“Just how we like ‘em.” Eli said, and I looked up at him, catching his wink. “May the best man win.”
For some reason,I was on edge walking into the rink before our Saturday night practice.
Anxious?
Nervous?
Worried?
Earlier, I’d sent out a mass text to the team to help Trav and me out with coaching the Tots league, but I had no clue Frankie was in that group chat.
After the blunder, I searched the chat, and she had never once responded to any of our bullshit. She simply existed in silence, reading or maybe ignoring us completely.
However, when searching for her name to see if she had ever texted back, I found one hundred and four mentions of her name in the conversations. Forty-eight of them were from me.
Kill me.
Frankie Blake couldn’t have been more different from me. When I smiled, she glared. When I laughed, she said something sarcastic. When I was easygoing and made friends everywhere, she acted as though she sat upon a deserted island, watching everyone float on by without even trying to wave hello.
She existed in her own little black cat bubble, with her sharp eyeliner, ripped jeans, and scuffed Converse.
But she hadn’t always been like that. When we were in high school, she was two years younger than I was, but I knew who she was. Everyone did.
Franchesca Blake was the wild child of our little hometown. She smiled and flirted with everyone, in a nutshell, she was the girl everyone wanted either to be or to date. It was no surprise when she got wrapped up with an asshole bad boy, but we were all surprised when he talked her into leaving it all behind for him.
Broke her mama’s heart to watch her ride away on the back seat of his motorcycle with nothing more than a quick goodbye.
A couple of years ago, she pulled back into town, this time in an SUV with a couple of car seats in tow, and no smiles for anyone. Now she was right back where she never wanted to be, to begin with.
I couldn’t find it in me to be sad about that though, because it meant she was around people who cared about her. People who watched over her.
Men who would take care of her.
Something happened to her in her time away from Cedar Bluff, and it darkened her soul. It changed who she was.
When her mama had mentioned that Frankie was coming back, and looking for a job, I mentioned the rink was looking for a couple of different positions.
A few weeks later, Frankie was the newest bartender, working five shifts a week.
And for the last four years, she slowly unwound herself from the mental turmoil she hid behind, and started integrating with locals, building new relationships as the woman she was today.
I had almost convinced myself to do more than shamelessly flirt from my side of the bar top when Trav made a comment about being interested in her. God, that was a shitty night.
It was the first time in our nearly two decades long friendship that I had considered competing with him for a girl. We had completely different types in women, so it hadn’t happened before. To be honest, Frankie was the perfect woman for Trav. Their darkness matched energies, and their dry humor, or better yet, their incredible lack of any humor at all, was identical.
All that being said, I couldn’t figure out why I was interested in her at all, outside of physical attraction. That was easy to figure out because, fuck—she was sexy. Then there was the way she was with her kids. She was an incredible mom. Emmie and Toby were terrorists in their own ways, and ran Frankie ragged, but she never complained.
She just showed up every day for them, without fail.
Then there was also the way my body reacted every time she was near,thatwas hard to ignore. There was something in her smile. It happened so infrequently that when I could get one outof her; it felt like the sunshine had broken through the clouds in a storm, for just a second before it disappeared again.
Worth every second of corny one-liners, and overwhelming moments of annoying her for them.
My attraction to her made little sense, so that was why I never acted on it. I thought maybe it’d fade and blow over after the appeal of the shiny new toy vibe she brought to town ended.
Four years later, I was still fucking waiting.
Scratch that, I wasn’t waiting anymore. I was tired of ignoring it. Even if it meant stepping on Trav’s toes. If it was meant to be between her and me, he’d get over it. And if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t matter, anyway.
