32
Harrison
Frankie broughther lips to me slowly. We kissed long and deeply. There was nothing here like our previous frenzied coming togethers. She held my head and poured a gentleness into her kiss. And I accepted it.
She had tried to be gentle with me in all things. She folded me into her life and took me as I was. She wouldn’t tell me lies or what I needed to hear. But she cared for me. That much was obvious. I was wrong to think that she was using me. She loved me as perfectly as she could, and I was being greedy. Maybe I was set to always suffer in my extremes. I was all or nothing. Extremely single-minded, focused, or completely disinterested. I felt with my entire being or … Well, I would always love Frankie. That much I already knew to be true. She was as woven into me as my years on the show. She’d come into my life to show me my full capacity to love. That was her gift to me.
There was love here. In her own way. A tenderness that Frankie rarely gave except for the lucky few. The four of us in this house were lucky in that way.
Our mouths only separated when we needed to pull pieces of clothing off the other. We stood naked, memorizing each other with our hands and mouths like we were archiving this moment.
When we fit our bodies together in her bed, it was slow and tender. My gaze never left hers.
It was intense and deep, and it felt like love. It was our version of love, of course.
She cried my name softly as she came apart on me, a tear in the corner of her eye. I kissed it away and came a moment after.
Later, in her bed, I held tight and practically heard her thoughts in the air around us.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked. My heart was hammering with hope.
Tell me we can stay like this forever. Tell me you love me. Tell me how we can make it work.
If I told her how much I loved her now would she believe it? Would she accept it, or would it feel like pressure to make a promise to me?
“I was just thinking about the cruelty of life,” she said.
I blinked. “Wow. Was I that bad?”
She laughed and pulled me closer to rest her head on my chest. “I think we both know it wasn’t. Don’t fish. It’s gauche.”
“Gauche is my middle name.”
“It is so unfair. How a family could want a baby so bad and never have one. How someone could feel that pull so sure and never experience it. And then there are people who have children without thinking about it. Like it’s … I don’t know, a side effect of living. Something to be dealt with. Something to cure yourself of,” she whispered as she got to the end.
“Or how a mind that created an entire world that made a million or more people happy could start to kill itself.”
She squeezed me tighter when my voice broke. “Exactly. It’s cruel. There are a million examples of how unjust life is.”
“George would tell us that the beauty is there to balance it out. That we have to take time to notice it and enjoy the good while it’s here.” I inhaled along her neck.
“He’s so good at that. I feel so scared all the time,” she admitted softly.
“Really?” I lifted my head to look at her. She nodded, hand running over my abdomen. “You always seem to know exactly who you are and what you want.”
“I guess I’m just good at faking it.”
“Christ, I hope not. My ego would never take it.”
She kissed my pec, and I felt her smile. “You have nothing to worry about, Captain Modest.”
“What are you afraid of?” I asked, running my fingers through her hair.
“Everything.” She huffed. “Collette being alone. George being scared or sad. You being gone,” she said.
I swallowed the tightness and fought the urge to understand what that could mean.
“Me being …” She faded off.
