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And they had conversations like he never had with anybody. She wasn’t afraid to talk about Anna. She didn’t shy away from hearing about the sharper parts of his grief. About his darker moments.
But it wasn’t all that. It wasn’t all intensity and darkness.
His favorite thing had been when he and Frankie had gone out to the barn and she’d ambushed him with water balloons. And he’d gotten to live the end of that moment that had tortured him forever. He got to turn that fantasy into reality.
He’d grabbed her and pulled her into his arms while she laughed and stripped that wet white T-shirt from her body. He had her in the barn.
One thing he really valued about her was that she just understood certain things about him. She knew how he liked his coffee, she knew that in the morning he wanted to sit and not talk. He had done that alone for years. And now he did it with her beside him, usually touching him. Holding his hand, brushing her fingertips over his thigh, but she gave him the silence that he’d come to count on at the start of his day, while also giving him companionship. When he’d been lonely a lot of the time for a lot of years.
She knew everything about Sky and Carter, and could slip into easy conversations about them. He could use shorthand with her, which was a damned blessed thing considering he was out of practice when it came to having a social life.
It was funny, because he supposed that maybe eventually his social life would be going out to bars. That was what people did, he was pretty sure. They did that, and they were on dating apps. They went out to dinner. They...
It was so hard for him to imagine that life. He never had it. It was normal.
A lot of the people having that life... They were his age. Never been married. Had not kids yet. And he was on the subset of that piece of his life.
It was also weird. He didn’t know how to process it. He didn’t know whether he was looking forward to it or not. So he didn’t think about it when he could help it. He just enjoyed his quiet mornings with Frankie and the simple touch of her hand against his.
She had stocked wine in his kitchen, and he would sometimes share a glass with her at the end of the day. As the evenings got warm, they would sit on the porch swing.
He was used to having beers at the end of the day, but Frankie liked to have her wine and sit there with her feet bare and her hair loose, the wind moving through her curls.
And he loved that.
That was the other time of day he was used to solitude. When the boys were little, they’d be in bed, but now that they were teenagers, they were just in their rooms ignoring him. He had another person to sit and really share the day with. Of course, they were with each other for a lot of the day, so it wasn’t so much a rundown of the steps of things as it was just a satisfied companionship.
As they got into bed that night, he realized with a jolt that this was a window into what a long-term relationship would have been like at this point. While there were pieces of a new relationship with Frankie, because the sex was exciting and different, she was also embedded in his life. So there were notes of long-term and what they were.
This was what it might’ve been like.
But there was no might have. Because he could never know that. He had known enough people from high school who had eventually blown their marriages up, shattered their ideal on purpose because it felt uncomfortable. Because they wondered about that bar life that lurked somewhere beyond the edges of domesticity, he figured.
You were supposed to want that. Or miss it. Regret what you didn’t have.
As he watched Frankie sleep, he wasn’t sure what he thought about anything. His chest was a tangle of emotion. It was all unfamiliar. There was something deep and needy inside of him that he recognized, the desire to cling to someone else.
All these other feelings that didn’t make sense. He was all those things he’d just thought. Thirty-eight and nearly done raising two boys, completely at his wit’s end about what to do with this twenty-four-year-old woman in his bed.
He was familiar with loving a woman. He’d felt it before.
But not with the heart he had now.
A heart that had been shattered and put back together. A heart that beat even after tragedy. A heart that would always be in pieces, because those boys he loved so much were out there in the world and he could never forget it, or not feel it.
Frankie was old and new, all at once.
He didn’t know what to do with it.
He loved the companionship, that feeling of a lived-in life he got with her. But she was young. He was young enough, it was true, but his experiences put him in a whole different place in his life. The quiet nights and mornings were the privilege of a man who had already raised his kids.
Sleepless nights and toddler feet pounding on hard floors at five a.m. and sippy cups and screaming instead of glasses of wine on a porch swing...she hadn’t done it yet. He had.
They were passing by each other. Him on the way to an early retirement, so to speak. Her on the way to beginning her own version of this life, and they’d met at this summer along the way.
He had to just be glad of that.
The next day was hot. And Frankie was wandering around the house wearing a pair of shorts that she absolutely couldn’t have worn in public and a bikini top. And he couldn’t quite bring himself to go back to work after lunch. He was lingering. Watching her move around the house. How she knew like she lived in it, because she basically did. And had for a long time.
