13. Frankie #2
He looks at me for a long moment, one a.m. honest. Then he tells me.
Quietly, in order, in that low even voice he uses for things that matter: what he’d do first, and how slowly, and exactly what he’d want to hear from me while he did it.
By the third sentence, my professional instrument, which is language, has left the building entirely.
“For accuracy,” I say, when I can say anything. It comes out a full octave low. “Fiction requires field verification.”
“Come here, Frankie.”
I go. Across the couch and into his lap, knees bracketing his thighs, and his hands close on my hips like they’ve been waiting all month for the assignment.
The kiss is nothing like the doorway kisses we’ve been rationing.
It’s deep and unhurried and it has intent in it, and when his hands slide up under my shirt and span my ribs, I pull the shirt off myself, because we are past pretending I wouldn’t.
“The rules,” I manage, as his mouth moves down my throat.
“Still there.” His thumb strokes over my nipple, slow, and my breath goes ragged on the spot. “I’m not taking you to bed tonight. Everything short of that—” his teeth graze my collarbone “—is research.”
What follows is the most thorough interview of my career, and I am not the one conducting it.
His hand slides into my leggings and he watches my face while his fingers find me, already wet, embarrassingly ready, and he says so, low and appreciative, in the tone other men save for good whiskey.
Two fingers, unhurried, his thumb circling my clit with the patience of a man who has never rushed anything in his life.
I ride his hand with my forehead dropped against his, both of us watching, and when I try to narrate, purely to prove I still can, he curls his fingers and deletes the sentence.
“Say it again,” he murmurs, terrible and delighted.
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” No. I don’t. He knows it, and half a minute later I come apart in his lap with my face in his neck, gripping his shoulder, making a sound into his skin that Fabio will hold against me for weeks.
When I can see again, I slide backward off his lap and down onto my knees on the rug, and his expression goes from soft to reverent to slightly concussed. “Frankie. You don’t have to—”
“Primary sources.” I work his belt open and take him out, hard and heavy in my hand. One moment of pure professional appreciation: I have written this exact object into eleven books, and, as with everything else about the man, I underwrote it.
I take him in my mouth and he exhales my name, long and wrecked, one hand gathering my hair back with a gentleness completely at odds with what my mouth is doing.
I go slowly. I pay attention, the way I’d handle a first edition, learning what makes his thighs tense and his breath stall.
The commentary he can’t seem to stop, my name, French I don’t know, English I very much do, is the best review my work has ever received.
“Frankie. I’m—” His hand tightens in my hair, a question. I answer it by staying, and he comes with a groan he muffles in his own forearm, courteous even now, shaking, and then goes boneless into my terrible couch like a building agreeing to sit down.
I climb back up beside him and he gathers me in, my ear over his heart, which still has some distance left to cover, and the one a.m. honesty is still in the room, so I spend it. “Can I ask the real one now?”
“Mm.”
“In the bookstore you said you’d never forgive me. You meant it. I’ve been waiting all season to find out what happened to that, and I’m too afraid of the answer to ask in daylight.”
He’s quiet long enough that I hear the radiator tick twice. When he answers, his hand keeps moving in my hair, slow, like the words need the rhythm to come out.
“I read it again. In November.” His chest rises under my ear.
“The first time, I read it like a man counting what got stolen. The second time I couldn’t find the theft.
All I could find was a woman alone at a laptop for six weeks who missed me so much she gave a paper man my father’s joke, so somebody would get to keep it.
” A breath. “And then I watched you. Three months, Frankie. Barlow would pay you tonight. Marion would pay you more. Every door in publishing is standing open. You keep walking past them carrying the one thing that could ruin me, and you think I don’t notice.
” His hand stills. “The book was you missing me. The silence since is something I don’t have a word for yet.
A man can stay angry at the first thing. Not at both.”
“Nick.” My eyes are stinging. “I need you to know, if I could unpublish it—”
“I know. Don’t.” He tips my chin up, and even in the dark I can see him choosing the words.
“I stopped wanting it unpublished somewhere around the wedding chapter. It’s the only place he ever got a bestseller.
” And there it is, the thing I will never earn and get to keep anyway: absolution, at one in the morning, from the man I stole it from.
For a while the only sounds in the apartment are the radiator and a man relearning how to breathe. Then he pulls me up onto his chest, tucks my head under his chin, and says, into my hair, “Saturday. My house. I’m cooking.”
“Saturday,” I repeat, muzzy.
“Dinner. A fire. No cameras, no schedule, nothing borrowed from anybody’s script.
” His hand moves up my spine, slow. “I told you in Minneapolis: when we do this, we choose it, wide awake. That’s still the rule.
So I’m going home tonight. And on Saturday I’m going to feed you, and if you stay, it’ll be because we decided. Not because a couch happened to us.”
“A couch did just happen to us.”
“Part of a couch.” I feel him smile into my hair. “Saturday’s the whole book.”
He leaves at a quarter to two, dressed and reassembled into a man who could plausibly have spent the evening reviewing game tape, except for his hair, which my hands have made honest. At the door he kisses me once, slowly, both hands framing my face, and then he thuds down my stairs into the dark.
Fabio resumes the windowsill, betrayed on several counts now.
The apartment goes back to its old dimensions. Except it doesn’t, quite.
And then, because the universe reads drafts over my shoulder, the phone lights up on the counter.
Becca: Marion again, don’t panic ?? just planting seeds. They keep asking what’s next from Sinclair. Book two energy is EVERYWHERE. Nothing you need to do yet!! Just know the garden’s growing.
Nothing I need to do yet. I stand in my kitchen where his tea is still sitting, full, gone cold, and the little seedling emoji glows up at me like a pilot light on something I can’t see the size of, and for the first time all night I feel it, small and cold and patient, under all the warm.
The sequel is out there, and it’s growing, and the only thing it can feed on is his secret.