disappeared up under her shirt.
There, he said nothing as the side of his face found her chest. His hands traveled in the same direction, the way she’d come to like, to find their spot at the dip in her waist. She traced lines with her fingertips along his back under his hoodie.
“I don’t know how you breathe like that,” she said.
Nico’s breath tickled her right breast, bare under the baggy T-shirt of his that she’d worn to bed for the last two nights in the penthouse. He took back the first one he gave to wash it but didn’t mind replacing it. “I’m breathing in you, Frankie.”
“I’m not oxygen.”
“Something close to it, angel.”
She let the argument go. “Whatever you’re doing, workwise I mean, you’re still going to be there to see me walk for graduation, right?”
Nico smiled against her skin. “I won’t miss it.”
“But if something came up—”
He popped out of her shirt in an instant, hair messy and his gaze sharp, as he rested back on his knees. “Babe, I’m gonna be there.”
She toyed with the hem of the shirt. “Are you really going to bring me sheets?”
“And a bag of clothes from the estate,” he added, arching an eyebrow. “Anything Sissy wants to send. Shit, the first chance I get when I don’t have something else to do, I am taking you to the nearest IKEA because the state of this place is pathetic. You don’t even have chairs.”
“Maybe I’m not ready for chairs,” she argued.
“How did you ask for an empty penthouse, anyway?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted, okay!”
Nico chuckled, shaking his head. “Sad. That’s sad. You know, you could just go home for a couple of hours and grab some things as well. It would help.”
“I can’t be there right now. I love them, but I can’t be there with them while they do...whatever the hell they’re doing.”
His brow dipped, but he stayed quiet.
“Not because of what Carina or my dad said, but...”
Nico cleared his throat, suddenly refusing to meet her gaze.
“I keep asking if you’re okay just like I did when it happened,” she whispered, “and you keep saying yes.”
“I am.”
No, she didn’t think so. Even that came out too rough.
“Nic—”
“I am okay,” he repeated.
She stopped pressing, instead admitting, “It’s the fighting with them. For me, it’s always been the fighting. I can’t hear it. I can’t be around it. It makes me sick to my stomach. I’ve been listening to them scream at one another for years.”
“Sounds like they had reasons, some even valid,” Nico muttered, clearing his throat after. He shot her an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
“What’s fucked up is that I probably shouldn’t have heard any of it. Back then, or now. I think they start hating one another again and get louder and louder, and they both just forget I exist. How do you forget the kid in the middle of the room?”
Nico nodded, his expression both thoughtful and somehow amused at the same time.
“The same way the kid in the middle of it all can’t remember half of it, or they can’t ever let it go, no matter how long it’s been.
What’s fucked up is being so stuck in survival as a kid that you can’t even remember the day they brought your little sister home.
Or the months someone should have been pregnant for her.
How your entire house was just chaos and bullshit to the point you were making it minute to minute, day to day.
And now you can’t even put together a fucking timeline in your head because ninety percent of your childhood was just trying to get through it instead of living it.
So, now you don’t know about your own history, as if it wasn’t all lies and smoke and mirrors anyway.
But don’t worry. I can calculate numbers in my head to the tune of a few million the second someone needs it.
I got shit handled. The rest, it just gets filed away. Now that’s fucked up.”
She kinda froze. That was the most he’d said about what happened. At all.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he muttered again.
She shook her head fast. “No, don’t say that. Come here.”
He did, hiding away again under her—well, his—shirt. There, he mumbled against her skin, “A lot of things make sense now. A lot of things just...suck, too.”
“Sounds like they probably always did, anyway.”
“More than you know.”
Her fingertips found his skin under his clothes again. “I’d like to know, if you’d tell me.”