Page 160 of Made in Love and Blood

“Suggestion being the key word there, huh?”

She shrugged. He said it, not her.

Salvatore shook his head while wiping his mouth with a napkin. “I think that’s a fine plan, Frankie. As you know, any school of your choice is paid for, and any housing or whatever while you’re there. That’s not on your side of things to handle, either.”

“Oh, but I have.”

His look of surprise tickled her pink.

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

Frankie nodded. “Yeah, I got that figured out. I contacted one of the scouts that had been particularly persistent about following up with me after last year. I’m going to go to NYU next fall, Daddy. They have a good human relations program, and it’s a start.”

The silence at the small breakfast table continued to grow between them, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. She remembered the other thing she had coming up, and divulged the news of NYU’s soccer training camp as he got up and began clearing the table.

“And I start a training camp for NYU’s soccer team in two weeks,” she explained, smiling at the way her father froze as he reached for her platter. “I’m officially enrolled as a student for the summer taking a class I don’t even have to pass or show up for just so they can justify having me on the field four days a week.”

“Training,” Salvatore parroted, looking for confirmation.

“Yeah, I mean it’s only for the summer, but I need to keep up with practice. I can’t go a whole year doing nothing.”

“There are gyms, personal trainers. There are other options besides jumping right back in if you don’t want to.”

“I never said I didn’t want to. And I should get to know the team, right?”

Salvatore picked up her dishes to add to his own. “And what about when summer ends?”

She chewed on her lip, wondering how to tell him the other bit to that side of things.

“Well, the Olympic team has training camps in the winter, too. I did get invited to start attending after I’d graduated. It’s in California, but it’s also four days a week. I could come home on the weekend. It’ll give me an idea about whether I want to pursue the team in a couple of years, anyway. But if I can’t stand a month away from Nico, I don’t how I’m supposed to do weeks at a time with only weekends to even it out.”

At the sink where he placed the dishes, Salvatore stood still and didn’t turn around. “Is it the fact that he’s gone or something else?”

Her foot tapped to the floor, and she resisted the urge to dig a hole in her nailbed at the question.

“Why would you ask that?”

“Curious,” her father replied, still not turning around.

“Well, things are better when he’s around. Inside, I mean. I want him around because he makes me feel better and not a lot of things do that for me.”

“Want or need?” he asked. “Because they feel a lot alike, Frankie.”

She thought about that and her conversation with Nico in bed that morning. She couldn’t even let him fuck her before he left because her anxiety over his trip had reached a boiling point given it was D-day. Go time. When she got back, he would not be there.

“This morning, he asked me what my anxiety felt like,” she whispered. “Not what it made me do, or how I dealt with it. No, what it felt like.”

She chose not to share why Nico asked that. Because he’d just wanted to love her the same way he’d been doing every other morning, night, and afternoon in between, but she couldn’t let him do it.

Those details weren’t important.

Finally, her dad turned around. He leaned against the marble counter with his hands grabbing the edge while he watched her. “And what did you say?”

“I’m the dam. Anxiety is the water. But the dam’s taken a lot of pressure over the years trying to hold up and keep standing all the while. There’s a lot of cracks, and the water never stops coming, right, because that’s the way of water. I’ve found some patches for the dam here and there to help it, but inevitably, the water’s going to come out one way or another.”

“Eventually,” Salvatore added in.

“The dam is always just standing to fail. Eventually, I’m going to fail.” Frankie dragged in a deep breath. “And then I asked him what his ADHD is like.”